Bell Communications Research of Morristown New Jersey, the research arm of the Baby Bell local phone companies, has rallied a number of US firms and research laboratories to establish collaborative research programmes related to the feasibility of a national US information Superhighway. To pursue these projects, it has created the Collaboratory on Information Infrastructure, which will research and experimentally prototype various software-based technologies and user interfaces. The aim is to develop technologies to enable users to browse the national information infrastructure, discover useful information, collect, and use it. The organisations involved in bilateral research projects with the Collaboratory include: Capital Cities/ABC Inc and ABC News; Digital Equipment Corp; Hewlett-Packard Laboratories; J C Penney Co, the US national department store and catalogue retailer; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Bellcore said that technologies to be investigated include electronic shopping malls, collaborative electronic education and distance learning, and access to multimedia information and electronic libraries.
