by Chris Redmond Where can you read today's Gazette -- and last week's -- if the printed page isn't handy? Where can you find a colleague's electronic mail address, read the university policy on clerical workloads, see an up-to-date list of tomorrow's campus events, find a summary of how the campus computer network operates, and connect to the library's electronic catalogue? Where can you make a quick connection to other computers around the world that offer the text of yesterday's Daily Texan newspaper or the complete works of Shakespeare, as well as thousands of recipes, free computer software, and the latest rulings of the United States supreme court? The answer in every case is UWinfo, a new service that's available to most computer users at Waterloo. Sessions to introduce UWinfo to beginners start tomorrow, but the people behind the service say it's so simple that most users won't need to wait for a help session before they start drawing on the wealth of information UWinfo offers. UWinfo enthusiasts have tried various ways of explaining what their product is. It's a bulletin board; it's a library; it's a database; it's a menu; it's a directory. Or try combining those metaphors: UWinfo is a menu of databases, a database of directories, a directory of libraries, a library of bulletin boards. . . . Here's what the user actually finds. Type the single command "uwinfo" (or a variant, depending on exactly what your computer system is), and you'll see a menu on your screen: ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. About UWinfo/ 2. About the University of Waterloo/ 3. Official University Documents/ 4. Facilities & Services/ 5. Departments, Faculties, Associations, Student Groups/ 6. Courses and Timetables (future)/ 7. UWDIR ... Directory of Staff and Faculty (phone, email) 8. Events, News and Weather/ 9. Other Servers (FTP, Archie, CWIS, Databases, etc.)/ 10. "Index of Document Contents, this server only" 11. "Index of Menu Items, all UWinfo servers" 12. "Table of Contents". ------------------------------------------------------------ You choose one of the headings (with your mouse or cursor, or by typing the item number and hitting the carriage-return a couple of times), and you'll see a new and more detailed menu. Choose 8, for example, and the screen offers this: ------------------------------------------------------------ 1. About Events, News and Weather. 2. Events/ 3. Gazette/ 4. Releases from the UW News Bureau/ 5. Weather Forecast for Southern Ontario. 6. Weather Forecasts: Canada and U.S./ ------------------------------------------------------------ Choose again and you'll see text or more menus, leading you to the weather forecast (for Waterloo, or for Oklahoma, as you prefer); selected articles from the Gazette of this week or a previous week; events listings; and so on. Choose number 7 from the main menu instead and you're on your way to campus names, phone numbers and electronic mail addresses. Choose number 5 and you'll find information put there by various departments and organizations, from the library to the Graduate Student Association. Choose number 2 and you'll see a selection of general texts about the university, lists of departments and similar campus-wide information created or collected by Information and Public Affairs. It's all free, by the way, so free that you don't even have to reach UWinfo from a regular computer userid. You can just log in to one of the major Unix systems with the userid "uwinfo" and look at whatever you need. Who's providing UWinfo? There are two opposite answers, depending on what you mean by the question. * UWinfo is run by an operations committee that includes people from computing services, data processing, and the library. Its head, and the one staff member who spends a large percentage of the workday on UWinfo, is Faye Abrams, coordinator of the library's Industrial and Business Information Service. Abrams is assisted by Esther Millar of the Davis Centre library. Technical work has been handled by such people as Roy Wagler of the data processing department and John Sellens of computing services. There's also an advisory committee, representing departments from across campus that have an interest in UWinfo, either as users or as providers of information that people might need. That committee is chaired by Dr. Johnny Wong, associate provost (computing and information systems). No big investment was involved. One of the operations committee members -- Mike Ridley, associate librarian (systems) in UW's libraries -- chortles that "UWinfo has been built entirely with existing resources: hardware, software, wetware (people). That's one of the great things about it. Johnny and the University Computing Committee provided non-monetary support and encouragement." * UWinfo is run by departments and offices across campus who provide the information. As Abrams stresses at every opportunity, it's not her job to make sure that there's full, up-to-date information available through UWinfo. She provides the software and the structure, but whoever "owns" the information puts it on UWinfo. The first significant files of information appeared in mid-summer. The departments actively involved in providing information so far include