InterNIC Information Service maintains an announcement-only service at LISTSERV@is.internic.net called net-happenings. It distributes announcements about tools, conferences, calls for papers, news items, new mailing lists, electronic newsletters like EDUPAGE, and more. To subscribe, send a message to the LISTSERV containing this command:
subscribe net-happenings Your Name
InterNIC's automated mail service is at MAILSERV@RS.INTERNIC.NET. It allows access to documents and files via email. To use it, send email to the Mailserv with the word "HELP" in the subject field of your mail.
How to get more out of your magazine subscriptions ————————————————————————— PC Magazine (U.S.A.) is one of those magazines that arrives here by mail. We butcher them, whenever we find something of interest. The "corpses" are dumped in a high pile on the floor. To retrieve a story in this pile is difficult and time consuming, unless the title is printed on the cover. Luckily, there are shortcuts. Logon to PC MagNet on CompuServe. Type GO PCMAG to get the following menu:
PC MagNet
1 Download a PC Magazine Utility
2 PC Magazine Utilities/Tips Forum
3 PC Magazine Editorial Forum
4 PC Magazine Programming Forum
5 PC Magazine After Hours Forum
6 PC Magazine Product Reviews Index
7 Free! - Take a Survey
8 Submissions to PC Magazine
9 Letters to the Editor
10 Subscribe to PC Magazine
Choice six lets you search for stories. Once you have a list with page/issue references, turning the pages gets much easier. PC Magazine is owned by the media giant Ziff-Davis. PC MagNet is a part of ZiffNet on CompuServe. So is Computer Database Plus, which lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200 popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987. The database is also available on CD-ROM, but the discs cover only one year at a time. CDP contains full-text from around 50 magazines, like Personal Computing, Electronic News, MacWeek and Electronic Business. Stories from the other magazines are available in abstracted form only. To search the database, CDP, you pay an extra US$24.00 per hour. In addition, you pay US$1.00 per abstract and US$1.50 per full-text article (1992). These fees are added to your normal CompuServe access rates. ZiffNet also offers Magazine Database Plus, a database with stories from over 90 magazines covering science, business, sport, people, personal finance, family, art and handicraft, cooking, education, environment, travel, politics, consumer opinions, and reviews of books and films. The magazines include: Administrative Management, Aging, Changing Times, The Atlantic, Canadian Business, Datamation, Cosmopolitan, Dun's Business Month, The Economist, The Futurist, High Technology Business, Journal of Small Business Management, Management Today, The Nation, The New Republic, Online, Playboy, Inc., Popular Science, Research & Development, Sales & Marketing Management, Scientific American, Technology Review, UN Chronicle, UNESCO Courier and U.S. News & World Report. In the next chapter, we will present another ZiffNet magazine database: the Business Database Plus. Magazine Index (MI), from Information Access Company (U.S.A.), is another source worth looking at. It covers over 500 consumer and general-interest periodicals as diverse as Special Libraries and Sky & Telescope, Motor Trend and Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone. Many titles go as far back as 1959. Although most of the database consists of brief citations, MI also contains the complete text of selected stories from a long list of periodicals. It is available through Dialog, CompuServe, BRS, Data-Star, Dow Jones News/Retrieval, Nexis, and others. Say you so often get references to a given magazine that you want a paper subscription. Try the Electronic Newsstand, which is available by gopher or telnet to gopher.netsys.com. If these Internet commands are unavailable, try mail to staff@enews.com.
Finding that book ————————- Over 270 libraries around the world are accessible by the Internet telnet command. Some of them can also be accessed by Internet mail. This is the case with BIBSYS, a database operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries. I am into transcendental meditation. I'm therefore constantly looking for books on narrow topics like "mantra". To search BIBSYS for titles of interest, I sent mail to genserv@pollux.bibsys.no . The search word was entered in the subject title of the message. By return email, I got the following report:
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 93 13:54:18 NOR
From: GENSERV@POLLUX.BIBSYS.NO
Subject: Searching BIBSYS
Search request : MANTRA
Database-id : BIBSYS
Search result : 5 hits.