The whole internet: User's guide & catalog Ed Kroll

T HOUSANDS OF NEW USERS each month are joining their colleagues, peers, and associates in exploring a new world of electronic communication. The Internet, a wide-area network, transports information to their desktops from all corners of the globe across high speed telecommunications networks. By tapping the Internet's resources, scholars have immediate access to databases, library catalogs and other library resources, and to the work of colleagues anywhere in the world. The Internet has changed the way we perceive academic exchange and collaboration, libraries and information, and teaching and learning from something that often is time and location specific to something that can happen at any time in any place. The Intemet was once viewed as the province of scientists and engineers, who, in the past, were the principal beneficiaries of funding for information services. With access to several hundred online public access catalogs and other library resources, researchers in the humanities are finding the Internet as important to them as to their colleagues in the sciences. Yet, for the new traveller, getting around the Internet is not without some difficulties. Navigating the Internet often frustrates unsophisticated or nontechnical users making them feel lost and intimidated in an unknown cyberspace of information. "Historically, one of the biggest problems on the Internet has been finding what you know exists" (Kroll, p. 155). To address some of these problems, Ed Kroll, Assistant Director for LAN deployment at the University of Illinois, turned his internet manual into a book called