The Scout Report - September 25, 1998

The Scout Report

September 25, 1998

A Publication of the Internet Scout Project
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. However, everyone is welcome to subscribe to one of the mailing lists (plain text or HTML). Subscription instructions are included at the end of each report.

An Acrobat .pdf version of this report is available for printing and distributing locally. For information on Adobe Acrobat Reader, visit the Adobe site.

New From Internet Scout

• Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics

Research and Education

• Galileo Solid State Imaging Full Data Releases--NASA/JPL
• Profiles in Science [RealPlayer, Quicktime]
• UNESCO Electronic Document Management System [.pdf]
• New York Times Learning Network
• Residential Housing Characteristics Survey 1997--EIA
• EDPubs Online Ordering System--US Department of Education
• The Flowering Plant Gateway
• Five Colleges Archives Digital Access Project
• Environmental Security Database

General Interest

• The Democracy Project Election '98--PBS [RealPlayer, Quicktime]
• Two From American Memory--LOC
• Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) Photograph Collection Database
• PBS Kids! Online [Shockwave, RealPlayer]
• Medieval English Urban History
• Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Local Jails in the United States--HRW
• St. Michael's Abbey [Java]

Network Tools

• Opera 3.5 beta 9
• The OpenLDAP Project
• Beginner's Central

Where Are They Now

• Volume 2, Number 21, September 22, 1995

Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics
Scout Report for Social Sciences
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/socsci/
Scout Report for Business & Economics
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/bus-econ/
The first issues of the second volumes Scout Reports for Social Sciences and Business & Economics are available. Each report annotates over twenty new and newly discovered Internet resources. The In the News section of the Social Sciences Report annotates seven resources on this Sunday's general election in Germany. The Business & Economics Report's In the News section annotates nine resources on Brazil and the Latin American Economy. [MD]
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Galileo Solid State Imaging Full Data Releases--NASA/JPL
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/sepo/fulldata.html
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been making images and data obtained by the Galileo Solid State Imaging (SSI) system available on an ongoing basis for some time (see, for instance, the Scout Report for September 12, 1997). However, for the first time, complete image data from the first nine orbits (G1-G9) have been merged, validated, and made available via the Planetary Data System (discussed in the Scout Report for June 3, 1994). Users can search this impressive collection by a number of parameters, including target name, spacecraft clock, latitude/longitude, filter, phase angle, exposure, gain, and compression ratio. The JPL notes that to support the various needs of the scientific community, "the archived files are raw data files which merge the multiple downlinks of data to provide the best final version of an image. Supporting data such as calibration files are also available. Such files include dark currents, radiometric calibrations, blemishes, hot pixels, etc." Additional resources at the site include complete SSI data sets from the Galileo Cruise Phase (Earth launch to Jupiter arrival, 10/89-12/95). [MD]