the library (its on-line catalogue, as well as the texts of its user publications, a list of specialist librarians, and its operating hours); computing services (information about the network, computing policies, and services available); and information and public affairs (the Gazette, off-campus news releases, and coming event listings). Possibilities for the future are limitless, but Abrams is especially hoping for such databases as the undergraduate and graduate course listings (to come from the registrar's office and the graduate office) and co-op job listings (from the co-op department). Some UW policies have been made available by the university secretariat, and more are expected soon. One unit that has adopted UWinfo with enthusiasm is the Graduate Student Association, which is putting everything on-line from the text of its newsletter to a list of its committee members. Darren Meister, president of the GSA, explains why: "The GSA is an organization whose purpose is to serve grad students by enhancing the quality of grad student life and by increasing the positive profile of grad students. UWInfo allows us to advertise our events, provide information about our services and hopefully prompt feedback. "While UWInfo is not an interactive system, a userid is given at the end of every article that can be used for reply. "Basically, there's no sense having services and events if no one knows about them." Meister adds that "Since we are already information providers, we can quickly take advantage of this approach." When you find the piece of information you want, UWinfo lets you read it on your computer screen or make a copy of it -- through electronic mail, direct copying to a file, or in some cases hard-copy printing. It's all made possible by a piece of software called "gopher", developed at the University of Minnesota little more than a year ago. Already dozens of universities and other institutions around the world have installed "gophers", systems like UWinfo -- although browsing suggests that few of them have as much information in place yet as Waterloo has. But there are treasures on some of them -- and one powerful feature of "gopher" is the ability to link from place to place instantly. Choose the right heading on a UWinfo menu, and you can find yourself linking (still free) to databases and gophers anywhere in the computerized world. In fact, some of the Waterloo-based information is also coming from "local gophers" maintained in various parts of the university. The electrical engineering department pioneered gophering here, and the university secretariat is setting up a local gopher to hold the vast volume of reports and minutes it's responsible for. When a UWinfo user asks for a document that's maintained by the secretariat, or by electrical engineering, UWinfo instantly connects to the appropriate local gopher. Managers of local gophers are able to specify which files should be available to UWinfo users and which are confidential, or open only to users within their own department. General campus information, and information provided by departments that don't have their own gophers, lives on a Sun 690 computer in UW's department of computing services which also provides other central services for campus computing users. The result of those electronic links is that a UWinfo user doesn't always know whether the information being requested is coming from -- the central server, a local gopher, another computer such as the Geac machine that holds the library's catalogue, or a computer anywhere else in the world. Select 9 on the top-level UWinfo menu and you're on the way to off-campus riches. A few examples: > The library catalogues of the University of Toronto, the University of Manitoba, and numerous other Canadian and American institutions (but not, yet, Wilfrid Laurier University). > Hundreds of text files maintained by the Online Book Initiative, a Boston-based operation that provides everything from the words of Aesop's Fables to a collection of Bell Laboratories documents. > Collections of "FAQ's" -- frequently-asked questions and their answers -- from Usenet "news groups", or electronic bulletin boards, on subjects from light aircraft to abortion. > Gophers at Canadian institutions (Queen's has a particularly large one) and dozens of American ones: Michigan State University, Cornell (featuring the popular "Uncle Ezra" advice column), Illinois (where the Daily Illini newspaper is on line), and "the mother of gophers", the University of Minnesota. The weak point of this mountain of information is that it's not well indexed. It isn't easy to find the text of the Bible, although it's there, or a schedule of future space missions, although that's there too -- somewhere. Some users -- such as Mike Ridley, of the library -- speak of "surfing the Internet", moving from database to database as if from wave to wave, still hardly getting below the surface of what's there. Best bet for the future: more efforts by librarians to organize, index and interpret such on-line information. The UW library has taken responsibility for UWinfo's off-campus connections, and Bill Oldfield, usually head of the cataloguing department, has been assigned to that part of the project. UWinfo