Internet Scout Project--Announcement

[Jack Solock]

This is being cross posted to several lists. Please excuse any
duplication.
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The Internet Scout Project (located in the Computer Sciences Department at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison) is pleased to announce that we have
received a grant for three years of continued funding from the National
Science Foundation. The grant, totalling $3,000,000, will enable us to
continue providing the current awareness and resource discovery services
that our readers have come to rely on, such as the Scout Report
(http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report) and Net-happenings
(http://www.gi.net/NET/), and it will allow us to broaden our scope to
include research into new technologies for helping people make more
effective use of the Internet's resources.

Here's an idea of some of the things we have in store for the coming months:

The Scout Report

Now in its fourth year of continuous publication, the Scout Report provides
thousands of readers worldwide with weekly updates on new and newly
discovered Internet resources in the areas of Research and Education,
General Interest, and Network Tools. The Scout Report will soon be joined
by three new Subject-Specific Scout Reports:
	* The Scout Report for Science and Engineering
	* The Scout Report for Social Science
	* The Scout Report for Business and Economics
Each of these new Scout Reports will be produced by a specialist in the
area, and held to the high standards that the Scout Report has established.
The Scout Report is available at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/
For more information on the Scout Report, please contact Jack Solock,
Editor, at jacks at cs.wisc.edu


Net-happenings

For more than four years, Net-happenings has provided Internet users with
bulletins describing new resources. Our new grant will allow us to
centralize our mailing list operations, and to provide an enhanced
interface to the collection of Internet resource announcements that Gleason
Sackman, moderator of Net-happenings, provides. Gleason can be reached at
gleason at rrnet.com.
For information on how to subscribe to Net-happenings, or to search the
archive of announcements, visit http://www.gi.net/NET/


Scout Report Signpost

Signpost, the newest service from Internet Scout, has just been released.
Having published weekly for over three years, the Scout Report editors
have collected a sizeable archive of annotations--some 2,100 (and
growing!) resources in research, education, and general interest areas.
The Scout Report Signpost will be the user's entrance to this archive of
the best that the net has to offer.
As useful as the Scout Report Signpost is to users, it represents a larger
accomplishment: the application of traditional cataloging methods, combined
with developing metadata standards, to the relatively new medium of
electronic-only publications. The Internet Scout team is tackling such
issues as the transient nature of hypertext addressing, which make the
cataloging of networked resources a great challenge. This is one area in
which Internet Scout will be devoting considerable resources in the coming
years. Signpost is available at
http://www.signpost.org/signpost/index.html
For more information on the Scout Report Signpost, please contact Amy Tracy
Wells, Signpost Coordinator, at awells at cs.wisc.edu


The KIDS Report

Produced for more than a year by students in Madison, WI, and Nederland and
Boulder, CO, the KIDS (Kids Identifying and Discovering Sites) Report is
the only Internet newsletter written for K-12 students by the students
themselves. Twice a month more than 2,000 students, teachers, and parents
read the KIDS Report, which presents reviews of about ten websites of
particular interest to kids. The KIDS Report is available at
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/KIDS/


The Scout Toolkit

We've just finished revamping the Scout Toolkit, and the result is a
tighter, more focused set of pages designed to help users make the most
effective use of the resources on the Internet.
	* The all-new Scout Select Bookmarks section presents an organized
collection of subject-specific meta-pages in a range of disciplines.
Finding resources in a particular area has never been easier.
	* Also updated is the Searching the Internet section, which has
been designed to help users get the most out of the major search engines,
directories, subject guides, and catalogs.
The Scout Toolkit is available at http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/toolkit/

We have many more innovative services in the works, and will announce them
in the Scout Report and on our website as they become available. If you
have any general questions about the Internet Scout Project or its
services, please send email to scout at cs.wisc.edu.

The Internet Scout Project is funded by the National Science Foundation and
is part of the InterNIC.