[172] in Information Retrieval
Re: LIB OF CONG INTERNET ACCESS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Mon May 17 09:32:41 1993
From: ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: jon@GZA.COM (Jon A. Rochlis)
Cc: elibdev@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 14 May 93 16:40:33 -0500.
Date: Mon, 17 May 93 09:32:09 EDT
The LC databases are very rich in content and very poor in access.
The system is an LC home-grown product called LOCIS (Lib. of Cong.
Info. Sys.), and the files are called SCORPIO (Subject Content online
something or other). The system began as a tool for the Congressional
Research Service at LC to help in their work for congress.
Even though I used the system for the six years I was at LC, I had a
hard time remembering all the magic incantations; basically one
BROWSES (B Anthropology) an index, SELECTS (S b6) the set that
corresponds to the stuff your're looking for, and then you DISPLAY
(D 1) the SET you have created. You can get to the full display of
a particular item in the SET, by DISPLAY SET/ITEM# (D 1/item4).
As you can see, it's pretty laborious. Once ingrained, however, you
can manipulate sets with boolean operators and limit sets by date,
language, etc.
To my knowledge, there is no Z39.50 effort to make this easier.
Carter Snowden has put the access into the Library GOPHER, and we're
working to get it into the Library DASH menu.
Enjoy,
Greg
-------------
>This looks somewhat interesting ...
>------- Forwarded Message
>Date: 14 May 1993 11:26:11 GMT
>From: "DANIEL MORGAN" <MORGAN@MAIL.LOC.GOV>
>Subject: LIB OF CONG INTERNET ACCESS
>To: jon@GZA.COM
>Comment: LIB OF CONG INTERNET ACCESS
> In case you're interested... The library's databases are
> supposedly now available to the public via internet. I don't
> know if everything's there, or what kind of interface they're
> using, or anything else, but supposedly one can now telnet to
> locis.loc.gov and get all kinds of stuff. I doubt that the
> catalog info would be of much interest, but maybe the online
> summaries of legislation past and present, and miscellaneous
> other stuff. Beats me, but I thought I'd let you know. Tell me
> how it works out if you try it.
>
> D
>------- End of Forwarded Message
