The Scout Report - February 9, 1996

February 9, 1996

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://rs.internic.net/scout/report

Send comments and contributions to: scout@cs.wisc.edu

Berkeley Digital Library
University of California-Berkeley and Sun Microsystems have released the Berkeley Digital Library, with the goal of providing information and support for those building digital libraries, museums, and archives. The Digital Library has connections to over 30 digital text and image collections, hundreds of library catalogs, location aids for selected archival collections, and tools for clients and servers such as Adobe Acrobat, Quicktime VR, the Scout Toolkit, DynaWeb, Harvest, and WebZ, among others. Network information resources are included on topics such as copyright and intellectual property, current awareness, imaging, and preservation. Also provided are pointers to research and development projects in digital library technology. SunSITE expects the digital library to grow to over a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of data in the next few years.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/
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From Revolution to Reconstruction
"From Revolution to Reconstruction, and What Happened Afterwards" is an ongoing hypertext history of the United States. The backbone of the document is a U.S. Information Agency document called "An Outline of American History." The site is divided into eight chapters covering the colonial period to the Bush administration. Hypertext links are made to literally hundreds of full text documents including Presidents' addresses, the Federalist Papers, the Confessions of Nat Turner, the Mayflower Compact, the Northwest Ordinance, and excerpts from F.L. Olmsted's "A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States." The power of this site is not in its collection of documents, but in how they are accessed via hypertext and appear in context of the history presented. At present the content predominantly covers early American history, however the site is a work in progress.
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/
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Women's Studies Librarian
The University of Wisconsin System Women's Studies Librarian offers a web page that provides exhaustive lists of bibliographies of monographs and scholarly articles in women's studies. The site also offers core lists of women's studies books in print on subjects from aging to women of color, compiled by the Association of College and Research Libraries Women's Studies Section. These core lists are intended to aid librarians in building women's collections, as well as guide teaching faculty in selecting course materials. Publishers and prices are provided. The page also points to selected women's Internet subject resources, e-zines and newsletters, and syllabi and course materials.
http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/
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Physiology Online
Physiology Online, the electronic information service of the Physiological Society, provides information about its three journals: Journal of Physiology, Proceedings of the Physiological Society, and Experimental Physiology. Also included are selected abstracts, as well as information about recent monographs, job listings (mostly in the U.K.), information about Society grants, a physiology file and software archive for both PC and Mac platforms, pointers to other physiology resources on the Internet, and a listing of upcoming meetings and conferences within the field.
http://physiology.cup.cam.ac.uk/
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Cable in the Classroom
Cable in the Classroom is an "initiative by Canada's cable companies and programming services to provide copyright cleared, commercial free, educationally relevant television programming for Canadian schools." Included are a list of hyperlinked program service providers, a searchable and browsable list of classroom TV programs all over Canada, and a large list of Internet resources including schools on the Internet, resources for teachers, and information on getting your school on the Internet.
http://www.cableducation.ca/cic/home.html
The French version is available at:
http://www.cableducation.ca/cic/french/home.html
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Beethoven Discussion List
The LUDWIG moderated discussion list is devoted to all aspects pertaining to the life and musical compositions of the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
To subscribe, send email to:listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu
in the body of the message type:
SUBSCRIBE LUDWIG yourfirstname yourlastname
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Telecommunications Act of 1996
The telecomm bill has passed and been signed into law. Full text of the Telecommunications Law is available via the Internet. The bill is available in sections (HTML):
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c104:S.652.ENR:

