Scientists producing new datasets or astronomical catalogues are encouraged to make their computer-readable material and documentation available for distribution to the worldwide astronomical community. The usual procedure is by depositing a copy in one of the international astronomical data centers (see, e.g. CDS, chapter in this book), while simultaneously submitting a paper describing the results and procedure to a scientific journal. The journal's refereeing process will check the scientific contents while data centers normally check the technical consistency of the digital material, thus ensuring the quality of the publication.
While this is recommended in all cases, it is clear that scientists (and especially those working in a highly computerized working environment) have a lot more useful digitized information on hand than they can possibly publish by the traditional ways. The current technology allows to make this information (data, tools, news, etc.) available to a wider community on a fast, cheap, and efficient manner.
Different media serve different purposes. While it seems desirable to be able to read a scientific paper from a paper copy, it is uncontended that on-line systems are extremely useful for performing searches on databases, indexes, catalogs, or just any on-line collection. The advent of the World-Wide Web has opened on-line media to large scale electronic publishing.
In this chapter we will advocate quality as the prime objective and at the same time encourage the utilization of the Web as an information medium. We will discuss the information handling aspects of how to organize a local information server, present a case study, and give tentative guidelines for exploiting the enormous potential of the World-Wide Web.
We will not address the technical issues of writing HTML documents and of installing HTTP servers which are extensively covered elsewhere, in books as well as on line (see e.g. Yahoo).