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Profiles in Science [RealPlayer, Quicktime]
http://www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov/
This new site from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) will focus on the major scientific achievements of this century and the people behind them by making archival collections of prominent biomedical scientists publicly available. The site will feature collections donated to the NLM which contain published and unpublished materials, including books, journal volumes, pamphlets, diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, audio tapes, and other audiovisual materials. The first scientist profiled is Oswald Avery, a pioneer in DNA research. Nobel Laureate Dr. Joshua Lederberg has selected the materials in Dr. Avery's collection, which are supplemented by an assortment of 74 resources that offer Alternate Views on Avery's research. Visitors can search for particular documents with the site's internal search engine. [MD]
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UNESCO Electronic Document Management System [.pdf]
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ulis/
UNESDOC
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ulis/ged.html
UNESBIB
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/ulis/unesbib.html
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Electronic Document Management System offers researchers these two databases. The first, the UNESDOC database, provides multilingual, full-text access to documents of major governing bodies, field mission reports, speeches of the Director-General, and the UNESCO Sources Bulletin. UNESDOC documents are presented as text or .pdf files, and are searchable by citation; however, only the text files are available for full-text string searching. The second database, UNESBIB, allows users to search an extensive bibliography of UNESCO documents and publications, as well as the UNESCO library catalog. [AO]
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New York Times Learning Network
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/
This new free service from the Times is aimed at students grades 6-12, their teachers, and parents. Updated daily Monday through Friday, the site naturally enough offers learning and teaching resources related to current events and journalism. Students can read the day's top stories aided by Knowledge Tools, which hyperlinks selected words and place names to dictionary and encyclopedia definitions. For a more interactive experience, the site offers a news quiz and a chance to communicate with the paper's staff. Teachers will find daily lesson plans, written in partnership with the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, which reference a selected article in the Times. Both plans and articles can be printed from the site or received via email. The Parents' section is not as well developed as the other two, offering product reviews and online discussions (free registration required). Additional resources at the site include a collection of related links. [MD]
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Residential Housing Characteristics Survey 1997--EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs97/recs.html
Data Table Home Page
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs97_hc/97tblhp.html
Specific information such as how many homes have PCs, modems and FAX machines or how home appliance usage has changed over time (1978-1997) can now be obtained in this recently-released Residential Housing Characteristics Survey by the US Energy Information Administration. Nearly two decades of Regional Energy Consumption Surveys (RECS) on US households and their energy is contained on site in addition to supplementary maps, a glossary of terms, and documentation of EIA survey methods and data quality. To further facilitate research, the EIA provides a Data Table Home Page where users may choose variables and access data tables directly on site. [MW]
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EDPubs Online Ordering System--US Department of Education
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html
The US Department of Education recently launched this site to offer one-stop, public access to free copies of publications, posters, videos, CD-ROMS, and a comprehensive array of other Department of Education products. Users can browse by topic or conduct either a keyword or advanced search to locate items of interest, which can be ordered at the site. There is currently a one item per order limit. A number of resources are available in Spanish, as well as alternate formats such as Braille, large print, disks, and captioned videotapes. [JR]
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The Flowering Plant Gateway
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/newgate/gateopen.htm
Biological classification systems provide a structural framework through which scientists explore patterns of affinity and phyletic relationships. In an attempt to anchor the "growing mass of Internet data" on flowering plant families to stable taxonomic structures, Texas A&M University Bioinformatics Working Group has created this excellent resource, offering detailed information within the construct of several well-known plant classification systems. Currently-listed classification systems include Cronquist, Takhtajan, and Thorne. An additional section, Select Family, allows users to browse an alphabetical list of family names (with links to either the Cronquist or Thorne classification systems) or, for non-flowering vascular plants, to access Internet data directly for each family. Internet information for each family varies but covers a wide variety of topics--for example, several full family descriptions, comparative systematics, illustrated examples of families, and genetic sequence data. [LXP]
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Five Colleges Archives Digital Access Project
http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/
