Documentation
Intelligence documentation
The commands used to find files are similar to those used in traditional databases. Often, you can limit the search by library, date, file name, or file extension. You can search for text strings in the description of the contents of a file, or use key words.
On the Internet, the Virtual Shareware Library is a favorite. The page at
http://castor.acs.oakland.edu/cgi-bin/vsl-front
links to a front end which catalogues about 120,000 software files available from the 22 largest shareware and freeware archives on the Internet (1996). Its search engine lets you search descriptions, locate, retrieve, or order files.
Narrow your search by stating the desired hardware or software platform, as in Commodore Amiga, Atari, MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Novell Netware, IBM OS/2, Unix/Linux, etc.
Use Boolean operators (AND and NOT), specify case requirements, use wildcards (like *, | and ?), delimit by file creation dates, demand matches in paths and file names, and limit the size of the search report.
Using a program like Netscape, just click on the desired files to have them transferred to your local disk. Easy.
To search a huge database of files on the Internet, try FTP Search at http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no/ftpsearch. In September 1996, their index contained over 62 million files.
FTP Search features advanced search options to help you narrow down to the file you want, including case insensitive/sensitive substring searches, limiting to a given domain and path, as well as many formatting options.
On bulletin board systems, there are many different search methods.
Example: You're visiting a bulletin board based on the BBS program RBBS-PC. You want a program that can show GIF graphics picture files. Such files are typically described like this:
VUIMG31.EXE 103105 07-15-91 GIF*/TIFF/PCX Picture Viewer/Printer
From left to right: file name, size in bytes, date available, and a 40 character description.
You can search the file descriptions for the string "gif". You do this by entering the term "s gif all". This will probably give you a list of files. Some will have the letters GIF in the file name. Others will have them in the description field.
CompuServe has several special "Find this File" services.
Other sources available through the Internet
The Galaxy service offers: Search Galaxy Pages, Find Galaxy Entries, Search the World Wide Web, Search Gopher Space, Search Hytelnet Services (includes traditional ``top-down'' interface), and has pointers to searchable indexes and databases at many other sites. Point your WWW browser at http://galaxy.einet.net/search.html
Free vs. commercial sources: On commercial online services, the profit motive provides continuous pressure to keep data plentiful and approachable. On the Internet, the information you'll find is there often because of someone's good will. So, unless the resource is sponsored or commercial in another another way, beware of outdated information.
The Northern Light Search Engine's "Special Collection" (at http://www.nlsearch.com/) is a database of more than 4,500 books, magazines, journals, newswires and databases that aren't generally available via the Web (1998). Many of the publications are dating from January 1995. Searching the database is free, but there is a modest fee for documents actually retrieved.
The list of sources is sorted by Arts & Entertainment, Business, Books & Literature, Careers, Cars, Computers, Education, Fashion, Food & Cooking, General Reference, Health & Fitness, History, Hobbies, Home Electronics, House, Investing, Kids, Military, News, Parenting, Product Information, Politics, Science, Special Interest, Sports, Vacations.
Their General Reference group includes Africa News Service, African Affairs, Aging, Asian Folklore Studies, Asian Survey, Business Wire, Collier's Encyclopedia, Compass Middle East Service, East European Politics & Societies, East European Quarterly, Economic Geography, Europe, Europe- Asia Studies, Futurist, Germanic Review, Greece & Rome, Inter Press Service, ITAR/TASS News Agency, Journal of Asian & African Studies, Journal of European Studies, Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Palestine Studies, Latin American Research Review, MEED Middle East Economic Digest, NACLA Report on the Americas, Pacific Affairs, Russian Life, Russian Review, Scandinavian Studies, SwissWORLD, UPI, World Press Review, Xinhua News Agency, Ziff-Davis Wire Highlights, and more.
The Electric Library (http://www.elibrary.com) has more than 1,000 publications in its archive (1996). Users can enter a plain English question to search over 900 full-text magazines, over 150 full-text newspapers, over 2,000 complete works of literature (Shakespeare, Monarch Notes), 20,000 photographs, news wires, television and radio transcripts, book, movie and software reviews, and Compton's Encyclopedia. They also have a dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, fact books, and more.
Getting more out of your magazine subscriptions
To garner new subscribers and keep current readers, magazine publishers turn to online services to create an ancillary electronic version of their print product. Their readers are being transformed from passive recipients of information into active participants in publishing.
