What can Archives offer the World Wide Web?

ftp archive sites are well known throughout the Internet community for their wealth of useful information. UNIX HENSA is perhaps one of the better known academic archives in the United Kingdom. In this paper the roles of these archive sites are examined with a view to what they can provide the World Wide Web community. The Web suffers from virtually the same problems as standard ftp; slow networks, overloaded serving hosts, and the immense difficulty of finding information spread across the globe. Fortunately, it seems that just as Archive sites have helped alleviate some of these problems for ftp users, they should be able to do the same for Web users. In this paper I shall demonstrate how, at the UNIX HENSA Archive, we have been investigating this possibility.