_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, ]. 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 ]. 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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