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Date:         Mon, 11 Jan 1993 14:50:18 CDT
From:         Judy Koren <JUDYK@LIB.TECHNION.AC.IL>
Subject:      RE: Electronic Publication and the Knowledge Glut, Pt. 1 of 2

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Re. using Veronica (and other gopher-based and/or menu-driven
systems available via Internet):

I detect a hint in the message on Psycholoquy that automatic
distribution of such e-journals might be discontinued in favour
of retrieving what you want when you want it, now that user-friendly
tools like Veronica are available. PLEASE, BEFORE TAKING SUCH A
STEP, REFLECT THAT:

1) many, many sites do not have gopher installed on their machines,
   esp. outside the U.S. Even if they do, they don't have Veronica
   on their main gopher menu. That means you can't just type
   "Veronica" and take it from there; you have to know how to
   telnet to the Veronica site. Not that it's difficult, but it's
   not that user-friendly either.

2) Many, many users of the Internet are outside the U.S., i.e. we
   are searching from half the world away. I have found response
   time to be slow, often almost unbearably so, even though the
   time difference means that I'm usually searching during the site's
   off-peak hours. To get access to Veronica (or InfoSlug, or
   Panda, or any other nice furry Internet creature) and complete
   a search through several menu levels, can take me 15-30 minutes.
   This is NOT as user-friendly as getting "issues" of an e-journal
   automatically in my email.

   I am told that the reason for the slowness is overload of the
   main connection cable from Israel to Europe/the U.S.  By the time
   they get around to installing an upgrade, traffic will have
   increased almost to congestion capacity again... and so ad
   infinitum.  I can think of lots of countries whose budget for
   upgrading undersea cables is even smaller than Israel's: i.e.
   this problem is going to be with us for quite a while. The
   global demand for Internet connectivity is going to outstrip
   the physical infrastructure supplying it for the forseeable
   future, the way I read it.  Online, real-time menu-based
   searches are not the most efficient way to handle all information
   transfer needs under such constraints.  They're very *nice* --
   if you can pop in and out of Veronica in 2 minutes. But if
   it takes you 30 minutes with 2 or 3 unexplained "connection
   closed" messages along the way??

Bottom line: we will need a variety of distribution channels.
The disk-quota-impaired may well prefer to turn off the e-mail
and rely on enhanced gopher-based searches. The bandwidth-constrained,
like me, may well prefer the opposite.

Have a nice day, fellow netsurfers!

 -----------------------------------------------------
| Judy Koren,                                         |
| Head, Technical Services, Elyachar Central Library, |
| The Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology,     |
| Haifa, Israel 32000.                                |
|                                                     |
| Email: judyk@lib.technion.ac.il                     |
|    or: lbjudy@vmsa.technion.ac.il                   |
 -----------------------------------------------------
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