History of ANBG's Information Technology

Launch of WWW - 8 July 1993

New botanical WWW server
Jim Croft (jrc@ANBG.GOV.AU)
Thu, 8 Jul 1993 11:51:33 +1000

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+---------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| New Biodiversity WWW (World Wide Web) server at the |
| Australian National Botanic Gardens |
| Canberra |
| |
+---------------------------------------------------------+

The Australian National Botanic Gardens is pleased to offer a new World Wide Web server for biodiversity information which has just been commissioned and released to the Internet.

It has yet to be registered on any of the major WWW sites but can be picked up from the ANU WWW server at life.anu.edu.au port 80.

The ANBG WWW server can be found at 155.187.10.12 port 80 and there are two files, index.html and anbg.html, that point to a number of other files and network information services. The URLs (Universal Record Locators ) for these files are:

http://155.187.10.12:80/index.html
http://155.187.10.12:80/anbg.html

The former is a terse home page with links to other network resources, the later is a more narrative account leading to a range of other files and information servers, essentially a verbose form of the former.

WWW is a hypertext client/server network information retrieval tool based on linked marked up documents. Clients exist for a range of operating environments to allow storage and display of formatted text, in-line images, sounds, etc. WWW clients can access gopher, ftp, wais, news sites and invoke telnet sessions, etc.

If you are not running a local WWW client (like xmosaic, cello, etc.) public WWW clients (line oriented and screen-oriented vt-100-like) are available from a number of places and can be picked up from the ANBG gopher (155.187.10.12 port 70) under Other Information Servers.

The focus of the ANBG WWW server is the same as that of the ANBG biodiversity gopher and in fact has links to all of the ANBG gopher resources, including the on-line database access and the WAIS indices. Botanical and biodiversity documents will be marked up and attached to this server on a regular basis.

With the new ability to integrate text and images, the ANBG will be making an effort to provide renderings of some of its slide collection to the network at various resolutions, depending on available disk space. Some trial images are available, but files formats are still being assessed.

As the ANBG WWW resource is still under consruction, it is possible that the lower level WWW directory structure may change. For the time being users are encouraged to limit their links to the two URLs listed aboove.

For information about the ANBG network information services, send email requests to:

webmaster@anbg.gov.au World Wide Web
gophermaster@anbg.gov.au Gopher
postmaster@anbg.gov.au Email

Or directly to:

Jim Croft ( jrc@anbg.gov.au )
Greg Whitbread ( ghw@anbg.gov.au )

From: jrc@anbg.gov.au (Jim Croft)
To: mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Cc: murray@anbg.gov.au (Murray Fagg), ghw@anbg.gov.au (Greg Whitbread)
Subject: A new WWW server for botanical and biodiversity information
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 1993 12:55:45 +1000 (EST)

Greetings

I could not find a place to formally register a WWW server so I am sending you this announcement. I would be pleased if you could do what has to be done to register this server, advertise its presence and otherwise entangle it in the Web.

At the Gardens we have an FDDI compliant network of over 30 Sun sparcstations, 8 macs, 25 pcs, 12 dumb terminals, etc. and an associated Novell network on site has about 24 pcs.

A major activity centres on a large botanical database on the Oracle RDBMS. We developed a gopher interface to parts of this database and plan to do provide similar information with WWW. We have a large collection of scientifically vouched 35mm slides of Australian native plants that we plan to digitize and make available through WWW as soon as we come to grips with the most appropriate file formats.

All of the sparc stations have access to Xmosaic and WWW, which staff are starting to use. Dumb terminals are using the line oriented WWW clinet until we can sort out the VT-100 versions. They have been using gopher for quite a while and are comfortable with using the network and the menu-like hierachy - our task now is to educate them about the hypertext view of the same information. Those that have tried it like the Xmosaic interface - it handles gopher so well we are thinking of using it as our gopher client of choice.

kind regards

Jim Croft