From PCRISPE1@UA1VM.UA.EDUWed Dec 6 00:26:04 1995
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 95 21:42:43 CST
From: Patrick Douglas Crispen
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM, Bob Rankin
Subject: TOURBUS - DECEMBER 5 -- IPL
TOURBUS - DECEMBER 5, 1995
TODAY'S STOP: THE INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY
TODAY'S ADDRESS: http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/
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\___/ \___/ "Why Surf When U Can Ride The Bus?" \___/
Hi, kids ... this is Patrick (Bob and I swapped days again).
If you are a Roadmap workshop alum, you will no doubt remember
my bemoaning the fact that I absolutely HATE my e-mail program.
Well, my e-mail program is now more squirrely than ever, and
somehow or another last Thursday's TOURBUS (along with a whole
bunch of my other outgoing e-mail) experienced a rather
fiery death and was dispatched to the deepest depths of
IP Packet hell. In other words, it disappeared :(
Since Bob and I have swapped days (I'm going to post on Tuesdays
from now on, so you'll now get your Southern Word at the BEGINNING
of the week), and since I am one of the laziest people in LA
(Lower Alabama), I figure we should chalk up Thursday's mysterious
TOURBUS disappearance to some REALLY hungry squirrels and move on
(in other words, we're just going to pretend that Thursday,
November 30, was a TOURBUS holiday and there was no TOURBUS
post that day).
With that out of the way, let's pay some bills ...
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One of the true joys of playing all day on the Internet at work
(besides the fact that you get paid while you play) is that from
time to time you stumble across a really neat Internet site
by accident. That is how I found today's TOURBUS site.
The Internet Public Library is at
http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/
and is well worth your time (by the way, a quick word of warning to
the librarians on the Bus: please notice that the address is
"sils" (as in window "sills") and NOT "slis").
The Internet Library (IPL) is still in the larval stage but,
to use the words that my parents heard all too often from my
teachers, it "has great potential." The IPL was created by
the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library
Studies (SILS) so that its graduate students could get hands-on
experience with library interconnectivity.
On the surface, the IPL may remind you a lot of the UMich
Library Gopher Server that we visited back on November 2
(gopher://gopher.lib.umich.edu). The two look quite similar.
However, dig a little deeper and you will discover that
in many cases the IPL has a lot more stuff than the UMich
Library Gopher (for example, the gopher hole has one dictionary;
the IPL has twenty).
The IPL has five major divisions:
1. Reference,
2. Youth,
3. Librarian Services,
4. MOO, and
5. About the Library.
You'll find the most stuff in the Reference Division, including
general reference stuff (dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.),
business and economics information, and news and current events.
After bouncing around the IPL for a while, though, I discovered that
one of the easiest ways to find stuff in the IPL is to use their
"Directory and Tour" service by either clicking on "Directory and
Tour" on the IPL homepage or by jumping directly to
http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/bldg.dir/
This takes you to the building directory which gives you a
good look at what can be found in the IPL.
One of the neatest things about the IPL is that they have
set up a special Internet program (a MOO) that will allow you
to talk real-time with a reference librarian (during certain
hours). Unfortunately, this program is not the easiest
thing in the world to figure out, but if you have patience
(or if you have ever been on a MOO, MUD, or MUSH before)
you shouldn't have any problems.
As I said earlier, the IPL is still in the larval stage. The
folks at the IPL have focused more on content than on presentation
(and rightly so, might I add), so the IPL pages are not as "pretty"
as ones you might see elsewhere. Also, the IPL's Youth section is
pretty bare, but you still owe it to yourself to check out
some of their "story hour" books. The IPL's on-line children's
book "Do Spiders Live on the World Wide Web?"
(http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/youth/StoryHour/spiders/cover.html)
is without a doubt one of the most charming things I have EVER
seen on the Internet :)
All in all, the IPL is a really good site that has a heck of
a lot of potential. If you have some spare time, I recommend
that you drop on by the IPL and take a look ... and make sure
that you read "Do Spiders Live on the World Wide Web?"
PERSONAL REQUEST:
If there is a professional graphic designer on this list, could
you please recommend a solid, sans-serif font that would be complimentary
to Letraset Jazz? This is for my upcoming Atlas workshop pages
(I am using Jazz for the titles and woodcuts for the icons) and
I can't figure out what font to use for the subtitles :(
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY
---------------------------------
REVIEW WORD (originally posted in the Aug. 3 TOURBUS):
IGNERT - adjective. Not smart.
NEW WORD:
HAZE - a contraction.
Usage: "Is Bubba smart?" "Nah ... haze ignert."
(Special thanks goes to Jack Dohme for today's wurd)
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TOURBUS - (c) Copyright 1995, Patrick Crispen and Bob Rankin
All rights reserved. Redistribution is allowed only with permission.
(\__/) .~ ~. ))
/O O ./ .' Patrick Douglas Crispen
{O__, \ { pcrispe1@ua1vm.ua.edu
/ . . ) \ The University of Alabama
|-| '-' \ } )) http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/crispen.html
.( _( )_.'
'---.~_ _ _& Warning: squirrels.
