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Current Cities Volume 04 Number 10
_Current_Cites_
Volume 4, no. 10
October 1993
Information Systems Instruction & Support
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by David F. W. Robison
ISSN: 1060-2356
Contributors:
David B. Rez, Teri Rinne, Vivienne Roumani-Denn, Mark Takaro, Roy Tennant
_______________________________________________________________________
Information Transfer
Chroust, David Z. "From FirstSearch to Wordperfect: Cleaning Up
Downloaded Screens" ONLINE 17(5) (September 1993):44-50. Through
nine well-defined macros, Chroust instructs the reader on
"cleaning up" OCLC FirstSearch screens downloaded to Wordperfect
5.1. - VR
Jackson, Kathy M. and Nancy L. Buchanan. "Unlimited Access to
FirstSearch: An Online Success Story" ONLINE 17(5) (September
1993):34-43. Jackson and Buchanan, reporting on Texas A&M
University's faculty and students' successful experience using
OCLC's FirstSearch, describe the various methods of access
available to their clientele, and documentation support. Their
statistics include monthly use, databases used, connect time per
search, and per-search pricing. - VR
Mintz, Anne P. "Availability of Electronic Full-Text Sources: A
Look Behind the Scenes" Database 16(5) (October 1993):24-31.
Mintz, Director of Information Services at Forbes, explains the
"legal, financial, and technological concerns [including image
technology], as well as issues of data integrity and quality"
that are affecting online availability of titles. Until these
issues are resolved, "we have a long way to go...before we see
easily searchable full text with images." - VR
Orenstein, Ruth M. "`How Full Is Full' Revisited: A Status Report
on Searching Full-Text Periodicals" Database 16(5) (October
1993):14-23. Experimenting with the coverage of Forbes through
several vendors and databases, including Dialog, Nexis, Data-
Star, Trade & Industry, Orenstein traces the currency and
completeness of full text journal coverage. Grids and tables
substantiate her warning, "...many librarians are considering
canceling their print subscriptions and relying on online full
text sources for articles. Given the variability in currency
shown here, this is a strategy that bears rethinking!" - VR
Networks and Networking
Dern, Daniel. The Internet Guide for New Users. New York: McGraw
Hill, 1993. 570p. $40 (hardcover), $27.95 (paperback). Dern,
editor of Internet World magazine, has produced a fine new guide
to the Internet. This book does well by covering both
introductory material along with specific information on using
networked resources. Dern leaves no stone unturned, though a
little more coverage of topics like encryption and the politics
of network development would be nice. The tone of the book is
friendly, helpful, and humorous, with captions like, "Remote
login is a lot like astral projection." Another small nitpick,
the quality of a few of the images could be improved. Overall,
this is an excellent all-round guide to networking that even
intermediate and advanced users will find helpful. - DR
Hart, Michael S. "How Shared ARE Our Shared Resources, Anyway?"
Internet Research 3(2) (Summer 1993):4-7. Hart, well known on
the net for his postings and Project Gutenberg, offers his
opinion on the idea of public domain works. Hart complains that
current copyright law fails to protect the public good by
preventing the free distribution of works over the network for
too many years. Hart compares this limitation on the access to
information free of charge to access to other resources, like
air and water, and describes this as the creation of an
artificial scarcity. Hart makes some interesting comments,
often not seeming to realize the implications, for instance,
publication of expensive artworks on CD-ROM highlights the value
of the information over the medium (but he seems to believe
users should only be charged for the medium). He also claims
that all compression schemes but DES are illegal in the United
States. The journal's editor, Charles McClure, asks interested
readers to send their responses in for possible publication. -
DR
Kaman, Geradine M. "Broadband-ISDN: Personal Connections to
Global Resources" Internet Research 3(2) (Summer 1993):8-20.
Kaman attempts to focus attention on some of the social issues
surrounding the deployment of both narrowband ISDN (utilizing
standard copper wire to provide voice, data, and low-quality
video) and broadband ISDN (fiber in the loop to provide voice,
data, and high-quality video). Pointing out that technical
issues have been the primary focus of ISDN development since its
inception in 1971(!), Kaman suggests that for widespread
implementation to begin, demand for the service must be created
by addressing users and their needs. Included with this article
is handy list of acronyms. - DR
Kapor, Mitchell and Daniel J. Weitzner. "Developing the National
Communications and Information Infrastructure" Internet Research
3(2) (Summer 1993):21-30. Based on testimony before Congress in
Janury 1993, this article describes the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's (EFF) Open Platform Proposal to deploy narrowband
ISDN services in the United States. The EFF supports deployment
of ISDN technology as a near-term solution to providing wide-
scale, affordable access to the National Information
Infrastructure. The discussion presented here describes both
the benefits and limitations of narrowband ISDN. - DR
Malamud, Carl and Marshall T. Rose. "An Experiment in Remote
Printing or Toward the Integration of the Internet and
Telephony" ConneXions 7(9) (September 1993):27-29. In case you
have not heard, the communications technology of the early 90s--
FAX transmission--has been networked, Internetworked. Internet
FAX combines telephony, IP addressing and the Internet's use of
long-distance lines to offer FAX services at no charge to the
user. Internet FAX is now available in all of Australia, all of
Washington, DC, most of Silicon Valley, parts of Riverside, CA,
and all of the University of Michigan. Coming online soon are
Denmark, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Japan, and Sweden.
