Fwd: Internet-on-a-Disk, Issue #6, October 1994

[Gwen Gall <ggall -at- CA -dot- ORACLE -dot- COM>]

I'm forwarding this to the list--not only is it interesting generally, it also
provides some information for Steve Lawrensen's request (Check out the item on
the Metaindex).

Cheers,

Gwen (ggall -at- ca -dot- oracle -dot- com)
Oracle MultiDimension

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"The foreseeable future. A cliche, and a fuzzy one. How much of the
future is foreseeable? Ten minutes? Ten years? Any of it? By whom is it
foreseeable? Seers? Experts? Everybody?"
                                --Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style"

*******************************************************************************




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Received: 10-22-94 21:56                         Sent: 10-22-94 21:22
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Subject: Internet-on-a-Disk, Issue #6, October 1994
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INTERNET-ON-A-DISK #6,  October 1994
Newsletter of public domain and freely available electronic texts
Circulation:  direct = 3200, indirect (estimated) 100,000+

This newsletter is free for the asking.  To be added to the distribution
list, please send requests to (samizdat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com). If you don't
have an email address, we can send it to you  by snail-mail on IBM or
Mac diskette -- $30 for ten diskettes -- one with all the back issues,
followed by the next nine issues. B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 161,
West Roxbury, MA 02132.

Permission is granted to freely distribute this newsletter in electronic form.

We plan to produce new issues about once a month (with time off for
summer vacation).  We welcome submissions of articles and information
relating to availability of electronic texts on the Internet and their use in
education.

*************************************************

WHAT'S NEW
(texts recently made available by ftp, gopher, www, and LISTSERV)

from the Gutenberg Project --
   ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu /pub/etext/etext94
   http://med-amsa.bu.edu/Gutenberg/welcome.html
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (2000010.txt)
The American by Henry James (ameri10.txt)
Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster (dlleg10.txt)
Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott (ffabl10.txt)
McTeague by Frank Norris (mcteg10.txt)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (sense11.txt)
Summer by Edith Wharton (summr10.txt)
American Hand Book of Daguerrotype by Samuel Humphrey (1858) (amdag10.txt)
illustrations for the above, as .gif files (amdgf10.zip)
The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux (phant10.txt
The Picture of Dorian Gray (dgray10.txt)
The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, by Sax Rohmer (fuman10.txt)
The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley (hbook10.txt)
Charlotte Temple, by Susanna Rowson  (chtem10.txt)
The Haunted Hotel, by Wilkie Collins (hhotl10.txt)
The Well At The World's End, by William Morris  (wwend10.txt)
1994 History and Practice of the Art of Photography  (hipho10.txt)

from wiretap
   ftp 130.43.43.43 /Library/Classics
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (pride.ja)
Peer Gynt's Onion by Anthony Campbell (gynt-on.txt)

from Association des Bibliophiles Universels
   classic works in French
    ftp ftp.cnan.fr   /pub/ABU
    cubaud -at- cnam -dot- fr
   Unfortunately, these texts are in a variety of formats, and it
   may be difficult to convert a given document to plain ASCII or
   some other form that will work in your word processor.
works include Jules Verne "De la terrre a la lune" and
"Les forceurs de blocus", Rene Descartes
"Discours de la methode", Fontenelle "Entretiens sur la pluralite
des mondes habites",  Chanson de Roland, Racine Athalie,
La Bible (Edition Louis Segond), Blaise Pascal "La machine
d'arithmetique", Malbranche "Meditations sur l'humilite et
la penitence, Rousseau "Les reveries du promeneur solitaire"

Country Studies on World-Wide Web from Library of Congress
   http://lcweb.loc/gov/homepage/country.html
(This is a comprehensive, up-to-date, book-length study. It looks
great on-line with a Mosaic browser.  But for those who need
plain ASCII, it will take quite a lot work to convert it from html.)
Ethiopia

U.S. Army Area Handbooks
    gopher umslvma.umsl.edu/library/govdocs/armyahbs
    (These are each comprehensive, up-to-date, book-length studies.
    This is valuable information, but the gopher server gives it to you
    in little pieces.  To download a single book may mean retrieving
    200 or more separate gopher files.)
China, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Singapore,
Somalia, South Korea, and Yugoslavia

United Nations
   gopher nywork1.undp.org 70
They've added a lot of new material, including resolutions from the 48th
session of the General  Assembly and also Security Council resolutions for
1994.

