March 1996 € Volume 6 € No. 3

APICS Online

Locating New Services And The URL


By Kenneth Moser, CNSA, CNA

The number and variety of resources on the Internet can often be overwhelming, and it can be difficult to absorb and to sort out all the information available. To further complicate matters, new resources come online every week. How does one keep up? A unique online publication, the Scout Report, can help.

The Scout Report is a free mailing list publication released weekly to subscribers by Susan Calcari under the auspices of the InterNIC. Each issue of the Scout Report focuses on new and newly discovered Internet resources for researchers and educators, the InterNIC's primary audience.

Unlike most other online publications featuring service announcements, the Scout Report does not focus on a single Internet service. Instead, it reports on a full range of resources, including World Wide Web sites, gopher links, electronic mailing lists and network tools. For example, the December 8, 1995, issue listed the following new services:
  • Research and Education
    Bellingham Public Schools
    Curriculum and Lesson Plans
    The Online Medieval and Classical Library
    World Wide Arts Resources
    American Civil War Page
    Points of Pediatric Interest
    USDA "Agricultural Statistics 1994"

  • General Interest
    The Department of Defense's BosniaLINK
    Government Printing Office Database Now Cost-Free
    The Atlantic Monthly
    TV Links Film and Television Website Archive
    Net Day Internet News Magazine
    Adobe Acrobat
    Open Text

    • Here's a sample listing from the November 17, 1995, issue*:
    NetBytes

    Jumbo: the "official" shareware site of the Web. This searchable archive contains over 24,000 shareware and freeware programs. Categories include business, home and personal, programming, utilities, words and games. Within each category, programs are cataloged by operating system. The entire archive is searchable by program category and operating system. A short annotation with the programs helps the user determine whether to download them. Size of program is given. A "starter kit" of a decompression and antivirus program is also provided for each operating system. Jumbo is an excellent specialty site.
    http://www.jumbo.com/

    Another feature of this report is that it's available via electronic mail, the World Wide Web and even file transfer protocol (FTP). To receive the e-mail version of the Scout Report each week, send e-mail to [email protected]