Surfing the Internet | Page 6

gopher items, immediately accessible via the
gopher client 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:
[email protected]"

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
[email protected]


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