[Music]
[Image of book opening and computer rising out of the frontispiece. ]
[A map of the United States emerges, cities connected by a web of laser-like beams.]
[Narrator]: The internet is the fastest growing wide-area computer network in the world.
Built on communication standards developed by the Defense Department in the 1970s, the internet
is now a global enterprise with tens of millions of users in hundreds of countries.
[Woman sitting at a desk, typing on a computer, followed by a screen shot displaying commands.]
For organizations with Local Area Computer Networks,
a connection to the internet is a window on the world.
For electronic mail to distant colleagues, special interest electronic bulletin boards and discussion groups,
and a growing variety of multimedia information.
Because the internet provides communication speeds that are ten to a thousand times faster
than a modem connected to a standard phone line,
it is possible to send colored digital images...and sound.
[Screen shots of computer monitors with various commands and images displayed.]
[R.P.C. Rodgers]: Hello, I'm R.P.C. Rodgers. I work at the Lister Hill
National Center for Biomedical Communications,
a research and development arm of the National Library of Medicine.
[Narrator]: Motion video is also available.
One of the most widely used information retrieval tools of the internet is Gopher.
Developed at the University of Minnesota, Gopher provides
access to information via a series of hierarchically structured menus.
The Gopher client software, which can run on a micro-computer having access to the internet,
sends brief messages to Gopher server computers
located around the country and around the world.
Information can be retrieved by point-and-click on any line of the menu.
The National Library of Medicine has a Gopher server which provides access
to a number of information resources: NLM fact sheets, specialized factual databases
in subject areas such as HIV, current bibliographies.
[Screen shots of results of information resource searches using Gopher.]
Some information is available in ASCII, postcript, and WordPerfect formats so that it can be
viewed on the screen and also transmitted to client systems for printing
in its original page format.
The NLM Gopher can be found by searching any one of several national Gopher directories with the term "NLM."
NLM's Gopher information services are complemented by a new internet information access program called "MOSAIC."
Developed by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, MOSAIC provides hypertext documents
composed of text, images, and sound. In the electronic pages of MOSAIC,
highlighted terms are links to related information.
[Screen shot of MOSAIC]
These links may be in other sections of the same document, other online documents, or
even interactive access to other computers on the internet. Like NLM's Gopher server,
the new multimedia MOSAIC server can be accessed from national directories such as the one
maintained by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications.
Public domain MOSAIC client software is available from NCSA for Unix workstations, Macintoshes,
and PCs running Windows.
NLM's Gopher and MOSAIC are the first examples
of a growing number of online multimedia information services.