The Scout Report - December 8, 1995

The Scout Report

December 8, 1995

A Publication of Internet Scout
Provided by the InterNIC as a Service to the Internet Community

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators, the InterNIC's primary audience. However, everyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML) or visit the Web version of the Scout Report. Subscription instructions are included at the end of each report.
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/

In This Issue:

Research and Education

General Interest

Network Tools

Research & Education


The American Civil War Home Page
The American Civil War Home Page has links to hundreds of resources, including general resources such as timelines and overviews, images, letters, accounts and diaries, bibliographies, state studies, specific battles, and rosters, among others. It is a very comprehensive page, and a good place to start for Civil War information.
http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/
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Bellingham Public Schools curriculum and lesson plans
The Bellingham Public Schools Web site is recommended when you want to collect information and formulate ideas about designing collaborative and educational web-based activities. It offers a selective collection of WWW Curriculum resources by Subject or Grade Level and lesson plans integrating the use of technology into the curriculum. Also provided are a half dozen lessons for adult learning of new technologies. These are problems-based and learner-centered. They require teams to explore challenging and authentic issues. Educators are provided with instructions for building curriculum pages which include 18 design tenets for WWW sites, helping them avoid the pitfalls that created problems for the pioneers. School Board Policies are listed (copying permitted) including Internet Policy, Internet Procedures, Copyright Policy, Technology Plan, Library Media Frameworks, and a Parent Internet Permission Form.
http://www.bham.wednet.edu/default.htm
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The Online Medieval and Classical Library
The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE offers The Online Medieval and Classical Library. "The purpose is to provide a free and easy way for the average computer user to access some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization." At present texts include "The Song of Roland" and "Njal's Saga" (Anonymous) as well as works of Chaucer (including "The Book of the Duchess" and "Troilus and Criseyde"), Hesiod, and Homer, among others.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/
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Points of Pediatric Interest
The Points of Pediatric Interest page at Johns Hopkins University is a comprehensive and well-designed collection of links to information on all aspects of children's health care and related issues. Parents, teachers, care-givers, and professionals will find the site useful. Examples include BabyWeb, The Doctor's Guide to the Internet, Rural Health Village Children's Center, and the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Computers and Other Technologies. Collections of links to hospitals, humor and art in medicine, parenting resources, and patient education material are also offered, as well as "Fun Stuff for Kids on the Web."
http://www.med.jhu.edu/peds/neonatology/poi.html
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USDA "Agricultural Statistics 1994"
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has made full text of "Agricultural Statistics 1994" available via its Web site. Agricultural Statistics is an annual compendium of data (and selected charts) relating to all aspects of the U.S. agricultural economy. Subject coverage includes all major crop and livestock sectors, farm income and credit, stabilization and price support, agricultural conservation and forestry statistics, and fertilizers and pesticides, among others. Tables include both state and national breakdowns, and most national tables include between two and ten year time series. The book is available as one large Adobe Acrobat .PDF file (about 5 megabytes), so you'll need a fast connection to get it. You'll also need a free Acrobat Reader, which can be obtained at the same page. Acrobat allows selective searching for specific tables, as well as selective printing of those tables. (See Network Tools, below.)
http://www.usda.gov/nass/pubs/acrobat.htm
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World Wide Arts Resources
The World Wide Arts Resources site is a comprehensive registry of visual arts information world-wide on the Web. The 4000 resources have been compiled over the last year and can be searched by keyword. Categories include museums, performing arts, artists, antiques, art resources, and publications. Commercial, government, and academic sites are also offered.
http://wwar.com/
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General Interest


The Department of Defense's BosniaLINK
BosniaLINK is the official Department of Defense information system about U.S. military activities in Operation "Joint Endeavor", the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. The system is provided by the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. All information in BosniaLINK is publicly released information from the U.S. government or NATO headquarters. BosniaLINK contains operation maps, fact sheets, news releases, biographies of key commanders and leaders, and transcripts of briefings, speeches and testimony. It is also hyperlinked to the NATO and State Department information services.
http://www.dtic.mil/bosnia/

Full text of the recent Bosnia Peace Treaty (Dayton Peace Agreement--22 Nov. 1995) is available at the following sites:
PeaceNet:
Gopher to gopher.igc.apc.org and then follow the path: PeaceNet; Balkans/Ex-Yugoslavia; Dayton Peace Treaty (22 Nov 95). Text and commentary.

