HUBNET: Wide Area Network utilization of Local Area Network medical reference and communication resources

The State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and its associated teaching sites have developed and partially implemented a regional Wide Area Network (WAN) in Buffalo and Western New York. The school wishes to use this WAN to deliver reference and communication resources to students, residents and faculty. The richest pool of easy to use reference and communication resources are PC software programs that are intended for individual workstations or at best, client-server, Local Area Network (LAN) implementation. HUBNET (Hospitals and University at Buffalo Library Resource Network), a project of the School of Medicine and the Library Consortium of Health Institutions in Buffalo offers integrated presentation of many such LAN resources over this regional WAN. The system crosses many institutional boundaries and reaches physically remote sites in a complex mix of information systems environments with few issues related to performance. The system design provides a level of ease of use that has brought many new users into active computer use while addressing integration into diverse information systems settings and networking environments.