The Online World Part 22

INDEX SIGLISTS

InterNIC Information Service maintains an announcement-only service at [email protected] called net-happenings. It distributes announcements about tools, conferences, calls for papers, news items, new mailing lists, electronic newsletters like EDUPAGE, and more. To subscribe, send a message to the LISTSERV containing this command:

subscribe net-happenings Your Name

InterNIC's automated mail service is at [email protected]

It allows access to doc.u.ments and files via email. To use it, send email to the Mailserv with the word "HELP" in the subject field of your mail.

How to get more out of your magazine subscriptions -------------------------------------------------- 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 t.i.tle is printed on the cover.

Luckily, there are shortcuts. Logon to PC MagNet on CompuServe.

Type GO PCMAG to get the following menu:

PC MagNet

1 Download a PC Magazine Utility 2 PC Magazine Utilities/Tips Forum 3 PC Magazine Editorial Forum 4 PC Magazine Programming Forum 5 PC Magazine After Hours Forum 6 PC Magazine Product Reviews Index 7 Free! - Take a Survey 8 Submissions to PC Magazine 9 Letters to the Editor 10 Subscribe to PC Magazine

Choice six lets you search for stories. Once you have a list with page/issue references, turning the pages gets much easier.

PC Magazine is owned by the media giant Ziff-Davis. PC MagNet is a part of ZiffNet on CompuServe. So is Computer Database Plus, which lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200 popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987. The 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 the database, CDP, you pay an extra US$24.00 per hour. In addition, you pay US$1.00 per abstract and US$1.50 per full-text article (1992). These fees are added to your normal CompuServe access rates.

ZiffNet also offers Magazine Database Plus, a database with stories from over 90 magazines 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 and U.S. News & World Report.

In the next chapter, we will present another ZiffNet magazine database: the Business Database Plus.

Magazine Index (MI), from Information Access Company (U.S.A.), is another source worth looking at. It 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 t.i.tles 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, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, Nexis, and others.

Say you so often get references to a given magazine that you want a paper subscription. Try the Electronic Newsstand, which is available by gopher or telnet to gopher.netsys.com. If these Internet commands are unavailable, try mail to [email protected]

Finding that book ----------------- Over 270 libraries around the world are accessible by the Internet telnet command. Some of them can also be accessed by Internet mail.

This is the case with BIBSYS, a database operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries.

I am into transcendental meditation. I'm therefore constantly looking for books on narrow topics like "mantra". To search BIBSYS for t.i.tles of interest, I sent mail to [email protected] .

The search word was entered in the subject t.i.tle of the message. By return email, I got the following report:

Date: Fri, 21 Jul 93 13:54:18 NOR From: [email protected] Subject: Searching BIBSYS

Search request : MANTRA Database-id : BIBSYS Search result : 5 hits.

The following is one of the references. I have forwarded it to my local library for processing:

Forfatter : Gonda, J.

t.i.ttel : Mantra interpretation in the Satapatha-Brahmana / by J. Gonda.

Trykt : Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1988.

Sidetall : X, 285 s.

I serie : (Orientalia Rheno-traiectina ; 32) ISBN : 90-04-08776-1 1 - UHF 90ka03324 - UHF/INDO Rh III b Gon

The Danish library database REX may be accessed through most international packet switching networks. Its Network User Address (NUA) is 23824125080000. When connected, enter RC8000 and press return. Press ESC once. The system will respond with ATT. Enter KB REX, and you're ready to search Dansk Bogfortegnelse since 1980, Dansk Musikfortegnelse since 1980, and ISDS Denmark.

BARTON is the library system of Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology. Its database contains everything received since 1974 except magazine articles, brochures, and technical reports from sources outside M.I.T. Phone: +1-617-258-6700 (1200 bps). Press ENTER a couple of times to access the system.

On CompuServe, there is a section for book collectors in the Coin/Stamp/Collectibles Forum, and a Weekly Book Chat section in the ScienceFiction & Fantasy Forum. In the Electronic Mall, you can buy books directly from Ballantine Books, Penguin Books, Small Computer Book Club, The McGraw-Hill Book Company, Time-Life Books and Walden Computer Books.