You can "talk" with PC Magazine's writers through ZiffNet on CompuServe. Their forums function as expert sources. Here, you will often learn about products and trends sometimes before the magazines hit the newsstand. Time magazine has a forum on America Online. There, readers can discuss with magazine reporters and editors, and even read the text of entire issues of Time electronically before it is available on newsstands.
Time Warner's Pathfinder (http://pathfinder.com) provides the full text of Time magazine, including a feature called Time Daily, updated with the latest stories each evening around 8 p.m. ET.
PC Magazine (U.S.A.) is one of those magazines that arrives here by mail. We butcher them, whenever we find something of interest. The "corpses" are dumped in a high pile on the floor. To retrieve a story in this pile is difficult and time consuming, unless the title is printed on the cover. Luckily, there are shortcuts. Connect to ZD Net Search. Here, you can search for stories. Once you have a list with title references, turning the pages gets much easier. However, as the articles are in full text, you may not want to hit for the floor at all.
On CompuServe, ZiffNet offers Computer Database Plus. It lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200 popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987. Their database is also available on CD-ROM, but the discs cover only one year at a time.
CDP contains full-text from around 50 magazines, like Personal Computing, Electronic News, MacWeek and Electronic Business. Stories from the other magazines are available in abstracted form only. To search, you pay extra per hour. In addition, you pay a fee per abstract and per full-text article. These fees are added to your normal CompuServe access rates.
ZiffNet also offers Magazine Database Plus, a database with stories from over 130 magazines (1994) covering science, business, sport, people, personal finance, family, art and handicraft, cooking, education, environment, travel, politics, consumer opinions, and reviews of books and films.
The magazines include: Administrative Management, Aging, Changing Times, The Atlantic, Canadian Business, Datamation, Cosmopolitan, Dun's Business Month, The Economist, The Futurist, High Technology Business, Journal of Small Business Management, Management Today, The Nation, The New Republic, Online, Playboy, Inc., Popular Science, Research & Development, Sales & Marketing Management, Scientific American, Technology Review, UN Chronicle, UNESCO Courier, U.S. News & World Report, and World Press Review.
Magazine Index (MI), from Information Access Company (U.S.A.) covers over 500 consumer and general-interest periodicals as diverse as Special Libraries and Sky & Telescope, Motor Trend and Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone. Many titles go as far back as 1959.
Although most of the database consists of brief citations, MI also contains the complete text of selected stories from a long list of periodicals. It is available through Dialog, CompuServe, BRS, Data-Star, Nexis, Dow Jones Interactive, and others.
The Ei Compendex Plus database from Engineering Information in the U.S. offers information on various disciplines of engineering, from marine to chemical to electrical to nuclear. On CDP Online, Dialog, and Orbit.
What to do if you have so many references to a given magazine that you want to check it out? Try the Electronic Newsstand. It is available at the Web address http://www.enews.com/, and has links to over 2,000 magazine sites (1996). If you like, you can subscribe (with discounts) to over 300 of them.
Finding that book
Many libraries are accessible through the Internet. For a list of links to library web servers, look up Libweb: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Libweb, or webCATS (http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat/). Both Libweb and webCATS have geographical indexes with links to libraries in Africa, Americas, Asia/Pacific Rim, and Europe/Middle East.
Some libraries can be searched by Internet mail. This is the case with BIBSYS, a database operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries.
The British Library is at http://www.bl.uk/. The Web site "Book Lovers: Fine Books and Literature" has links to writers and poets, libraries, publishers and booksellers, both of new and second hand/antiquarian books. URL: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pwessel/
The Complete Guide to Online Bookstores is a handy guide to the net's offerings (at http://www.paperz.com/bookstores.html). Their list is broken down into categories like: Academic bookstores, Alternative, Archive, Australian, Automotive, Business & Career, Children's, City, Computer & Technical, Cooking, Co-Ops & Book Trading, Gay & Lesbian, General, German, Health & Nutrition, How-To, Israeli, Irish, Martial Arts, Medical & Chiropractic, Multilingual, Museum, Mystery & Fantasy, Future Fantasy, Nature, Organizational, Photographic, Progressive, Rare Books, Religious, Special Interest, Spiritual, Swedish, Travel, University & College, and more.
Roswell Computer Books Ltd.'s online book store (Canada) has a large database of titles. Check it out at http://www.roswell.com/. The Internet Book Shop in the United Kingdom offers over 750,000 (1995). It's URL is: http://www.bookshop.co.uk/.
