The development of the testbed is now at the point where the loading of significant collections of items is feasible. We believe that the construction of large and useful collections is necessary for a variety of research purposes. For example, it is not possible to evaluate many aspects of user response unless the information that they access is of real value. In the case of geospatial information, this implies that the collections should be relatively large in volume in order to provide appropriate extents and density of coverage. It is also important that ADL support specific sets of user communities with appropriate materials in order to have a basis for evaluation.
These materials will be made available to users of the WWW in mid 1997. ADL has developed the following strategy for choosing which collection items to load and make available in a WWW environment.