On the Internet, Roswell Computer Books Ltd. (Canada) has an online bookstore with a database of over 7,000 t.i.tles (1993).

Gopher to nstn.ns.ca, select "Other Gophers in Nova Scotia", and then "Roswell Electronic Computer Bookstore". Failing access to gopher, send your email requests to [email protected] .

The Book Review Digest (GO BOOKREVIEW) is CompuServe's database of bibliographical references and abstracts of reviews (since 1983). You can search by t.i.tle, author, and keywords found in the text of book reviews. CompuServe also offers book reviews through Magazine Database Plus.

"Books in print" is a North American bibliographic reference database. It is available on BRS and CompuServe.

South African Bibliographic and Information Network has a gopher service at info2.sabinet.co.za.

FidoNet has COMICS (The Comic Book Echo), BITNET the list Rare Book and Special Collections Catalogers ([email protected]). NewsNet has the COMPUTER BOOK REVIEW newsletter and on The Well you'll find the "Computer Books" conference. OCLC's WorldCat is a reference database covering books and materials in libraries worldwide.

Bookworms may appreciate the BITNET discussion list DOROTHYL ([email protected]), and especially if they like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers.

On Usenet, you will find alt.books.reviews, k12.library, alt.books.technical, rec.arts.books, and misc. books.technical, and more.

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 now online (1992).

An up-to-date directory of libraries that are interactively accessible through Internet can be had by anonymous ftp from ftp.unt.edu (then: cd library). File name: LIBRARIES.TXT. Check out the end of Chapter 12 for how to get the file by email (ftpmail).

You will also find full electronic versions of books. This book is one example. Many texts are courtesy of Project Gutenberg, an organization whose goal is to develop a library of 10,000 public domain electronic texts by the year 2000.

Since books are often quite large, they are somewhat bulky for email transfer. If you have direct Internet access, use anonymous ftp instead.

Many books are available through the /pub/almanac/etext directory at oes.orst.edu. For more about how to use the Almanac information server, send [email protected] the following email command:

send guide

For a list of books, add the line

send gutenberg catalog

Among the offerings, you'll find The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, The Unabridged Works of Shakespeare, Aesop's Fables, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, The Holy Koran, The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Peter Pan, Roget's Thesaurus (1911), and The World Fact Book (1990 - CIA).

If quite impossible to locate a given book, try the Rare Books and Special Collections Forum at [email protected]

Non-Chinese speaking people will probably cla.s.sify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many of them are impossible to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters, and you know their meaning.

Still interested? If yes, subscribe to [email protected] .

Be prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.

Chapter 11: Getting an edge over your compet.i.tor ================================================

We must be willing to risk change to keep apace with rapid change.

The key is moderation and balance, supported by sufficient information to allow meaningful feedback.

It requires adaption by management and staff in developing the necessary skills and vision.

This chapter starts with how to use the networks to manage projects. Next, it treats how to monitor compet.i.tors, prospects, suppliers, markets, technologies, and trends. It winds down with marketing and sales by modem.

Project coordination -------------------- So far we have mainly been looking at sources of information. Let us start this chapter with some words about 'online conference rooms' for project coordination.

Several services offer rental of private conference areas to businesses. Corporations have discovered them to be an efficient way of coordinating a group of people, who are far apart from each other geographically. They are also useful when team members are constantly on the move and hard to gather face to face.

Many international companies use such services regularly. The applications are different. They range from tight coordination with suppliers and subcontractors, to development of company strategies and new organizational structures.

Renting an online conference room has advantages over doing it in-house. The company does not have to buy software, hardware, expensive equipment for communications, and hire people for to run and maintain a conferencing system. The more international the business, the better.

For ideas about how to set up and operate a coordination conference. Study how volunteer organizations do it. One place to check out is KIDPLAN, one of several coordination conferences used by KIDLINK (see Chapter 2 and 5).

KIDPLAN is usually most active during April and May each year.

This is when their annual projects are being closed down, and new projects are started. Read the dialog between coordinators to get an idea of how the medium is being used.

Old conference messages are stored in notebook files. You can therefore have the full coordination dialogs sent you by email.

Send all requests for notebook files to

[email protected]