International FAX for free? Check this out. - DR
Medvinsky, Gennady and B. Clifford Neuman. "NetCash: A Design
for Practical Electronic Currency on the Internet" Proceedings
of the First ACM Conference on Computer Communications Security
(November 1993) [available via anonymous FTP, <URL=ftp://
prospero.isi.edu/pub/papers/security/netcash-cccs93.ps.Z>].
Addressing the pressing problem of how to conduct fiduciary
business on the Internet, Medvinsky and Neuman describe a system
that allows clients, merchants, and currency servers to interact
in a secure fashion over an insecure medium. The framework
presented here addresses, to varying degrees, the following
issues: security, anonymity, scalability, acceptability, off-line
operation, transferability, and hardware independence. The
authors readily admit that this scheme does not solve all of
these problems perfectly, but it does allow for the integration
of other protocols when utmost anonymity and offline capabilities
are required. - DR
Notess, Greg R. "Reading Usenet News: Using the rn and trn
Newsreader" ONLINE 17(5) (September 1993):94-98. Notess's goal
is to help us simplify Usenet News reading through selected Unix
newsreader commands. The commands described help us find and
move between newsgroups, organize .newsrc (a listing of
newsgroups available), save articles, and reply to articles. - VR
Ryan, Joe. "A Pathfinder to Core Resources for Network Users"
Internet Research 3(2) (Summer 1993):69-87. Ryan has created a
very useful guide to locating help on using the Internet. Ryan
adresses this article to beginner, intermediate, and expert
users. Covered here are suggestions for finding help using
books, articles, email, and, mentors as well as brief
descriptions of various general resources like archie, Gopher,
etc. The references are rather verbose, and I mean that in a
good way, so are useful as a resource themselves; unfortunately,
some of the information in the references is out of date, always
a danger with network resources. - DR
Tuss, Joan. "Easy Online Access to Helpful Internet Guides"
ONLINE 17(5) (September 1993):60-64. This is a useful,
instructional guide to the FTP sites for retrieving Internet
guides, such as "Surfing the Internet", "There's Gold in them
thar Networks!", SURAnet "Guide to Selected Internet Resources",
and others. - VR
Valauskas, Edward J. "One-Stop Internet Shopping: NCSA Mosaic on
the Macintosh" ONLINE 17(5) (September 1993):99-101. Valauskas
describes Mosaic, as an easy way to organize and "pull together
documents, Internet search tools, scientific data, and other
[Internet] files under a single framework." The Macintosh and
MS Windows versions are currently in beta testing, while the X-
Windows version is in full release. - VR
Walsh, R. Taylor. "Development of a Community Information
Service: The National Access Capital Area Public Access Network
(CapAccess) - A Work in Progress" Internet Research 3(2) (Summer
1993):41-59. Walsh, acting Executive Diretcor of CapAccess,
describes the history and development of this civic networking
project. Beginning from the well-founded premise that local
governments, organizations, businesses, and citizens have an
important role to play in networking, this Washington, DC group
has created a well-run and very interesting community network.
Walsh sees community, or civic, networking as an important step
in the development of the National Information Infrastructure.
Also included in this article are a number of screen dumps that
illustrate the breadth of information available through the
system (in addition to email and online forums), ranging from
local online library catalogs to information on public-access
cable television shows to local tax information. - DR
Wiencko, Joseph A., Jr. "The Blacksburg Electronic Village"
Internet Research 3(2) (Summer 1993):31-40. Wiencko, project
manager of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, describes the
vision and scope of this groundbreaking project now underway.
The idea is to connect every member of the town of Blacksburg,
Virginia (pop. 34,000) to a local high-speed network that is
also connected to the Internet. Part of the project is to
identify what the critical mass of users is, identify and create
applications that are useful to users from all sectors of the
population, and encourage users to create new applications. On
the technological side, connections will be made available
through both ISDN and FDDI (optical fiber) services at little or
no chargeback to the user. - DR
"WIRE: Women's Information Resource & Exchange Opens Online
Doors" EFFector Online 6(2) (October 1, 1993) [availabale via
anonymous FTP <URL=ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/EFF/newsletters/
effector6.2>]. WIRE is a new resource designed to both provide
information of special interest to women and to encourage women
to become involved in networking. Users (women and men) can use
a special graphical client to access to "databases, discussions,
alerts, abstracts, resources and experts on health, politics,
career, finance, technology, parenting, education, lifestyle and
is fee-based, available both as dial-up and via telnet. For more
information, email info@wire.net. - DR
Zeeman, Johan and Dennis MacKinnon. "Spreading the ILLINET: A
Distributed Network for Library Resource Sharing in Illinois"
Internet Research 3(2) (Summer 1993):60-68. Zeeman and
MacKinnon describe the two-phase plan to bring the ILLINET
resource sharing system into a client-server mode employing
Z39.50. The idea is to establish a statewide Interlibrary Loan
system that allows users to order materials from any
participating library from a single interface. - DR
Optical Disc Technologies
Desmarais, Norman. "Driving CD-ROM: MicroSolutions Backpack CD-
ROM Drive" CD-ROM World 8(9) (September 1993):70-71. Desmarais
describes an innovative DOS-based CD-ROM drive just released by
MicroSolutions. Designed for easy portability, the Backpack
drive is especially convenient for those who want to add CD-ROM
capability to their system and do not have an available expansion
slot. This external drive connects to the computer's parallel
printer port. - TR
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Current Cites 4(10) (October 1993) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (C) 1993 by the Library, University of
California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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must appear on copied material. All commercial use requires
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