With this digital access program, the Five College consortium of western Massachusetts--Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, and University of Massachusetts--seeks to increase "access to digitized versions of archival records and manuscript collections relating primarily to women's history--particularly women's education at the Five Colleges." From the homepage, visitors can either go directly to the collections at each college or use the search engine to look for materials by keyword. Though the colleges are in various stages of digitizing their collections (Mt. Holyoke is almost finished; Hampshire and U Mass do not yet have any documents online), the project plans to have 24,000 unabridged items, including some graphical materials and motion picture footage, online by the end of next year. The site will be a boon, particularly when completed, for anyone researching the history of American women's education. [TK]
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Environmental Security Database
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/pcs/database/libintro.htm
Maintained by the Peace & Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, this database has potential as a powerful research tool for those studying the relationships between environmental stress and violent conflict in developing countries. The database contains information on (but not the text of) over 20,000 items, including books, journal articles, papers, and newspaper clippings. Users may conduct searches using keywords, names, titles, or a special coding system developed to permit "complex Boolean searches of the Database to produce subsets of items relating to specific issues." Typical search returns include author, title, publisher, date, and comments which vary in length. The authors stress that most items in the database can be found through local research libraries; however, they do offer limited assistance in locating and reproducing some materials. [MD]
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The Democracy Project Election '98--PBS [RealPlayer, Quicktime]
http://www.pbs.org/election98/
Like it or not, the election season is nigh. PBS has unveiled a site to help users stay informed and cut through the sound bites and commercials. Courtesy of Project Vote Smart (discussed in the Scout Report for August 11, 1995), the site features a searchable, comprehensive database containing voting records, campaign issue positions, performance evaluations by special interest groups, campaign contributions, backgrounds, previous experience, and contact information for over 13,000 candidates and elected officials. Another feature of the site is PBS's own Ad Watch, which, over the course of the campaign, will highlight television advertisements that distort the truth. Users will also be able to view RealPlayer and Quicktime clips of the ads and read expert analysis. Additional resources include in-depth political coverage and news updates from Online Newshour and lesson plans for teachers. [MD]
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Two From American Memory--LOC
African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/aohome.html
A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: US Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1873 (Second Release)
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html
The US Library of Congress's American Memory project has premiered a new collection and substantially updated a second. The first is an online exhibit showcasing the Library's extensive African-American collections. It traces the African-American experience through nine chronological periods that document the long and difficult path from slavery to Reconstruction to the fight for civil and social equality in the twentieth century. This virtual exhibit is similar to a physical one in that the emphasis is on the historical materials rather than explanatory text. Users will find images of a wide range of rare books, manuscripts, government documents, sheet music, movie posters, and photographs. The second site, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation (discussed in the Scout Report for March 20, 1998), has been increased from 4,400 image pages to over 23,000, chronicling the history of the early American lawmaking bodies from 1774-1793. New additions include the Journals of the Continental Congress, Elliot's Debates, and Farrand's Records, bringing the current number of titles to eight. As before, all are available both as digital facsimile images and as searchable texts. The only exception is The Annals of Congress (1789-1793), which is available as digital facsimile images accompanied by searchable indexes and page headings. [MD]
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Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) Photograph Collection Database
http://www.mnhs.org/collections/photo/bsearch.html
The Minnesota Historical Society's new Photograph Collection Database provides information that previously could only be obtained by travelling to MHS and consulting a card file. Yet the site simultaneously illustrates that although the number of historical images on the Web is growing steadily, these images are certainly not all online. The Photograph Collection database contains records for 44,000 individual photographs, approximately ten percent accompanied by digital images. This is less than one-fifth of the quarter of a million photographs owned by MHS. The strength of the database is its coverage of Minnesotans' lives, landscapes, leisure activities, and occupations from 1850 to the present. Try searching for "frontier and pioneer life" or "farming" to see some greatest hits from the MHS photograph collection. [DS]
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PBS Kids! Online [Shockwave, RealPlayer]
http://www.pbs.org/kids/
PBS has re-launched this kids Website with all new features and content including a Pre-school activities section; Fun & Games, where kids can demonstrate their knowledge; an opportunity to communicate with select PBS figures in Babble On; and TV Sites, a place to get the latest scoop on favorite PBS TV shows. Visitors can select their favorite PBS characters as well from among Kratts' Creatures, Mister Rogers, Teletubbies, Theodore Tugboat, Barney, and others. [JR]
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Medieval English Urban History
http://www.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/towns.html
