Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from MOO

There are two visions of how use of the global network will evolve in the future First individ uals will use the network as a resource provid ing access to material from libraries and other suppliers of information and entertainment Sec ond in addition to communicating with these data sources people will communicate with each other using a variety of interactive text audio and video conferencing methods This paper is about a system that combines the two uses adding an information retrieval tool Gopher to a text based virtual reality environ ment MOO The combination allows informal collaboration using information retrieval to hap pen across the network