A gopher menu presents an easy interface to information which may be held at many different locations on the network. You can browse through these menus and make selections. Gopher menus can give you access to a variety of types of information, from plain text documents through to keyword searches on databases, or even to interactive login sessions. When you do locate a document you want, gopher will retrieve it for you - all you need to do is select it from the gopher menu. You don't need to know where the document is actually located because gopher will take care of the file transfer.
Gopher uses the client server model of processing.
That is, you need to use client software to access the gopher server. The client handles the communication between the two machines, and often gives you a nice, graphical interface to work with. There are clients available for most computing platforms. Veronica is an add-on tool to gopher. What it does is keyword-searching of gopher menus.