A labor of love for its author, Stephen Alsford (Special Projects Officer at the Canadian Museum of Civilization), this site promises to be a reliable source for well written and researched articles on Medieval English Urban History. Currently, the site contains concise capsule histories of six English towns: Norwich, King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Ipswich, Colchester, and Maldon. Each history covers key topics such as Origins and early growth, Development of local government, Buildings and fortifications, and Economy. Alsford has also generously placed the full text of his Master of Philosophy thesis on the site, an engaging study of office-holding in six East Anglian boroughs between 1272-1460. Additional resources at the site include a glossary and a large collection of related links. Alsford plans to add maps, photos, illustrations, and additional capsule histories in the future. [MD]
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Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Local Jails in the United States--HRW
http://www.hrw.org/reports98/us-immig/
This new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) highlights the plight of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detainees. HRW charges that, faced with overcrowding in its own detention facilities, the INS has placed over 60 percent of its 15,000 detainees in local jails, "where they are subjected to punitive treatment and may be mixed with criminal inmates," despite the fact that they are not serving criminal sentences and that some are actually political asylum seekers. The 84-page report reflects research conducted over an eighteen-month period, including visits to jails in seven states and interviews with more than 200 INS detainees. [MD]
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St. Michael's Abbey [Java]
http://www.farnboroughabbey.org/
Between 1883 and 1888, exiled Empress Eugenie, widow of Napoleon III, commissioned the construction of an abbey and a mausoleum in Farnborough, a town on the Hampshire-Surrey border in south central England, to inter and memorialize her husband and her deceased son, Prince Imperial Louis. Today, the Benedictine monks of St. Michael's Abbey, in the monastic tradition of contemplative scholarship and liturgical celebration, honor the beauty and the glory of their "basilique imperiale" by sharing its art, architecture, and history with the world via the Web. Their impressively designed site provides historical narratives about the abbey and its famous crypt, accompanied by arrays of high-quality thumbnails; an inside look on monastic life at St. Michael's; and an extensive virtual reality tour of the church. Together, these elements effectively recreate the atmosphere of life within the abbey as well as evoke its rich history. Note: users must use a Java-enabled Web browser version 4.0 or higher to appreciate the technology used at this site. [AO]
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Opera 3.5 beta 9
http://opera.nta.no/download.html
As strange as it may sound, there are other Web browsers besides IE and Netscape; one of them is Opera. The most recent release of Opera 3.5 beta 9, created by Opera Software, is a nice example of a competitive product produced by a small company. The Opera browser is a full-featured Web browser that is far smaller and faster than IE or Netscape. It has numerous interesting features that allow users to speed up browsing, watch the progress of a page loading, customize numerous options, and perform other useful tasks. Physically and visually impaired users will appreciate the ability to navigate solely with the keyboard and to display a page at varying degrees of magnification. Some may find the user interface disconcerting at first, but the speed and great features of Opera make it a very good choice for a Web browser. Opera 3.5 beta 9 may be used freely for 30 days, after which time a $35 registration fee is required (there is a 50 percent discount for students and educational institutions). [CL]
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The OpenLDAP Project
http://www.openldap.org/
This site, provided by the nonprofit OpenLDAP Foundation and its corporate sponsor, Net Boolean, Inc., hosts information and source code for OpenLDAP, an "open source" implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). The OpenLDAP project aims to provide a commercial-grade, full-featured suite of LDAP applications and development tools using the open source model. That is, the project relies on volunteers to provide code and documentation. The site contains the downloadable source code for version 1.0.1 of OpenLDAP, which is based on code from the University of Michigan and runs on a number of Unix platforms; information on how to participate in the project; links to general LDAP information; and instructions on how to subscribe to various mailing lists about the project. [MR]
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Beginner's Central
http://northernwebs.com/bc/
Created by Northern Webs, a Web design studio in Idaho, this online tutorial is aimed at the Internet newbie. Divided into several chapters, the tutorial guides users through the basic concepts and practical details of using the Internet. Topics include file downloading, email and news reader configuration and operation (on the two major browsers), FTP and Telnet basics, and Internet myths. A summary and brief quiz conclude each chapter. Although the tutorial would perhaps be easier read in a different font, on the whole, beginning users should certainly benefit from a visit. [MD]
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Volume 2, Number 21, September 22, 1995
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/archive/.html
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
http://www.nber.org/
A gopher site when initially reviewed, the Website of the nation's most prestigious nonprofit economic research organization has continued to evolve and add new resources. Perhaps the most useful portion of the site is the NBER Publications collection, which includes recent working papers, the NBER Digest and Reporter, and chapters from books in progress. The site also offers an online data collection and Business Cycle dates. Additional resources include a New This Week section and an internal search engine. [MD]
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Susan Calcari Michael de Nie Travis Koplow Aimee D. Glassel Todd Hanson Sheilah Harrington Kathryn Harris Christopher Lukas Andy Osmond Laura X. Payne Jeannine Ramsey Mike Roszkowski Debra Shapiro Geraldine Wanserski Megan Waters Amy Tracy Wells

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