isn't going to have much effect on the burden placed on UW computers, says Roger Watt, associate director of the computing services department and a member of the UWinfo operations committee. It may even help to reduce one part of the burden, he adds. Says Watt: "The potential value to the consumer of the information stored is much greater than the cost of the disk on which it sits. The cost of disseminating information via the historical print-and-publish vehicles with 'person receives request and responds' interfaces continues to increase; the cost of disk space with 'computer receives request and responds' interfaces continues to decrease." And moving information around campus to users on their client computers "won't cause much of an increase in the load on the campus computer network," says Watt, "until such time as the nature of the information shifts from being plain text to being image-and-sound files -- which assumes, of course, that the client (consumer) devices shift from being plain-text terminals to being computer workstations with the hardware/software needed for the reception and display of such files via the network. Some such user workstations exist on campus now, but they are not the norm, and it could be some years until they are." The only immediate concern isn't something caused by UWinfo, he says. "In fact, we are hoping that UWinfo can provide a user interface that will become part of the solution. The Waterloo-Toronto link by which the Campus Computer Network is part of the worldwide Internet is loaded well beyond the point of productivity, during the months when the student body is on campus. The loading is higher than is healthy for a production environment even during the quiet periods that occur three times a year. . . . "The monitoring we have done to date shows that the bulk of the loading is caused by people using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software from computers throughout the Campus Computer Network to obtain files (software, documents, images) from 'anonymous FTP' server computers all over the world. We are currently evaluating some experimental software that we have obtained from another institution; it provides an FTP 'user interface' that caches every file that is obtained. "If everyone uses this interface to obtain the files that they would otherwise FTP directly, then only the first obtaining of a particular file actually results in it being imported via the off-campus network link. Thereafter, all requests for that file are serviced from the on-campus cache. We are hoping that we can create a UWInfo interface to this that will make UWinfo the easiest way of all for people to obtain files via FTP. . . . "The whole point . . . is to make it possible for the greatest number of people to get the information that they need in the easiest possible way. The obligation is to achieve this via tools that make efficient use of the underlying computing and communications resources." .............................................................. If you want to jump into UWinfo all by yourself, you're welcome to do that -- it's available now on most UW computer systems. But if you'd like a quick tour first, here's your chance. Three open demonstrations have been scheduled, all at noon hours, and all in Davis Centre room 1351, says Faye Abrams, the UWinfo coordinator: They'll be on three Thursdays: September 17 (tomorrow), September 24, and October 1. ................................................................... gopher n. 1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of the family Geomyidae, of North America. 2. (Amer. colloq.) Native or inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State. 3. (Amer. colloq.) One who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches or delivers documents for office staff. 4. (computer tech.) Software following a simple protocol for tunneling through a TCP/IP internet. ........................................................... From the "How to get to UWinfo" file -- written by Roger Watt, of UW's computing services -- on UWinfo (1) From a computer connected to the campus computer network. (a) From a Unix system -- issue the "uwinfo" command. (b) From a MacOS system -- use the "Find" utility under the "File" menu to locate the "UWinfo" object and then use it. (The object will be either a "GopherApp document" or an "alias" pointing to it.) (c) From a DOS system -- (text to be written). (2) From a terminal connected to the Sytek terminal-to- host facility. Use the Sytek "call" command to connect to the Unix system that you use, and proceed as in (1a). If you do not have a userid on any Sytek-connected Unix system, "call 7100" and then log in as "uwinfo". (3) From a terminal connected to the Gandalf terminal- to-host facility. Set the 2-digit dial on the Gandalf unit to "20" to connect to Sytek and then proceed as in (2). (4) From off campus via the campus computer network terminal server. After connecting to the Terminal Server, use the "telnet" or "rlogin" command to connect to the Unix system that you normally use, and proceed as in (1a). If you do not have a userid on any Unix system in the campus computer network, then "telnet uwinfo" and log in as "uwinfo".