The community network selected for

The community network selected for this study is one of many successfully
operating generic community networks in the United States. Established
in 1993 as a community service of a Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at a large Midwestern university, this community network
was serving over five thousand citizens and five hundred organizational
members at the time of the study. It provided a full range of Internet
services, including e-mail, newsgroups, listservs, WWW, FTP, telnet, Web
hosting, IT training, and help desk service. Similar to many other community
networks, this one imposed a weekly Internet connection time
restriction due to the limited resources of the organization. Available connection
options included both a menu-based text interface and a graphical
browser. This community network had been a recipient of many information
technology grants from local and federal agencies, including the
Telecommunication and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program
(TIIAP), the largest federal funding program for community networks
under the initiative of the National Information Infrastructure. This grant