The reports of the demise of the CD-ROM have proved to be a little premature, if one judges by the contents of this issue of ReCALL. Whilst it is true that there is a strong emphasis in the articles by Huw Jarvis, Julie Belz and Lina Lee on the opportunities offered by network-based learning – and the trend towards such a focus is inevitable – it remains the case that the CD-ROM is still capable of rich and significant exploitation, as shown in the articles by Gunther Kaltenboeck and Birgit Winkler. Gavin Burnage argues for a ‘broad inclusive approach to networking’ which declines to abandon the old data-carriers, whether floppy-based DOS programs or CD-ROMs and argues for the pragmatic integration of a wide range of disparate resources into a single, coherent framework. DISSEMINATE, the macro-structure articulated here by Philippe Delcloque and Alexandre Bramoullé, is a concept with a similar integrative ambition but from an authoring perspective.