Book Stacks Unlimited (http://www.books.com/) offers over 410,000 titles. Search online, read book reviews, enter order and credit card information to have the books shipped. They also offer several free virtual volumes. The competitor at http://www.amazon.com claims over 1.5 million titles. For more books, check http://www.barnesandnoble.com.
For more on science fiction, browse William Gibson's self-destructing electronic book "Agrippa" at http://sfbox.vt.edu:10021/J/jfoley/gibson/gibson.html. You may also want to check out a parody, at http://www.irdg.com/mep/nni/agr1ppa.txt.
OCLC's WorldCat is a reference database covering books and materials in libraries worldwide. Their Online Union Catalog (OLUC) is the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database. Web address: http://www.oclc.org.
The Peking University Library (Beijing, China) contains about 4,500,000 items. It includes 2,700,000 items in Chinese and 900,000 items in different foreign languages. There are also 650,000 volumes of periodicals and other documents and 160,000 rare books. At http://www.lib.pku.edu.cn.
Bookworms may appreciate the DOROTHYL list (listserv@kentvm.kent.edu), and especially if they like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers. The Mark Twain forum (TWAIN-L) is at listserv@yorku.ca, and a mailing list for bizarre, disturbing, and offensive short stories (WEIRD-L) is at listserv@brownvm.brown.edu.
For Stephen King, check out http://www.wco.com/~pace/king.html. Usenet has alt.fan.holmes, and there is a "Sherlockian Connection" Web page with many links at http://www.bcpl.lib.md.us/~lmoskowi/holmes.html.
The Internet Poetry Archive is available through the World Wide Web. The URL is http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/. It brings selected poems from several contemporary poets in different languages, including text, photo of poet, voice of poet reading the poem, select bibliography, and brief biographical note.
If you are into Very Rare Books, visit the Vatican Library, one of the world's oldest and most tightly restricted libraries. Founded in the mid- 1400s, the library houses over 150,000 manuscripts and a million printed books, including 80,000 books published during the first fifty years of the printing press.
Digital images of several full printed volumes, manuscripts, and artworks are gradually being made available through the Internet. 200 of its most precious manuscripts, books, and maps -- many of which played a key role in the humanist recovery of the classical heritage of Greece and Rome, is available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/vatican/toc.html.
If quite impossible to locate a given book, try EXLIBRIS, the Rare Books and Special Collections Forum at listproc@library.berkeley.edu. At http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris/, you can browse the forum's archived messages by month.
The Bibliophile Mailing List is for collectors and sellers of old, rare, scarce, and/or out-of-print books. It is a forum for buying, selling, and trading books. Subscribe by email to biblio-request@smartlink.net with the word SUBSCRIBE in the body of your mail, or do it from their Web site: http://www.auldbooks.com/biblio/index.html
On Usenet, they have alt.books.reviews, k12.library, alt.books.technical, rec.arts.books, and more.
Online books
You needed strong muscles to read the earliest books. In ancient Babylonia and Assyria, books consisted of numbered collections of rectangular clay tablets. They were inscribed with cuneiform and packaged in a labeled container. Taking a book from the shelf and carrying it to a reading table required the help of several assistants.
Today, you'll find full electronic versions of books on the World Wide Web and in other types of Internet archives.
The first issue (version 1.0) of this virtual book is one example. You can find it in the archives of Project Gutenberg, whose goal is to develop a library of 10,000 public domain electronic texts by the year 2000. You can retrieve it to your disk for later reading, or read it with your Web browser.
Project Gutenberg is at http://promo.net/pg/. The offerings include The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Aesop's Fables, The Unabridged Works of Shakespeare, The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, Tarzan, The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee, Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, Peter Pan, The Holy Koran, Roget's Thesaurus (1911), Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and The World Factbook (CIA).
The Electronic Text Center (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/) offers a collection of thousands of English, French, German, Japanese, and Latin texts.
The Alex Catalog of full-text Electronic Texts gives pointers to more offerings (at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/alex-index.html). The catalogue is divided into Search the catalog, Browse the catalog (by author, date, host, language, subject, or title), and Information about cataloging Internet resources.
Books in other languages
On the Internet, there are a rapidly growing number of library online public-access catalogs (OPACs) from all over the world. Some provide users with access to additional resources, such as periodical indexes of specialized databases. More than 270 library catalogs are online (1992).
An up-to-date directory of libraries that are interactively accessible through Internet can be had at
The CASLIN Czech and Slovak Library Information Network is at telnet://beta.nkp.cz. Login: alluser . Use your Internet address as password. It contains over 30.000 sample records of Czech books from between 1983 and 1993 (1994). The code used for national characters is ISO 8859-2 (also called ISO Latin-2).
