Date:     Tue, 26 Jul 1994 09:51:38 -0700
From:     H-RHETOR <HATCHG@jkhbhrc.byu.edu>
Subject:  Guide to On-line books
To:       Recipients of list H-RHETOR
          <H-RHETOR%UICVM.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
......................................................................


      Alex: A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet
                          July 23, 1994

     This is to announce the available of a new service, "Alex:
A Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the Internet."  Alex can be
found at gopher://rsl.ox.ac.uk:70/11/lib-corn/hunter, or by
pointing at gopher.ox.ac.uk, choosing "The World", then
"Gopherspace", and then "Alex".

     Alex allows users to find and retrieve the full-text of
documents on the Internet.  It currently indexes over 700 books
and shorter texts by author and title, incorporating texts from
Project Gutenberg, Wiretap, the On-line Book Initiative, the
Eris system at Virginia Tech, the English Server at Carnegie
Mellon University, and the on-line portion of the Oxford Text
Archive.  For now it includes no serials.  Alex does include an
entry for itself.

     New publications at the sites above will be detected
automatically.  However, pointers to other sites, specific
suggestions for additions to the catalogue, and notifications of
errors are welcome, particularly those with full bibliographic
information and URLs.  The email address for Alex is
alex@rsl.ox.ac.uk.

     Gopher space for Alex is graciously provided by the
Radcliffe Science Library of Oxford University, which bears no
responsibility for its content.  World-Wide Web and WAIS
interfaces for Alex are forthcoming, as are tools to identify
bad URLs and to sort copy records in reverse order of server
response time.  The Alex database is copyright 1994 and released
for noncommercial use.  No claims are made concerning the
copyright status or quality of texts referenced in the database.

Hunter Monroe