or in its entirety (text):
ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c104/s652.enr.txt
or FTP to: ftp.loc.gov and change directories to pub/thomas/c104.
get s652.enr.txt
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ACLU Online
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom Network is available on the web. It contains sections on issues including church and state, criminal justice, cyber-liberties, the death penalty, free speech, racial equality, voting rights, and women's rights, among others. Each of these sections contains a summary of the ACLU's position on the issue, an index of ACLU documents related to the issue, and a collection of recent ACLU news releases about the issue. In addition, there are sections about congressional legislation with background overviews and voting records based on whether the vote was for or against the ACLU position, as well as summaries of recent court cases. There are also summaries of the 75 "greatest hits", ACLU victories in Supreme Court cases, going back to the 1920's. Contact information is included for state ACLU offices. The entire site is searchable. One of the highlights of the site is its inclusion of full text of the ACLU v. Reno complaint, regarding the "'indecency'" provisions of the telecommunications legislation" just passed and signed into law by the President.
http://www.aclu.org/
Text only menu: http://www.aclu.org/textpg.html
Full text of ACLU v. Reno complaint: http://www.aclu.org/court/cdacom.html
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Canadian Government Online
The Canadian Government Online web site provides information of all kinds about Canada and its institutions. A government overview offers information about "key institutions" such as parliament, the ministry and Prime Minister, the Supreme Court, and Auditor General. Also included is information about Canadian symbols such as the name Canada and the flags, and maps, and fact sheets. However, the real power of the site (much like the White House site in the U.S.) is its exhaustive links to Canadian Federal Institutions, arranged alphabetically, from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, to Yukon Water Board. Over one hundred connections are provided, including the Canadian War Museum, Canadian Wheat Board, Elections Canada, National Film Board, and National Archives. Under the "other governments" menu, there are pointers to all provincial and territorial pages, as well as an intergovernmental online information kiosk, with pointers to federal, provincial, and municipal pages. This is a very thorough, as well as beautifully designed gateway to Canadian information. The site is completely searchable. Both English and French sites are accessible from the home page.
http://canada.gc.ca/
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Consumer Information Catalog
The General Services Administration (GSA) offers its Consumer Information Center via the web. The 1996 Consumer Information Catalog (advertised as being available in hardcopy from an address in Pueblo, Colorado) is available for downloading, as well as full text consumer information publications on cars, children, employment, federal programs, food and nutrition, health, housing, small business, money, and travel and hobbies. Also offered are more than 15 10 second CIC TV spots (in AVI format) and a selection of CIC print adds (in GIF format).
http://www.gsa.gov/staff/pa/cic/
Text only: http://www.gsa.gov/staff/pa/cic/textonly.htm
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State Taxation Information
Information on state taxation for each state is available. Addresses and phone numbers are provided for each state's revenue department. Pointers to the revenue department or general state home page are provided. For some states, downloadable tax forms are available.
http://www.sm-b.com/nn/statinfo.htm
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Securities and Exchange Commission
The Securities and Exchange Commission has a very informative web site that is highlighted by the entire EDGAR database. This database contains the electronic filings that corporations are required by law to make with the SEC. The filings include company annual reports and prespectuses, among other reports, and are an excellent source of company information for researchers, investors, and the general public. According to SEC, "currently, nearly three-quarters of the publicly traded domestic companies use EDGAR to make the majority of their filings. Once all registrants become subject to electronic filing requirements (May 1996) most documents filed with the Commission will be available on EDGAR." Form definitions are given, as well as searching information and online help. Complete company, form, and master indexes are available. In addition to the EDGAR database, the SEC site provides news digests, congressional testimony, selected recent special studies, and the 1994 Annual Report of the Commission. Also available are currrent SEC proposals and enforcement actions, as well as pointers to other related sites.
http://www.sec.gov/
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24 Hours in Cyberspace--Two Versions
24 Hours in Cyberspace, by Rick Smolan (author of "A Day in the Life of America"), and a large team of authors and photographers, is available for viewing. It is a collection of photographs and related stories about how "online technology is changing people's lives." The technical magic of how the site was done is thoroughly explained. Themes in this richly graphical online book include "a better place", "faster, cheaper, better," "digital leapfrogging," and "cyberfrontiers", among others. Interestingly, Smolan's collaborative effort is not the first time this has been done. On October 10, 1995, the MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab, as part of its 10th anniversary, also put up a site called "A Day in the Life of Cyberspace." It was dedicated to "considering the impact of the digital revolution, and to describing in words, sounds and pictures, the ways digital media are affecting all of us as we work, play, learn, and live our lives."
Smolan team: http://www.cyber24.com/htm3/index2.html
MIT Media Lab: http://www.1010.org/
[Note: When last checked by the Internet Scout team, this site URL was no longer available.]
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Netscape Navigator 2.0, Navigator Gold Beta
After 6 beta versions, Netscape 2.0 is available for downloading. The new version incorporates integtrated applications such as e-mail and Usenet news reading, as well as a "frames" feature that allows the screen to be split into multiple parts, for ease of scrolling. Also supported are a series of plug-ins that enhance developers' abilities to deliver (and users' ability to receive) multi-media content. 2.0 also supports the Java programming language, which delivers executable program content to a Web page. Netscape 2.0 is available for Unix, Windows, and Macintosh platforms. Java is available for Unix and Windows 95/NT platforms. Plug-in platform availability varies by plug-in. Also available for downloading is the first Beta version of Netscape Navigator Gold 2.0, which has browsing and HTML editing capabilities. Gold, at present is available for Windows 95 and NT platforms.
http://www.netscape.com/navigator/index.html
For further information on Netscape, and comparisons with other Web Browsers try the Scout Toolkit Browser page.
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/webtools/browsers.html
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Mobile and Wireless Computing
Mobile and Wireless Computing is a large list of annotated pointers to Internet resources in wireless networked computing. Included are journal calls for papers, conferences, projects, on-line newsletters, wireless providers, and administrative organizations, among others. This is the World Wide Web Virtual Library for mobile and wireless computing and is one of the best places to start on this topic. As computers become more portable, wirless networking will become a more important factor.
http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/mobile/
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Copyright Susan Calcari, 1996. 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.

The Scout Report - February 9, 1996

February 9, 1996

Research and Education

General Interest

Network Tools

Scout Report and Scout Report HTML Subscription Instructions