Slide 1
Hello again, and welcome to Lecture #6 -- “Searching for Text and Print Materials through the Internet.”

Slide 2
I’m particularly excited about our topic today.  This is really an exciting time on the Internet as more and more print resources are becoming available.  Perhaps you’ve heard others who have criticized the Internet, saying the material on there can’t be trusted, and of course we talked about that previously, and how to evaluate websites, but there are those who would say, “Well, you can’t find anything of the quality of the New York Times on the Internet, or you can’t find the classics, something like Moby Dick, or you can’t find journals, true, scholarly, refereed journals.”  Not true.  In fact, the Internet has all of these and so very much more.  Print publications, in fact, are available through the Internet and increasingly, the entire text of publications, of journals, of newspapers, and textbooks are available entirely online.

Slide 3
There’s a wealth of print materials available through the Internet -- 10,000 books, probably even more, entire texts, and of course the first books that are put up on the Internet have been the classics and those that are out of copyright, so that they can be shared freely with anyone through the Internet.  Project Gutenberg, which is based in Champaign, Illinois, is one such huge project with the goal of putting 10,000 books on line by the end of the 1900’s.  And they’ve succeeded -- in fact, they have text in different languages, different editions of a variety of textbooks, as well.  Carnegie Mellon University has a wonderful English server site, which provides all kinds of text resources, and has links to a number of other sites that provide text online, such as the Electronic Text Center.  The Electronic Text Center, based in Virginia, has some 40,000 books that are either available entirely online, or partly online, in some 19,000 images.  These are textbooks in many different languages, fiction, non-fiction, etc. -- all available through the Internet.

Slide 4
Then there’s a whole evolving new area of E-Texts.  Electronic Texts are a new genre, in fact, probably even more than a genre, a whole new medium really of delivering print materials.  It mixes the idea of a book, of a text, and the multimedia capabilities of electronic delivery, so that E-Text commonly provides different outcomes; one might read a short story, or a novel and be able to choose the happy outcome, the sad outcome, the ambiguous outcome, etc.  The reader becomes involved in the story and can help move along the plot, and in some cases help direct characters and have them take a right turn or a left turn and events fall accordingly.  And there are growing, growing volume of E-Texts out there.  This new way of writing that involves the reader.  The E-Text archives is a great collection of this whole evolving medium, and I’ll note that this site, of course, is not censored, so there might be some material that you might find objectionable or inappropriate, but of course much of the material is not.  And interactive texts are really exciting, not only in the fiction area and in the area of novels, but also when one talks about text books, let’s say Biology, Chemistry, Physics, etc..  The textbooks that can respond to the readers, the reader can ask a question - the textbook then finds the answer, and displays it to the reader.  That kind of interaction in a book is also an example of an E-Text.  This whole new medium again, merging text with the hyperlinks of the electronic media.

Slide 5
There are thousands and thousands of journals available to you on line.  And I’m probably most excited about this particular aspect of today’s discussion.  It is Infotrac -- as a UIS student, you have access to resources through Brookens Bridge -- that’s one of the links we have on our page.  Brookens, of course, after Brookens Library, here on our campus.  And Brookens Bridge merges the electronic resources through the Internet.  The University of Illinois in Springfield and Urbana-Champaign have contracted for permission to have access for our students, and staff, and faculty, to Infotrac.  Infotrac pulls together Wilson Perodical Indicies and other indexes onto an electronic medium -- it’s updated daily, perhaps even more than once a day.  You can enter Infotrac by using your social security number, now the numbers of those students who have registered on our campus, those who are currently registered on our campus are stored in the database and will allow you access.  If your not a student, you won’t be able to get access to Infotrac at the address on our web page.  What’s exciting about Infotrac is that it indexes thousands of journals and it includes the last five years or more.  I generally point toward the academic database, but there also is a legal database and others available through Infotrac.  And not only does it bring up the traditional citation that you would expect from a guide to periodical literature, but in approximately one-third of the cases, it brings up the entire text of the article.  Imagine this -- it could be 2:00 in the morning and you could have a paper due at 8:00 some place, the library is closed, and you can quickly get on the Internet, do a search through Infotrac, bring the full text down from psychological abstracts or from a journal in communication or from a more popular magazine etc. -- and bring its full text down, print it out in your printer, as if you had copied it right at the library.  You have full citation; the entire text is available to you in many cases, including pictures, and diagrams -- and use it to put together your paper.  Of course, the full citation is available and abstracts of articles are available in many more of the cases.  This is really the front line tool for most undergraduate library research, that is, Infotrac, and you’ll find it at the forefront of most libraries.  When your walk in and ask for Infotrac, it’s usually right there by the reference desk, and you can take a quick look through Infotrac and search those journals, but commonly in a library, a physical library, you have to copy down or print out the citation and then walk over to where ever the periodicals are stored and pull out the periodical and then be able to read the text.  In this case, about one-third of them have the entire text right there on your computer screen.  And so now, at home through your computer you can virtually, virtually walk into a library.