U.S. State Department: Dept. of State Foreign Affairs Network (DOSFAN):
http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/bosnia/bosagree.html
or:
Gopher to dosfan.lib.uic.edu and follow the path: Geographic Area/Bureau; Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs; Dayton Peace Agreement.
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Government Printing Office database now cost-free
The U.S. Government Printing Office has announced free public access to its GPO Access database. The database includes full text of 1993-95 Congressional Bills, the 1995-96 Congressional Directory, 1994-95 Congressional Record, Economic Indicators (a monthly compendium of economic statistics), 1994-95 Federal Register, Government Manual, GAO (Government Accounting Office) Reports, History of Bills for 1994-95, Public Laws-104th Congress, and The United States Code, among others. While the database is not new, complete free public access to it is new. The site is searchable and detailed searching help is available on the home page. The GPO Access page also points to eight Federal Depository Library Gateway Web GPO Access sites, as well as over 15 Telnet or Gopher Depository GPO Access sites. Documents are available in ASCII text, and some are also available in Adobe Acrobat .PDF format. (See Network Tools, below.)
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces001.html
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The Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly -- a magazine devoted to politics, society, the arts, and culture since 1857 -- brings its electronic edition to the World Wide Web. Current articles include the strikes in France, the Balkan conflict, and "Does the Net Live Up To the Hype?" by National Public Radio regular Steven Stark.
http://www.theatlantic.com/
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TV Links Film and Television Website Archive
TV Links Film and Television Website Archive is a site that points to almost anything you can think of relating to film and television. Categories include television shows, motion picture production companies, screen and video professional organizations, awards (Oscar, Emmy, and Tony), world TV schedules, 30 TV networks, Usenet newsgroups, and film festivals, among others. This is a definitive site for the definitive couch potato.
http://www.timelapse.com/tvlink.html
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Internetnews.com (TM) Internet news magazine
Internetnews.com (TM) provides news every weekday about Internet companies and Internet product announcements. The News Services section links to 3 additional similar and more thorough services, ClariNet News, Cowles/Simba Media Daily, and the Daily Specturm. Net Day also provides book reviews done by outside reviewers. Past issues are archived and browsable. Provided by Mecklermedia, publishers of Internet World magazine.
http://www.internetnews.com/
[Note: Site title has changed since the original Scout Report review. Site formerly referred to in the Scout Report as "Net Day."]
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Net Tools


Adobe Acrobat
Adobe's publishing technology, called Acrobat, allows print documents to be passed through the Internet regardless of the operating platform or desktop publishing system used in creation of the document. Adobe's portable document format, PDF, is universally readable via a special Reader that Adobe provides free for downloading from its Web site. Once you have the software, configure it to your Web browser as explained in the help file. Acrobat Readers allow you to read and print a document with its original look and feel. Graphics, color, photographs, and even URL links to other Web sites are supported. The documents are also searchable. The software for creating Acrobat documents can be purchased from Adobe in order to distribute PDF documents on the Web. Acrobat technology is particularly good at creating rich text documents with equations, tables, and pictures.
http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/main.html
http://www.adobe.com/Acrobat/AcrobatWWW.html (help file)
Examples of PDF documents can be found on the New York Times FAX site:
http://nytimesfax.com/index.html
or numerous other PDF sites provided on the Acrobat page:
http://www.adobe.com/Acrobat/PDFsites.html
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Open Text
The Open Text Index and search engine indexes every word of almost one million web pages. While this may seem to be overkill, the searching system is extremely powerful. In addition to Boolean AND/OR/NOT searching, it supports phrase searching, proximity searching, weighted word searches, KWIC (key word in context) searching, and allows searching parts of the page. Relevance feedback is provided. It has detailed FAQs about both the searching system and the service and some time with the searching FAQ is necessary in order to really exploit the system.
http://index.opentext.net/
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Copyright Susan Calcari, 1995. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the Scout Report provided the copyright notice and this paragraph is preserved on all copies. The InterNIC provides information about the Internet to the US research and education community under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation: NCR-9218742. The Government has certain rights in this material.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the National Science Foundation, AT&T, or Network Solutions, Inc.

Internet Scout Project