*************************************
SUGGESTION -- PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD
While very few K-12 schools have good Internet connections, nearly all
have PCs or Macintoshes.  And one of the best ways to introduce them
to the treasures of the Internet is by providing them with electronic texts
on disks.  (That's a lot easier and cheaper than giving them printouts.)

For those who do not have the capability or the time to retrieve
electronic texts from the Internet, many are available at a nominal price
from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a project of The B&R Samizdat
Express.  For further information, send email to
samizdat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com

*********************************************************

WEB NOTES:

WEB ACCELERATOR:  If you use the World-Wide Web, you need the
new browser from Mosaic Communications.  Connect to http://mcom.com
and get Netscape.  It's free and installs quickly.  I have a Windows PC with a
14.4k baud modem.  In the past, with Mosaic from NCSA, I had to turn off
the graphics to get reasonable response time.  Now with Netscape (AKA
Mozilla), I leave the graphics on and still it goes about four times as
fast.  It's like getting a much faster modem for free.

YAHOO:  Check out Yahoo -- http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.  There you'll
find over 16,000 URLs organized by subject category in a cascade for menus.
It looks like this is updated daily.

SEARCH TOOLS:  Check out Meta Index --
http:\\cui_www.unige.ch/meta-index.html -- for a wide selection of tools to
help you find what you want on the World-Wide Web.  My favorite is the
WebCrawler, which you can get to directly at
http://www.biotech.washington.edu/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html.

WHITE HOUSE:  The White House now has a Web server
(http://www.whitehouse.gov),  with pointers to lots of other useful new
government sites.  These include The Government Information Locator Service,
 which is in the beginning stages but looks very promising
(http://info.er.usgs.gov/gils/index.html).  Also take a look at the subject
index of on-line government information
(http://www.fedworld.gov/#usgovt).
   The White House server itself is quite good.  It allows you to leave
an entry in the "guestbook" to register your opinion of this new service,
and also allows you to write your comments on any issue of concern to you
for the consumption of White House staffers. On the lighter side, you can
take a guided tour of the White House, or view Al Gore's favorite political
cartoons.  This site is well worth exploring.  It can open the Federal
government right in your classroom, making it appear immediate and
accessible, rather than remote and bureaucratic.  If done right, this
approach could encourage many more people to take a more active interest
in government and in solving the nagging social and economic problems
that government tries to deal with.

CALIFORNIA ELECTION:  The California state elections are now on line
 (thanks to Digital Equipment). Take a look at http://www.election.ca.gov/
for pre-election info about all the races and candidates.  And on election
day, get live, rapidly up-dated results, enhanced by maps and graphs to help
you understand the meaning of the numbers.

BRITANNICA:  The Encyclopedia Britannica will be on-line very shortly.
You can check a demo today at http://www.eb.com/eb.htm  I understand that
they will have the entire 1995 edition on the Web, with powerful search
capabilities and hypertext links to related Internet sites, and even an
on-line dictionary (if you don't understand a word in an encyclopedia entry,
 simply
clicking on that word will give you the definition.)  This will not be free,
but it will be very inexpensive for the value you get.  (Meanwhile, I
understand that the Gutenberg Project is hard at work to make available
the etext of an early, public domain edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

(Several readers have asked if they could "subscribe" to our home page --
a document listing hundreds of URLs in html format.  We're willing to do
that with updates four times a year for $10.  Send mail to
samizat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com if  you are interested.)

