o collections of E-text source materials, if relevant. These may
include "tagged" text for special statistical studies.
o a set of free programming tools for routine scholarly tasks like typesetting papers, creating bibliographic databases, and so on—in the format specific to your field.
Scholars in the humanities should check the list of E-text archives (over 300 of them) at Georgetown University (send E-mail message "" to "" to get started). These archives may well have materials in your field that they will make available for scholarly purposes at a nominal cost. In addition, check the Oxford Text Archives at black.ox.ac.uk. (Login as "anonymous" for information—as of this writing the archives are not searchable online by telnet, but an index is available).
<Chapter 17> Special for Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques
It is suprising that religious organizations have been so slow to recognize the importance of a new communications medium like the Internet. Many religious organizations use computers for producing newsletters or accounting and other office tasks; but very few use them effectively for telecommunication and internetworking.
The Internet is not like Television or Radio—it is not a broadcast medium. In many ways the Internet is a more appropriate communications medium for religions organizations than "the media". It is less expensive, not centrally controlled, and reaches persons who want to receive the information on a case-by-case basis.
There is nothing to prevent a religious organization from setting up a fileserver on one of the commercial nets (admittedly expensive, but you only need one worldwide). From there any member of your organization can upload and download information. Thus you can keep a library of regional or local newsletters, special software, a directory of local groups, listings of job openings, and so on. Many organizations already have this sort of thing on Bulletin Boards, but FTP archives and E-mail provide a less expensive method of disseminating information that can reach anywhere in the world, not just a local region or single area code.
But the promise of internetworking goes beyond the "office environment" of your organization—which I am sure is already well developed—to touch your educational and evangelical mission. You can make information about your organization and its beliefs instantly available to 25 million people if they want it.
In addition, there is a great need for "charity work" in preparing E- texts. Most E-texts are copyrighted or locked up in proprietary databases. This means that they cannot be freely shared. Free E-texts, especially those written in plain "vanilla" ASCII, are in great demand among blind people—who can use special software to convert the text to sound—and by persons in remote areas or the third world.
Distribution of free E-text is not limited to the Internet by any means. Free E-text will find its way onto thousands of bulletin boards and will be passed to non-networked machines by floppy disks. Once printed out it can be disseminated by photocopying or any inexpensive printing method that uses "camera-ready" copy. The Internet is thus the backbone of a worldwide distribution network that can reach anyplace sophisticated enough to have some sort of printing (or delivery) technology.