forwarded message from Jim Croft

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 8 Jul 93 01:38:07 -0500


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From: jrc@anbg.gov.au (Jim Croft)
To: mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Cc: murray@anbg.gov.au (Murray Fagg), ghw@anbg.gov.au (Greg Whitbread)
Subject: A new WWW server for botanical and biodiversity information
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1993 12:55:45 +1000 (EST)

Greetings

I could not find a place to formally register a WWW server so I am
sending you this announcement. I would be pleased if you could do what
has to be done to register this server, advertise its presence and
otherwise entangle it in the Web.

At the Gardens we have an FDDI compliant network of over 30 Sun
sparcstations, 8 macs, 25 pcs, 12 dumb terminals, etc. and an
associated Novell network on site has about 24 pcs.

A major activity centres on a large botanical database on the Oracle
RDBMS. We developed a gopher interface to parts of this database and
plan to do provide similar information with WWW. We have a large
collection of scientifically vouched 35mm slides of Australian native
plants that we plan to digitize and make available through WWW as soon
as we come to grips with the most appropriate file formats.

All of the sparc stations have access to Xmosaic and WWW, which staff are
starting to use. Dumb terminals are using the line oriented WWW clinet
until we can sort out the VT-100 versions. They have been using gopher
for quite a while and are comfortable with using the network and the
menu-like hierachy - our task now is to educate them about the hypertext
view of the same information. Those that have tried it like the Xmosaic
interface - it handles gopher so well we are thinking of using it as our
gopher client of choice.

kind regards

Jim Croft

+---------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| New Biodiversity WWW (World Wide Web) server at the |
| Australian National Botanic Gardens |
| Canberra |
| |
+---------------------------------------------------------+

The Australian National Botanic Gardens is pleased to offer a new
World Wide Web server for biodiversity information which has just
been commissioned and released to the Internet.

It has yet to be registered on any of the major WWW sites but can be
picked up from the ANU WWW server at life.anu.edu.au port 80.

The ANBG WWW server can be found at 155.187.10.12 port 80 and there are
two files, index.html and anbg.html, that point to a number of other
files and network information services. The URLs (Universal Record
Locators ) for these files are:

http://155.187.10.12:80/index.html
http://155.187.10.12:80/anbg.html

The former is a terse home page with links to other network resources,
the later is a more narrative account leading to a range of other files
and information servers, essentially a verbose form of the former.

WWW is a hypertext client/server network information retrieval tool
based on linked marked up documents. Clients exist for a range of
operating environments to allow storage and display of formatted text,
in-line images, sounds, etc. WWW clients can access gopher, ftp, wais,
news sites and invoke telnet sessions, etc.

If you are not running a local WWW client (like xmosaic, cello, etc.)
public WWW clients (line oriented and screen-oriented vt-100-like) are
available from a number of places and can be picked up from the ANBG
gopher (155.187.10.12 port 70) under Other Information Servers.

The focus of the ANBG WWW server is the same as that of the ANBG
biodiversity gopher and in fact has links to all of the ANBG gopher
resources, including the on-line database access and the WAIS indices.
Botanical and biodiversity documents will be marked up and attached to
this server on a regular basis.

With the new ability to integrate text and images, the ANBG will be
making an effort to provide renderings of some of its slide collection
to the network at various resolutions, depending on available disk
space. Some trial images are available, but files formats are still
being assessed.

As the ANBG WWW resource is still under consruction, it is possible
that the lower level WWW directory structure may change. For the
time being users are encouraged to limit their links to the two URLs
listed aboove.

For information about the ANBG network information services, send email
requests to:

webmaster@anbg.gov.au World Wide Web
gophermaster@anbg.gov.au Gopher
postmaster@anbg.gov.au Email

Or directly to:

Jim Croft ( jrc@anbg.gov.au )
Greg Whitbread ( ghw@anbg.gov.au )

___________________________________________________________________________
Jim Croft [Herbarium CBG] internet: jrc@anbg.gov.au
Australian National Botanic Gardens voice: +61-6-2509 490
GPO Box 1777, Canberra, ACT 2601, AUSTRALIA fax: +61-6-2509 599
______Biodiversity Directorate, Australian Nature Conservation Agency______
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