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Gutenberg Project ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext94 http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/pg_home.html
For those who do not have the capability or the time to retrieve electronic texts from the Internet, many are available at a nominal price from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a project of The Samizdat Express. For further information, send email to samizdat@samizdat.com
The White House server itself is quite good. It allows you to leave an entry in the "guestbook" to register your opinion of this new service, and also allows you to write your comments on any issue of concern to you for the consumption of White House staffers. On the lighter side, you can take a guided tour of the White House, or view Al Gore's favorite political cartoons. This site is well worth exploring. It can open the Federal government right in your classroom, making it appear immediate and accessible, rather than remote and bureaucratic. If done right, this approach could encourage many more people to take a more active interest in government and in solving the nagging social and economic problems that government tries to deal with.
Even queries to the help desk at tiac and to Web-related newsgroups had gotten me nowhere. Hence my sense of accomplishment that I was able to figure it out.
What does this mean? I can -- at no additional cost -- publish my articles,my lists of disks, my kids' pictures, anything I choose to a global audience.
All I do is create documents using word processor software, add some extra markup codes (hypertext markup language), and file the documents in the right directory on my PC. Then so long as my system is turned on, I am connected to my Internet provider, and I am running the server software, anyone with a browser on the Web can see my pages.
It was in a newsgroup that I found the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document) which pointed me to the right file at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). I quickly downloaded it, unzipped it, and followed instructions. I still haven't messed with the configuration or done anything fancy. It's all on default. It was incredibly easy. It took less than half an hour after I found the file.
I immediately phoned my son at Yale. He opened my URL, and the pages came up quickly.
(The newsgroup where I found the FAQ is comp.infosystems.www.misc. You can retrieve the FAQ from http://sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/faq/www_faq.html For NCSA's Windows Web server program, httpd for Windows, retrieve the file whp11ay.zip from the ftp site ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the /Web/ncsa_httpd/contrib directory).
I haven't had a chance to check how many simultaneous users it can handle.
(I gather from the instructions that when busy it can run out of room in the Windows message queue.)
This experiment tells me:
1) It is very easy for an individual or a school to set up Web pages for the fun of it and let the world see them (the only cost is the SLIP account -- which in my case if $29 for 40 hours per month, or $49 for 300 hours per month).
2) You could even run a cottage business this way (like many bulletin boards are run today), announcing to your audience the hours that the machine will be available.
3) Anyone can become a player in this game -- instantly. It takes no capital investment (assuming you already have a PC), and you don't have to put your info on someone else's commercial Web server, unless you really need commercial grade service. You can do it all yourself. And if you already have a SLIP account there is zero incremental cost.
4) You could use such a primitive setup to experiment and figure out what your school or library might want to do on the Web in the future. You could build a school club around this. You could also post agendas and minutes for community organizations, publish greeting-card messages to friends and family, publish articles and stories, give a local business some minimal Internet visibility, or even start your own business.
I have big plans for this little machine of mine. For the benefit of the curious, I'll leave the system on for a few hours each evening -- 6 PM to 9 PM Eastern Time, in the US. If you'd like to check it out, try http://199.3.129.189/index.htm [NB -- This is no longer active. I now use freeWeb space provided with my SLIP account by my Internet access provider, TIAC. That's what you are looking at now.]
There's nothing of any significance there yet. I'm just getting started.
But it doesn't take long to author html pages -- just adding markup to existing documents. I'll probably have back issues of the newsletter (maybe with hypertext links to the sites referenced), and our disk catalog broken up by subject. Please send me your suggestions. And also please let me know if you can and will mirror these pages on your own server so more people can get to the information more easily.
This is a scholar's dream, right?
Maybe.
Unfortunately, Internet addresses change; files get moved to other directories or other machines or are simply deleted. Just because I saw it today doesn't mean I'll be able to find it tomorrow. The on-line source you "cite" with a hypertext link may not exist when someone goes to check it out.
Can substantial scholarship be built on such shifting ground? Is there any way to make this massive flux of information more tangible and structured -- more amenable to cataloging, so its benefits can be more accessible and lasting?
On the one hand, the Internet looks like an enormous library. On the other hand, it's a librarian's nightmare.
That's one of the problems we are trying to deal with through our PLEASE COPY THIS DISK project. We want to capture the best electronic texts from the Internet and put them into a tangible form that is organized and easy for everyone to use -- even people who don't yet have Internet access.
Now that we have over 300 disks (the equivalent of about 700 electronic books), it's time to take the next step -- to catalog this material so it can be readily handled in a traditional library environment. Then students and scholars will be able to find what they want when they need it, and get to it again later, independent of the vagaries of Internet files.
We are looking for a library that would like to be a repository for our rapidly growing collection. We would provide such a library with a complete current set (a value of over $3000), and would send new disks as they are created.
We now add over two dozen disks per month). In exchange, we would like that library to promptly catalog the collection and make that cataloging information available to the world-wide library community.
A typical disk contains one to three related books, and the README documents provide details about the origin of the material -- usually the Internet site from which it was obtained. We would like the catalog entries to cross-reference those sites. Hence by cataloging our disks, you would also be cataloging the best public domain and freely available etexts on the Internet (U.S. Government, UN, and NATO information as well as classic works of literature).
If you are interested in this project, please contact us as soon as possible at samizdat@samizdat.com.
The main barrier appears to be that everyone is short of time. Despite good intentions, most people just don't get around to making lesson plans and study guides for the use of this new kind of material. Even if they have the creativity, they simply don't have the energy to work out how to take full advantage of this new kind of resource.
We would like to gather and redistribute study guides, lesson plans and other such classroom aids related to educational use of electronic texts -- to encourage teachers to develop such aids, and to share them with others who could benefit. .
We will send ten free disks of etexts (your choice from the PLEASE COPY THIS DISK collection) to any teacher who sends us a study guide/lesson plan of this kind -- whether it deals with etexts in general or with specific works or classes of works found in our collection. It need not be long (a few good pages should suffice). But it should be practical and useful.
Please send your submissions by email to samizdat@samizdat.com . And please include a note attesting that it is your work and that you wish to make it generally available, in the public domain. We will then do what we can to spread your work to other teachers -- using this newsletter and our new Web server and also including it on selected disks.
Published by Samizdat Express, 213 Deerfield Lane, Orange, CT 06477. (203) 553-9925. seltzer@samizdat.com
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