For Chinese books in Chinese (and in English language), check the China International Book Trading Corporation at http://www.cibtc.com.cn/indexe.html.
Non-Chinese speaking people will probably classify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many of them are impossible to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters, and you know their meaning. Interested? Subscribe to CHPOEM-L (listserv@listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu). Be prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias
OneLook Dictionaries, The Faster Finder (http://www.onelook.com/), lets you search words in several dictionaries and glossaries in one operation. By March 1999, it had 2,299,280 words in 461 online dictionaries indexed. A search for "backbone" returned definitions in six specialized dictionaries.
Your search may be limited to specific dictionaries/glossaries sorted in groups like Computer/Internet, Science, Medical, Technological, Business, Sports, Religion, Acronym, and General Dictionaries.
The Research Institute for the Humanities in Hong Kong offers extensive links to reference works, dictionaries and thesauri in many languages at http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Ref.html#dt . Their offerings include Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Norwegian, Qur'anic Arabic, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Welch dictionaries; Dictionary of Acronyms; Quotations; Abbreviations for International Organizations; History-related reference works; Philosophy-related reference; Computer-related reference; White & Yellow Pages; Maps; Encyclopedias.
The Places for THINKers web (http://think.ucdavis.edu/central/) has links to sources like Webster's Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and FAQs about Copyright. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations can also be searched at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,150425,00.html and http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/. Webster's is at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150275,0200.html, and Roget's Thesaurus at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150331,0200.html.
I wanted quotes for a speech for my wife's birthday, and entered "wife". Here are two examples of what I found in Bartlett's:
Euripides. 484-406 B. C.
... Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife.
Plutarch. 46 (?)-120 (?) A. D.
... Pittacus said, "Every one of you hath his particular plague, and
my wife is mine; and he is very happy who hath this only."
At Search.Com, you can also search the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150299,0200.html), the Koran (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150302,0200.html), The Bible at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150304,0200.html, and The World Wide Web Acronym and Abbreviation Server (at http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,0-150427,0200.html).
Try http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/HTML/Dictionaries.html for more dictionaries. Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (at http://www.crl.com/~jderouen/encyc.html) has links to Esoteric Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, Technical English dictionaries, and some resources in other languages. Assorted Encyclopedias on the Web (http://edis.win.tue.nl/encyclop.html) has a collection of links to various encyclopedias including Biology, Environment, Medicine, Crafts, Hobbies, Sports, Cultures, Geography, History, Economics, Finance, General Knowledge, Internet, Mathematics, Computing, Mysticism, Mythology, Philosophy, Physics, Cosmology, Religion and Social Sciences.
Research-It! (http://www.iTools.com/research-it/research-it.html) has free searching of dictionaries, thesauri, language translators, acronyms, quotations, maps, phone numbers, postal information, package tracking, financial info and more.
The real Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases can be found at http://www.thesaurus.com/.
At the Phrase Finder page (http://www.shu.ac.uk/web-admin/phrases/), type in a word to get a list of phrases related -in some way- to that word. The database includes: Lines from Shakespeare (or phrases related to the word Shakespeare), Quotations (or phrases related to the word quotation), and One-liner jokes.
Searching and reading well-known encyclopedias like Grolier's Academic American in full text costs money. Some services, like Dow Jones Interactive, will give you access at discount prices.
The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia has made over 17,000 articles from their Third Edition searchable for free at http://encyclopedia.com/. (Related links turn the encyclopeida into a subject-oriented front-end to the fee-based Electronic Library.)
The Encyclopedia Britannica is available for a fee. Subscribe at http://www.eb.com. Webster is at http://www.m-w.com/ with free searches in its dictionary, thesaurus, medical dictionary, and more.
For some time, "information-for-free" enthusiasts have been working on an alternative, the Internet Encyclopedia, or Interpedia. The idea is for volunteers to write cooperatively the new encyclopedia, put it in the public domain, and make it available on the Internet.
Unlike any printed encyclopedia, the Interpedia could be kept completely up-to-date. It could include hypertext links to discussions, and perhaps evolve into a general interface to all resources and activities on the Internet.
For more information, subscribe to the Interpedia mailing list by sending a message to interpedia-request@telerama.lm.com. The body of your message must contain the word 'subscribe' and your e-mail address, as follows: subscribe your_username@your.host.domain
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