A version of this announcement has been submitted to the Vernacular Architecture Newsletter. You are encouraged to print and copy this document.
A searchable version of the collected bibliographies from the Vernacular Architecture Newsletter is now available on the Internet. This database is pre-indexed for rapid searches and most software for consulting the database will allow you to save the results of your search to a file on your own computer for later consultation or printing. Any word or number appearing in a bibliography entry may be used as a search key.
The members of the VAF database committee are Mary Corbin Sies, Gabrielle Lanier, Martin Perdue, and Christopher Stark. We are particularly grateful to Martin Perdue for the hard and constant work of maintaining and formatting the bibliography files. Computing resources for this version of the bibliography are provided by the Department of Mathematics at the University of Florida.
We admit that the text below is terse and jargon-soaked. Christopher Stark will be at the Annual Meeting in Ottawa to answer questions and to distribute a more thorough handout on this version of the bibliography. Your comments and questions are always welcome.
The bibliography is made available at the University of Florida through a ``server'' running on one of our computers. The software at your end which interacts with this service is called a ``client'' and several forms of client software will do the job.
The World Wide Web is a distributed information service on the Internet which has distinguished itself through ease of use and ready integration of older techniques into Web servers and clients. Most recent Web clients should be usable as clients with the bibliography. World Wide Web resources usually present themselves on your screen as documents (``pages'') with connections (``links'') to other documents through underlined or highlighted words, phrases, or pictures.
More specialized clients for WAIS can be used as well, and we hope that Gopher clients will soon be able to consult the bibliography -- see below for more on this. The bibliography files themselves can be downloaded using ftp (FTP is the Internet's File Transfer Protocol).
Web servers are specified by Uniform Resource Locators, which amount to addresses enriched with protocol information. The Uniform Resource Locator for the VAN bibliography and some other bibliographies is
http://www.math.ufl.edu/math/biblio.htmlIf you have such a Web browser connected to the Internet then you should be able to use a navigation or file menu to specify this Web page. Most Web browsers will have a keystroke for this operation; for example, under Lynx one uses the `g' key to get a specified page.
You may also be able to open the bibliography Web page by specifying it at a command line when you start your Web browser. For example, Lynx users could type ``lynx http://www.math.ufl.edu/math/biblio.html'' to start a lynx session which opens the bibliography page to start.
You can also reach the bibliography by finding the University of Florida home page by any route and then opening the home page for the Department of Mathematics. You will find a collection of bibliographies about seven items down from the top in our main menu.
The Bibliography page has a table of contents at its top. Select the VAF bibliography item in the table of contents and page down through the descriptive text to get to the menu for the VAF bibliography. At this writing the menu includes three items: the first two offer database access to the bibliography for searches, while the third makes the files indexed by these databases available for downloading. After you have highlighted an appropriate menu item, touch the return key to open that page.
We recommend that you try a bibliography search from the second menu item because many users seem to have trouble with the first search mechanism listed, which depends upon a protocol called WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) that must be understood by your Web browser.
The second search mechanism is based on software from the University of Arizona (Glimpse) that requires no special support at the user side. When you select either of these menu items you will be presented with a page that includes a blank form for you to fill in with a search term. Note that you must move the cursor into the blank or box with the cursor keys or mouse before the form will accept your input. After you type your search term, just touch the return key to start a search.
The Glimpse search allows one to combine two or more search terms using semicolons, so that a search on
barn;colonialwill return only the records which include both ``barn'' and ``colonial''. (One could narrow the search still further by specifying ``barn;colonial;1980'' -- any word or number appearing in a bibliography entry may be used as a search key. Dates can be very useful in this regard.)
Both search mechanisms are currently case-insensitive (they ignore the distinction between capital and lower-case letters). Case sensitivity may become an option later.
WAIS clients for Macintosh and Windows computers are available as shareware from EINet (the software is available via anonymous ftp at ftp.einet.net, in the einet directory) and free clients and servers are available from CNIDR, the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (anonymous ftp to ftp.cnidr.org).
The address information for direct WAIS access to the database is: host www.math.ufl.edu, port 2010, and database vaf.
We hope to make the WAIS database for the bibliography accessible through Gopher gateways to WAIS at the original Minnesota gopher hole and at some other sites. This is not working as these words are written, but our WAIS service should be listed in at least one of the two big directories of WAIS servers sometime in the spring and we hope that gopher access will follow immediately.
To download the file to a computer connected to the Internet, use your ftp program to open the server at ftp.math.ufl.edu, login as ``anonymous'', and type your email address when the server prompts for a password. The files are in the subdirectory pub/bibliographies/vaf and currently take up about 1.8 megabytes of disk space.
The files can be searched with a good editor or other tools; we plan to make a rudimentary searching program available later in the spring.
Please contact Christopher Stark by electronic mail at cws@math.ufl.edu or by U.S. mail at University of Florida, Department of Mathematics, 201 Walker Hall, PO Box 118000, Gainesville FL 32611--8000 if you have comments and suggestions, or if you need more information.