Slide 6
Well, there are also our database searches and these also are very, very exciting.  Once again through Brookens Bridge, you can, we have access to IBIS and OVID, to the FirstSearch databases, and a number of other resources available -- you’ll see them among the bottom of that web page Brookens Bridge.  The log on and password are, for our class, are stored in WebBoard.  I put them in the assignment for this week and the question for this week.  I put the log on and password that you may use to access the FirstSearch databases.  These again are specific to our campus and I didn’t want to make it available to the Internet at large, so I put it behind the password on our WebBoard.  There are many full text sources available through FirstSearch.  Wilson Select is a great resource that looks at some of the Wilson Publications.  Periodical abstracts are available and there are some very useful resources in Medline, in the Health Reference Center, and there are a number of almanacs available online, too, and you can get full text retrieval from many of these resources -- so the FirstSearch databases are another great place to conduct your research.  There are also other databases available there that provide abstracts or citations or for a certain amount of money (it varies by your citation), they will email or fax the entire text of the article or database entry to you.  Of course, there are many, many more databases available on the Internet -- not just those linked at Brookens Bridge, although those are very valuable to us all.  The largest database on the Internet is one at terraserver.  You see the address there www.terraserver.microsoft.com. This is an interesting project, which combines efforts from Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, and it takes what can best be described as spy, satellite images that cover most of North America, not all, but half or more of North America, as well as large parts of other continents, and these have tremendous resolution -- in fact, if you go to the terraserver site and if you search for Springfield, you can bring up a satellite image from a few years ago, I think it’s 199,3 and you can home right in on the capital and you can take a look at the cars in the parking lot -- and it really is kind of an interesting experience in looking through the eyes of a spy satellite.  Well, of course this database, which has this enormous collection of images that are tiled across this continent and others is a wonderful one and is available entirely free to us over the Internet.  It might be particularly valuable if you’re looking at watershed.  It has great resolution on waterways and the like, so you might find that of interest or use.

Slide 7
Well, what we’ve been talking about today that is the text materials available on the Internet really is a portion of what we call, in Communication Technology, the concept of digital convergence.  The idea of digital convergence is that there is a confluence, a coming together of the various media, the print format, including graphics and images, the audio format, the video format, and of course, computer format.  And this has evolved over a period of time.  Perhaps one of the best examples is in audio.  Some of you may recall the vinyl record albums, that existed some time more than a decade ago, were quite popular prior to the development of the compact disc format and now the DVD format, which are digital discs formats, and soon the MP3 format.  Audio moved from what had been an analogue format to a digital format in moving to the CD, the DVD, or MP3, and now those formats are pulling together and being made available through the Internet.  Well, the same is taking place in print.  Print itself is essentially an analogue format that had been and is available for 500 years, since the printing press, and of course, written language, of course, far, far before that.  Print now is being digitized, as we just talked about, and being made available through the Internet in a digital format.  The same is true with video -- for example, one can go to CNN and see video clips or to C Span and see other television video clips available through the Internet, and of course then all of these three previous media come together with the computer and one digital delivery system, and that digital format is delivered through the medium of the Internet.

Slide 8
So in conclusion I find this a most exciting movement.  I mean you can tell I really have great enthusiasm for this because it adds that traditional research.  The scholarly academic research to this new medium.  The development of digital libraries, you know the library of Congress has challenged itself to attempt to put a million pages of information on the Internet in digital format every year at that rate.  It still won’t keep up with all the new books being published but still a million pages a year is quite an ambitious challenge.  And now you can do homework at home.  In fact you don’t have to do it in a library.  You don’t have to go to a location, except in rare cases where there might be materials that will be specific to that.  But even in fact most particularly in the cases where there is archival material that is fragile, dated material that has been around for many years, may be deteriorating due to the environment.  These are the very materials that are going onto the Internet first because by using, by digitizing the information we’re able to see it and use it and virtually handle it without doing any damage to the documents themselves.  And so now we have researched truly anytime, anywhere.  This converging of the media is that really exciting aspect and this is truly what will pave that gravel road we talked about early on into the “information super highway”.

Slide 9
Well, this week’s assignment is, of course, on the WebBoard, and I want you to do a little bit of search of print sources.  And you’ll have to get onto the WebBoard in order to find out the password, the logon and password, to get into the FirstSearch database.  Then you will be able to go right into Infotrac.  Try using your social security number -- if you’re a registered student, that should get you in right away.  And so on the WebBoard, our assignment this week, which is explained there, is for you to conduct a brief search of print resources and perhaps bring up full text of one of those resources, at your home or at your office place.  Well, next week, we’re going to talk about Usenet and newsgroups, discussion boards, in fact maybe a little something about soaps, soap operas on the Internet, so keep on surfing and I’ll talk to you again next week.