9508309 Dunn The PI's will establish GeoClio, an electronic bulletin board accessible through the Internet computer network, for the U.S. National Committee on the History of Geology at the University of Southern Mississippi. The bulletin board will facilitate communication between geologists and oceanographers doing research on historical topics in the Earth sciences, with historians of science. It will serve as a means of communication between geographically-widespread historical researchers on all the continents and Australia. In addition to assisting communication by serving as a "bulletin board" for researchers to post announcements of their particular research topics and requests for collaboration or assistance, GeoClio will provide space for listings of upcoming meetings, conferences, and symposia with historical themes. It may also contain summaries of recent historical meetings and symposia, and possibly the table of contents of publications in Earth history, to assist beginning researchers in becoming more familiar with the historical literature. GeoClio might also be used as an "electronic archive" in which text of historically- oriented research papers and journal articles may be stored, if this use does not violate appropriate copyright laws. The university currently operates a link with the Internet computer network (whale.st.usm.edu) through the Academic Computing Center of its College of Science & Technology, and this computer server will connect with the existing link to provide access to the Internet. The GeoClio computer bulletin board will be accessible in text mode (via Gopher) or in graphic mode, using the MOSAIC software package of the National Center for Super computing Activities to establish GeoClio as a site on the World- Wide Web (WWW). By combining both text and graphics access, GeoClio will be available both to users who have only low-speed Internet access (in text mode), and to users with high-speed computers able to acc ess WWW "home pages" through MOSAIC. ***
