Building a personal or company web site is now a commonplace activity, with an increasing array of commercial tools available to make the task easier and an increasing number of search facilities available to help users locate information on these sites. Mostly, though, the model for information access is based on the notion of a single provider and a single consumer. The research community has a very different model of the information service: information is drawn from a wide range of providers and distributed to a large and discerning collaborative community. The task of creating and operating continental-scale information services brings a whole new set of challenges: assessing the quality of information; integrating information from many sources and in many languages; optimising the location of information to make best use of network bandwidth; maintaining service quality given a widely-distributed set of service components. In this brief overview, we investigate the developing technology which can be applied to address these needs and the extent to which they have been successfully deployed in the DESIRE project, undertaken by 23 partner organisations as part of the Telematics Application Programme supported financially by the European Commission's DG XIII. More information about the project, the partners and the complete set of project deliverables can be found on the Project Web Site (http://www.desire.org/).