KEY POINTS

1. Recent assessments of the membership of the American Society of Anesthesiologists estimate that more than 90% have Internet access.
2. Although the innovation of hypertext browsing of remote computers with a "web browser" was invented by a physicist, the first few publicly accessible web pages dealt with a medical topic, epilepsy.
3. In many instances, the web has replaced physical media such as paper and film; however, with the growth in numbers and bandwidth supported by commercial interests also has come dilution and diminution of the quality of the information inasmuch as the WWW allows instant global publication of ideas by anyone at nearly no cost and irrespective of motives or qualifications.
4. The fundamental basis of current medical knowledge is the peer-reviewed, published journal articles that constitute the medical literature. Of most direct clinical utility are practice guidelines.
5. Another valuable, reliable site of clinically oriented material is MEDLINE, managed by the National Library of Medicine. MEDLINE contains over 14 million bibliographic citations from over 4600 biomedical journals.

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6. The major journals covering the field of anesthesiology are available on the web along with the full text of articles back to the late 1990s. Many academic and private departments of anesthesia have valuable web sites.
7. Commercial enterprises have created several clinical medical websites that are marketed as having value added beyond that contained in the free public access governmental sites. Such websites include Elsevier's MDConsult.
8. Many active Internet discussion groups provide a once-per-day digest service. The largest anesthesia-related discussion group at present is the GASNet Anesthesiology Discussion Group.