An educators’ guide to information access across the internet

Abstract

Educational use of the Internet network has exploded in the past few years. Most colleges and universities now provide Internet access to students and educators for instructional and reasearch purposes. Electronic mail, on-line conferencing, software access, and remote login are some of the many services which make it convenient to use the Internet as a global database. Since data is distributed in thousands of computers worldwide, accessing information in an organized manner is sometimes complicated. Client software tools are available that facilitate access to information by providing the user with a more intuitive interface. This paper provides summary information on the use of listservs, telnet, ftp, archie, and gopher application tools which are available to connect to and access data from remote hosts on the Internet.