Wide area networks offer access to an increasing number and variety of resources, such as documents, software, and network services. Yet, it is difficult to locate resources of interest, because of the scale and decentralized nature of the environment. We are interested in supporting a global confederation of loosely cooperating systems and users that share far more resources than can be completely organized. Therefore, mechanisms are needed to support incremental organization of the resources, based on the efforts of many geographically decentralized individuals, and a range of different information sources of varying degrees of quality. In this paper we describe a prototype implementation of a set of mechanisms intended to explore this problem in the specific domain of public Internet archives, accessible via the "anonymous" File Transfer Protocol. This is an interesting test case, because it encompasses a very large scale, administratively decentralized collection of resources, with considerable practical value.

We present an empirical study in which we investigated group vs. individual performance with collaborative information visualization environments (CIVEs), the effects of system transparency on users' performance and the effects of different collaborative settings on CIVE usage. Subjects searched for findings with CIVEs, working either alone, in a collocated dyad using a shared electronic whiteboard, or in a remote dyad using application sharing. Groups answered more questions correctly and took less time with the more transparent CIVE than groups using the less transparent CIVE. We interpret our results to mean that groups have better self-corrective abilities when the system is transparent. We present a stage model to explain the collaborative process of using CIVEs, which accounts for task type, collaborative setting, and system transparency.