ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Internet Reviews

Sara Amato, editor

Classics and Mediter- ranean Archaeology. Access: http:/rome.classics.lsa. umich.edu/welcome.html or gopher://rome.classics.lsa. umich.edu:70+/ll/General.

The Classics and Mediter- ranean Archaeology (C&MA) server points to Internet re- sources pertaining to the study of the ancient Medi- terranean world. C&MA also serves as a well-organized, easy-to-use launching site to other loosely related archaeology resources. Sources pointed to include: e-texts, field projects, course-related materials, museum files, other gophers, and listservs.

Announced in October 1993, the server resides at the University of Michigan (UM) as a WWW site and a gopher site. The WWW site links to more sources, including files and images, than the gopher site. Sebastian Heath, a graduate student at UM, created the site and maintains it with “plenty of moral support from the faculty.” Links are updated regularly.

The Field Projects section (/Table of Contents/Field Projects) accesses preliminary archaeological project reports from UM researchers, the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and the Archaeological Fieldwork Server in Cornell which lists archaeological fieldwork opportunities. For example, the files on the Leptiminus Archaeological Project, Tunisia, which was a port town under Roman Rule, include the report text and images of the site plan, structures located on site, and some artifacts.

Why are these preliminary reports exciting? They allow a peek at information that may not appear in published form for months or years, complete with images. They can also be used in class for discussion of various sites. The Field Projects section is a valuable resource that will increase in value as other reports are included.

The C&MA server in general is an excellent resource. Professional archaeologists, classicists, students, and archaeology/classics buffs will find it informative and fun.—Ruth Vondracek, Western Oregon State College;vondrar@fsa.wosc. osshe.edu

FDIC Gopher. Access: gopher://nic.sura.net:71.

Standard practice for most, if not all, academic li- brarians involves the search for resources and guides through the Internet. This incredible, mystical, and majestical world of cyber- space is packed with elec- tronic delicacies such as journals, financial reports, and U.S. government docu- ments. Recently, the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) established Internet access to its publications. The FDIC promotes a soundly managed banking indus- try, regulates commercial and savings banks, and insures depositors.

Presently, bibliographies, statistical data, and consumer information await any infonaut. Librarians will find the bibliographies useful in compiling in-house handouts. Graduate students in accounting, economics, and finance will appreciate access to the 1991 and 1992 Statistics on Banking and The Historical Statistics on Banking, 1934–1992. The periodical Consumer News and other assorted pamphlet titles may be of some assistance in answering banking queries. The statistical and consumer news materials are available in both ASCII and WordPerfect 5.1 text formats.

This nascent host offers only a handful of publications, but the FDIC reports that, in the future, users will be able to access materials such as press releases and quarterly banking profiles. Hopefully, these and other important publications such as the Data Book will make their way into cyberspace. In any event, the FDIC is to be applauded for initiating Internet access to its publications.—row Diamond, Louisiana State University; notted@lsuvm; notted@lsuvm sncc.lsu.edu

Voice of America Gopher. Access: gopher:// gopher, voa. gov/.

For those who are not familiar with its services, the Voice of America (VOA) is the international broadcast service of the U.S. Information Agency. While VOA has been providing up-to-date news through a variety of media for more than forty years, a relatively new way of accessing this information is through the Internet. The VOA gopher, located at gopher. voa.gov:70/11/, is a remarkably well-maintained source of news and any other information having to do with the many VOA services. While this information would be of particular interest to the political scientist, or anyone interested in current international news, the “About the Voice of America” file on this gopher describes itself as covering “economics, science, medicine, technology, agriculture, and music.”

Sara Amato is systems librarian at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon; samato@willamette.edu

The directory, which is perhaps the most impressive feature, deals with the most familiar service of VOA, the News and English Broadcasts Wire Service. Much like its broadcast counterpart, this directory provides up-to-date news from bureaus all over the world, averaging 180 stories per day. What is really remarkable about this service is the claim that news stories are posted to this gopher within five minutes of the time that they are posted to the wire. The impact of this was very effectively illustrated to me when the first story I read had been posted 15 minutes earlier, and was not on the network television news until six hours later.

Stories are arranged in files that cover one day of the week, and are kept on the gopher for seven days. There are, however, repeated notices that, in keeping with U.S. law, these files are not available to users within the United States. I would be interested to know if this is in fact the case.

This gopher also includes complete schedules for many VOA services, including program and frequency schedules for radio broadcasts to fifty countries around the world, once again, updated frequently. For those who use the

Worldnet Television Services and its great variety of programs, this gopher provides schedules as well as all of the satellite downlink information necessary to receive these broadcasts.

I imagine that this source of information could be very useful to those in far off places who wish to keep up with international news. With an Internet connection you could read the news and receive schedules for a wide variety of television shows through a familiar interface, no matter where in the world you were sitting at the time. With the proper equipment, you could even receive audio versions of the news over your personal computer.

The directory on this gopher with the title “VOA Internet Audio” provides compressed digitized audio files of selected VOA broadcasts. These may be downloaded, uncompressed, and played back on your personal computer. There are warnings, however, that these files can be quite enormous, may take a great deal of time to download, and may also require significant bandwidth for transmission.

Finally, this gopher provides a list of all of the files available from the VOA and Worldnet Public Internet Server, an anonymous ftp site holding the text of many VOA and Worldnet documents. As with many other gopher servers, VOA offers connections to other servers of interest to its users. This is a very well-organized and well-maintained gopher server. Those interested in VOA services, or simply in the most up-to-date source of international news (short of reading it off the wire) should find this site quite valuable.—Doug Home, University of Guelph, Ontario; dhome@uoguelph .ca