Libraries operate as part of the technological infrastructure that supports the National Research and Education Network (NREN), acting as an electronic safety net for the American public to guarantee basic access to electronic information.
[1] Consortia of public libraries use the NREN to connect their online catalogs.
The National Research and Education Program often referred to by the terms “National Information Highway”, “National Information Infrastructure”, Information Superhighway”, “High-Performance and high-speed network”, and “Gigabit test bed”, is a program to support improvements and enhancements to the existing Internet.
The National Research and Education Network have been under discussion since 1987 and was proposed in 1969 as an experiment under the sponsorship of the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), an agency of the Department of Defense.
The NREN was officially established with the passage of the High Performance Computing Act signed into law by President Bush on December 9, 1991.