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.
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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unpublished materials, including books, journal volumes, pamphlets, diaries,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]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
Residential Housing Characteristics Survey
1997--EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/recs97/contents.html
Data
Table Home Page
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/recs/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]
[Back
to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
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
gene! tic sequence data. [LXP]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
Environmental Security Database
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/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]
[Back to Contents]
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 Americ! an 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]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to
Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to Contents]
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 versi! on 4.0
or higher to appreciate the technology used at this site. [AO]
[Back to Contents]
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]
[Back to
Contents]
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]
[Back
to Contents]
The single phrase below is the copyright notice to be used when reproducing any portion of this report, in any format.
From the Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project
1994-1998.
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
The paragraph below is the copyright notice to be used when reproducing the entire report, in any format.
Copyright Susan Calcari and the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, 1994-1998. The Internet Scout Project (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/), located in the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides information about the Internet to the U.S. research and education community under a grant from the National Science Foundation, number NCR-9712163. The Government has certain rights in this material. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the entire Scout Report provided this paragraph, including the copyright notice, is preserved on all copies.
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, or the National Science Foundation.
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