BBS.OIT.UNC.EDU 
Telnet to BBS.OIT.UNC.EDU or 152.2.22.80. 
Type launch at the login message.  
It's a must. Not only can you read Usenet Newsfeeds, but you can use 
LibTel, a scripted telnet gateway to access both US and international 
libraries plus such things as Data Research Associates Library of Congress 
catalog, the Ham Radio Call Book, the National Science Foundation, the 
Weather Server, Webster's dictionary and thesaurus, and more.

Remote Access to Files (FTP)

FTP or File Transfer Protocol is what to use to retrieve a text file, software, 
or other item from a remote host. Normal practice is to ftp to the host you 
want and login as "anonymous". Some sites use the password "guest" while 
others require that you put in your network address as the password. Some 
popular ftp sites follow:

SUMEX-AIM 
This archive at Stanford (sumex-aim.stanford.edu or 36.44.0.6) houses a 
plethora of Macintosh applications, utilities, graphics and sound files.

SIMTEL20 
(simtel20.army.mil or 192.88.110.20) at the White Sands Missile Range in 
New Mexico contains a similar archive software for MS-DOS computers.

An FTP visit to the Network Service Center at nnsc.nsf.net (128.89.1.178) 
is a gold mine of documents and training materials on net use. See further 
information on this in the "Resources for Learning More" section of this 
article.

Project Gutenberg 
The primary goal of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and 
distribution of electronic text.  They hope to have a trillion etexts in 
distribution by the end of 2001.

Some of the many texts available now include Alice in Wonderland, Peter 
Pan, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost and other texts in the public domain. 
Many of these texts are available from: 
ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.201.12) /pub/etext92 [for 1992 releases] 
or /pub/etext/etext91 [for 1991 releases] 
/pub/etext/articles [for Project Gutenberg articles and newsletters].  
They are also available from quake.think.com (192.31.181.1); /pub/etext, 
and from many other sites.

For more info: 
Michael S. Hart, Director
Project Gutenberg 
National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts 
Illinois Benedictine College
5700 College Road
Lisle, Illinois 60532-0900 
BITNET: HART@UIUCVMD  
INTERNET: HART@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU

Travel Agents: Archie, Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, Worldwide Web and 
More

There is so much information on the net, it's impossible to know where 
everything is, or even how to begin looking. Fortunately, some 
computerized "agents" are in development to help sort through the massive 
data libraries on the net.

Archie 
Peter Deutsch, of McGill's Computing Centre, describes the archie server 
concept, which allows users to ask a question once yet search many 
different hosts for files of interest.

"The archie service is a collection of resource discovery tools that together 
provide an electronic directory service for locating information in an 
Internet environment. Originally created to track the contents of 
anonymous ftp archive sites, the archie service is now being expanded to 
include a variety of other online directories and resource listings."

"Currently, archie tracks the contents of over 800 anonymous FTP archive 
sites containing some 1,000,000 files throughout the Internet. Collectively, 
these files represent well over 50 Gigabytes (50,000,000,000 bytes) of 
information, with additional information being added daily. Anonymous ftp 
archive sites offer software, data and other information which can be 
copied and used without charge by anyone with connection to the Internet."

"The archie server automatically updates the listing information from each 
site about once a month, ensuring users that the information they receive is 
reasonably timely, without imposing an undue load on the archive sites or 
network bandwidth."

Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is currently out of service. Other 
sites are: archie.ans.net (USA [NY]) archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ]) 
archie.sura.net (USA [MD]) archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe) 
archie.au (Australia/New Zealand) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great 
Britain/Ireland)

Info from: UNIX Support Group
Computing Centre
McGill University
Room 200
Burnside Hall
805 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6 
514/398-3709 
peterd@cc.mcgill.ca

Internet  Gopher 
A gopher (or go-fer) is someone who fetches necessary items from many 
locations.

Login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy 
having a computer do all the work for you. Almost. Gopher is still in 
experimental mode at many gopherized sites. Still, it is one of the best 
ways to locate information on and in the Internet.

Besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and 
games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the Hacker's 
Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA World Fact Book), 
gateways to other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other 
systems.

VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized 
Archives.

Very new on the scene is VERONICA. Here is some information from 
Steve Foster about it.

"Veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus in the 
entire gopher web.  As Archie is to ftp archives, Veronica is to 
gopherspace. Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to 
the data source. Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the data, not 
just the host sites, directly from a menu.  Because Veronica is accessed 
through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and gives access to all types of 
data supported by the gopher protocol."

"Veronica was designed as a response to the problem of resource discovery 
in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. Frustrated comments in the net news-
groups have recently reflected the need for such a service. Additional 
motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users, several of 
whom assumed that a simple-touse service would provide a means to find 
resources 'without having to know where they are.'"

"The result of a Veronica search is an automatically-generated gopher 
menu, customized according to the user's keyword specification. Items on 
this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers.  These are functional 
gopher items, immediately accessible via the gopher client I just double-
click to open directories, read files, or perform other searches -- across 
hundreds of gopher servers. You need never know which server is actually 
involved in filling your request for information. Items that are appear 
particularly interesting can be saved in the user's bookmark list."

"Notice that these are NOT full-text searches of data at gopher-server sites, 
just as Archie does not index the contents of ftp sites, but only the names of 
files at those sites.  Veronica indexes the TITLES on all levels of the 
menus, for most gopher sites in the Internet.  258 gophers are indexed by 
Veronica on Nov. 17, 1992;  we have discovered over 500 servers and will 
index the full set in the near future. We hope that Veronica will encourage 
gopher administrators to use very descriptive titles on their menus."

"To try Veronica, select it from the 'Other Gophers' menu on Minnesota's 
gopher server (consultant.micro.umn.edu), or point your gopher at: 
Name=Veronica (search menu items in most of GopherSpace) 
Type=1 
Port=70 
Path=1/Veronica Host=futique.scs.unr.edu"

"Veronica is an experimental service, developed by Steve Foster and Fred 
Barrie at University of Nevada.  As we expect that the load will soon 
outgrow our hardware, we will distribute the Veronica service across other 
sites in the near future."

"Please address comments to:   gophadm@futique.scs.unr.edu"

Is this the new world order of automated librarianship?

WAIS 
Wide Area Information Servers (pronounced ways) allows users to get 
information from a variety of hosts by means of a "client". The user tells 
the client, in plain English, what to look for out in dataspace. The client 
then searches various WAIS servers around the globe. The user tells the 
client how relevant each hit is, and the client can be sent out on the same 
quest again and again to find new documents. Client software is available 
for many different types of computers.

WAIStation is an easy to use Macintosh implementation of a WAIS client. 
It can be downloaded from think.com as well as a self-running 
MediaTracks demo of WAIStation in action. Kahle also moderates a 
thoughtful WAIS newsletter and discussion group, often speculating about 
the future of libraries and librarians.

Info from: Brewster Kahle, Project Leader 
Wide Area Information Servers 
Thinking Machines Corporation 
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025 
415/329-9300 x228 
brewster@Think.COM

WorldWideWeb 
Tim Berners-Lee describes the Web this way: "The WWW project merges 
the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but 
powerful global information system. The WWW world consists of 
documents, and links.  Indexes are special documents which, rather than 
being read, may be searched.  The result of such a search is another 
('virtual') document containing links to the documents found.  The Web 
contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are 
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places 
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look 
similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme. 
To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or 
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other 
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire 
world of data."

Info from: Tim Berners-Lee 
WorldWideWeb project
CERN
1211 Geneva 23,
 Switzerland 
Tel: +41(22)767 3755  FAX:+41(22)767 7155 
email:tbl@cernvax.cern.ch