A collaborative effort between the White House Office of Media Affairs, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and others quickly created a workable framework for wide-scale distribution of a stream of daily documents originating from the Executive Office of the President. The document stream includes daily press briefings, speeches by the President and other officials, backgrounders, and proclamations. In addition, the stream of released information includes special documents such as the National Performance Review's reports on reinventing government, the proposed healthcare reform legislation, and the yearly budgets. The Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created an information distribution server that functions as the focal point of the distribution chain. Documents are released from the Executive Office of the President through this system; they are sent from this system to a variety of archiving and retrieval systems around the country, most online services (for example, Compuserve, America Online), about 4000 direct subscribers to the MIT server, and a variety of other servers that further redistribute the documents.

As part of a collaboration with the White House Office of Media Affairs, members of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a system, called COMLINK, that distributes a daily stream of documents released by the Office of Media Affairs. Approximately 4,000 direct subscribers receive information from this service, but more than 100,000 people receive the information through redistribution channels. The information is distributed through e-mail and the World Wide Web. In such a large-scale distribution scheme, there is a constant problem of subscriptions becoming invalid because the user's e-mail account has terminated. These invalid subscriptions cause a backwash of hundreds of bounced-mail messages each day that must be processed by the operators of the COMLINK system. To manage this annoying but necessary task, an expert system named BMES was developed to diagnose the failures of information delivery.