***********************************************

EUREKA!  I CAN RUN A WEB SERVER FROM MY PC AT
HOME WITH AN ORDINARY MODEM AND SLIP ACCOUNT
By Richard Seltzer

I have a Web server running off my 486 Windows PC at home.  I'm doing this
with a 14.4K baud modem and a SLIP account from tiac (The Internet Access
Company in Bedford, Mass.)  I'm a writer, not a computer wizard, and wizards
I know hadn't been able to tell me how to do it or even if it could be done.
Even queries to the help desk at tiac and to Web-related newsgroups had
gotten me nowhere.  Hence my sense of accomplishment that I was able to
figure it out.

What does this mean?  I can -- at no additional cost -- publish my articles,
my lists of disks, my kids' pictures, anything I choose to a global audience.
All I do is create documents using word processor software, add some
extra markup codes (hypertext markup language),  and file the documents in
the right directory on my PC.  Then so long as my system is turned on, I
am connected to my Internet provider, and I am running the server software,
anyone with a browser on the Web can see my pages.

It was in a newsgroup that I found the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions
document) which pointed me to the right file at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).  I quickly downloaded it, unzipped
it, and followed instructions.  I still haven't messed with the
configuration or done anything fancy.  It's all on default.  It was
incredibly easy.  It took less than half an hour after I found the file.

I immediately phoned my son at Yale.  He opened my URL, and the pages came
up quickly.

(The newsgroup where I found the FAQ  is comp.infosystems.www.misc.
You can retrieve the FAQ from http://sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/faq/www_faq.html
For NCSA's Windows Web server program, httpd for Windows, retrieve the file
whp11ay.zip from the ftp site fpt.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the
/Web/ncsa_httpd/contrib directory).

I haven't had a chance to check how many simultaneous users it can handle.
(I gather from the instructions that when busy it can run out of room in the
 Windows message queue.)

This experiment tells me:
1) It is very easy for an individual or a school to set up Web pages for the
fun of it and let the world see them (the only cost is the SLIP account --
which in my case if $29 for 40 hours per month, or $49 for 300 hours per
month).
2) You could even run a cottage business this way (like many bulletin boards
are run today), announcing to your audience the hours that the machine will
be available.
3) Anyone can become a player in this game -- instantly.  It takes no
capital investment (assuming you already have a PC), and you don't have to
put your info on someone else's commercial Web server, unless you really
need commercial grade service.  You can do it all yourself.
And if you already have a SLIP account there is zero incremental cost.
4) You could use such a primitive setup to experiment and figure out what
your school or library might want to do on the Web in the future.  You could
build a school club around this.  You could also post agendas and minutes for
community organizations, publish greeting-card messages to friends and
family, publish articles and stories, give a local business some minimal
Internet visibility, or even start your own business.

I have big plans for this little machine of mine.  For the benefit of the
curious, I'll leave the system on for a few hours each evening -- 6 PM to 9
PM Eastern Time, in the US.  If you'd like to check it out, try
http://199.3.129.189/index.htm

There's nothing of any significance there yet.  I'm just getting started.
But it doesn't take long to author html pages -- just adding markup to
existing documents.  I'll probably have back issues of the newsletter
(maybe with hypertext links to the sites referenced), and our disk
catalog broken up by subject.  Please send me your suggestions.  And also
please let me know if you can and will mirror these pages on your own
server so more people can get to the information more easily.

****************************************
CATALOGING THE INTERNET
by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express

The Internet continues to amaze me -- enormous repositories of
information and numerous little outposts of creativity and
initiative.  Every day dozens of new sites come on line. I love to see
papers by elementary school kids with hypertext links to the source,
rather than footnotes.  I love to follow the threads of my thought from
one page to another over the World Wide Web, and lose track of where I am
and what the source of the information is, as I immerse myself in the
content.  I love the array of  better and better search tools that let me
quickly find useful sites

This is a scholar's dream, right?

Maybe.

Unfortunately, Internet addresses change; files get moved to other
directories or other machines or are simply deleted.  Just because I saw
it today doesn't mean I'll be able to find it tomorrow.  The on-line
source you "cite" with a hypertext link may not exist when someone goes
to check it out.

Can substantial scholarship  be built on such shifting ground?  Is there
any way to make this massive flux of information more tangible and
structured -- more amenable to cataloging, so its benefits can be more
accessible and lasting?

