N-1-2-020.20.1  Full-Text Online by Billy Barron*, <billy@unt.edu>


One of the goals of many librarians and computing personnel is to make
documents, books, journals, magazines, and other materials available
electronically.  Most of these people agree that this project is too
big for one site to handle by itself and think that the solution is
for many sites to work together over the Internet.

Already, a very good, but expensive, full-text journal database known
as CARL (Colorado Association of Research Libraries) Uncover is
available over the Internet.  A site pays a flat fee for connections
that allow unlimited searching.  If a user wishes to view or get a fax
of a document, he is charged for this.  The money is used to pay
royalties on the article as well as fax costs.

Project Gutenberg is a project that is making electronic versions of
public domain works available to the public.  Some examples are the
works of Lewis Carroll, Moby Dick, and the 1911 version of Roget's
Thesaurus.  Project Gutenberg works are available via anonymous FTP
(mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu) or the University of Minnesota Gopher CWIS.
Other similar projects on Shakespeare, Dante, and Poetry are underway
or completed.

Many other types of full-text documents are online.  They range from
computer manuals to research technical reports.  I am sure that we
will see more and more full-text documents accessible over the
Internet, but that is just half of the battle.

The other half lies in the software used to access the document
online.  First of all, the software has to handle documents that are
distributed all over the Internet.  A correlary feature is that if the
primary site for a document is unavailable, then a backup site can be
used transparently to the user.  The text of the document must be
searchable in some fashion.  A quick, easy, and inexpensive method of
printing documents is also desirable.

None of the software available today meets all of these goals though
incredible progress has been made over the last 18 months.  WAIS (Wide
Area Information Servers) is an excellent distributed search engine
for documents.  Gopher, though originally designed as a CWIS, is an
excellent distributed hierarchical menu-driven document delivery
system.  World Wide Web (WWW or W3) can handle distributed hyptertext
documents rather well.  The best feature is that there are ways to
link these systems together and combine their powers.

Full-text online over the Internet is in its infancy, but should be a
rapidly growing application of the network.  Save a tree, digitize a
book.


* VAX/UNIX Systems Manager, University of North Texas