On the one hand, the Internet looks like an enormous library.  On the other
hand, it's a librarian's nightmare.

That's one of the problems we are trying to deal with through our
PLEASE  COPY THIS DISK project. We want to capture the best electronic
texts  from the Internet  and put them into a tangible form that is organized
and easy for everyone to use -- even people who don't yet have Internet
access.

Now that we have over 300 disks (the equivalent of about 700 electronic
books), it's time to take the next step -- to catalog this material so it
can be readily handled in a traditional library environment.  Then
students and scholars will be able to find what they want when they need
it, and get to it again later, independent of the vagaries of Internet files.

We are looking for a library that would like to be a repository for our
rapidly growing collection.  We would provide such a library with a complete
 current
set (a value of over $3000), and would send new disks as they are created.  (
We now add over two dozen disks per month).  In exchange, we would like that
library to promptly catalog the collection and make that cataloging
information available to the world-wide library community.

A typical disk contains one to three related books, and the README
documents provide details about the origin of the material -- usually the
Internet site from which it was obtained.  We would like the catalog
entries to cross-reference those sites.  Hence by cataloging our disks,
you would also be cataloging the best public domain and freely available
etexts on the Internet (U.S. Government, UN, and NATO information as
well as classic works of literature).

If you are interested in this project, please contact us as soon as
possible at samizdat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com -dot- 

 *************************

HEY, THIS IS GREAT.  BUT HOW CAN I USE IT?
by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express

Electronic texts can be copied at very little cost.  If teachers were to
take advantage of them,
o they could save money by not having to buy as many traditional books,
o they could greatly expand the breadth of information available to students,
o they could introduce students to the learning environment of the future,
o they could create their own anthologies tailored to their particular
classroom needs, etc.

But today, even though many teachers see the potential and praise the
concept, very few of them actually use electronic texts in the classroom.

The main barrier appears to be that everyone is short of time.  Despite
good intentions, most people just don't get around to making lesson plans
and study guides for the use of this new kind of material.  Even if they
have the creativity, they simply don't have the energy to work out how to
take full advantage of this new kind of resource.

We would like to gather and redistribute study guides, lesson plans and
other such classroom aids related to educational use of electronic texts
-- to  encourage teachers to develop such aids, and to share them with
others who could benefit.  .

We will send ten free disks of etexts (your choice from the PLEASE COPY
THIS DISK collection) to any teacher who sends us a study guide/lesson
plan of this kind -- whether it deals with etexts in general or with
specific works or classes of works found in our collection.  It need not
be long (a few good pages should suffice).  But it should be practical
and useful.

Please send your submissions by email to samizdat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com -dot-   And please
include a note attesting that it is your work and that you wish to make it
generally available, in the public domain.  We will then do what we can to
spread your work to other teachers -- using this newsletter and our new
Web server and also including it on selected disks.


***********************************
Back issues are available from us on request, and are also found at the
archives of Computer underground Digest (CuD), housed at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
   ftp  ftp.eff.org  /pub/Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk
   gopher  gopher.eff.org  /Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk
   http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk
They  are also available from a web server in London
  http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/people/gordo/samizdat.html   =  catalog of disks
                                             available from PLEASE COPY THIS
 DISK
   "                     "               /internet_disk1.html = issue #1
   "                     "               /internet_disk2.html = issue #2 etc.
(As noted above, we're just starting our own tiny web server at
http://199.3.129.189/index.htm  For now, it's only available for a
few hours in the evening, Eastern Time).

They are also found at such sites as:
gopher sjuvm.stjohns.edu /Disabilities & Rehabilitation Resources/
     /EASI/EASI's list of available Internet etexts

And also at the GRIST On-Line BBS at (212)787-6562.

You are welcome to include this publication on your bbs or ftp or
gopher or webserver.  Please let us know the address, and we'll add it to
this list.

NB -- Depending on time and place, Richard Seltzer could be available
for speaking engagements.

Published by PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, B&R Samizdat Express,
PO Box 161, West Roxbury, MA 02132.  samizdat -at- world -dot- std -dot- com