Newsletter Archive

Newsletter No. 28


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                             Free Pint
         "Helping 18,000 people use the Web for their work"
                    http://www.freepint.co.uk/
ISSN 1460-7239                                   17 December 1998 #28
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                           IN THIS ISSUE

                             EDITORIAL

                        TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
                 "Review of Online Information 98"
                        by Dr Anne L Barker

                          FEATURE ARTICLE
                        "Free Pint in 1998"
                 by William Hann, Managing Editor

                        FREE PINT FEEDBACK
          "News search engines / Publishing newsletters"
         "Bnet - free to academic librarians and lecturers"
                     "Telephone/Internet Costs"
                   "Business Leads - Profiling"
         "Public libraries using porn filters on the Web"

                        CONTACT INFORMATION

              ONLINE VERSION WITH ACTIVATED HYPERLINKS
            http://www.freepint.co.uk/issues/171298.htm

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     *** Information World Review on the Web - www.iwr.co.uk ***

With stories from the most recent issue of IWR, Internet Developments
and breaking news from NewsPage, www.iwr.co.uk is the Web site for
the information industry.
And coming soon - a fully searchable archive of past IWR articles.
Visit the Web site for more details.  http://www.iwr.co.uk/

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                             EDITORIAL

We hope you'll agree that 1998 has been a super year for Free Pint!
If you have enjoyed reading the newsletter as much as we've enjoyed
putting it together then all we ask is that you tell your friends and 
colleagues - why not forward this issue to them?

Today's edition brings you a review of "Online Information 98" 
which includes details of all those hard to find free trials! This 
is followed by a look at the past year for Free Pint -  we have 
pulled together interesting anecdotes, facts, and feedback on how
our stand went at the Online 98 exhibition (including announcement
of the winners of the two Christmas hampers!). We then round off 
with the Feedback section which once again is packed with opinions, 
tips and questions from readers.

We need to crack on and so it just remains for me to wish you ...

         "A Very Merry Christmas and Prosperous New Year"

... and to invite you to partake of your twenty eighth Free Pint!

Kind regards,
William

William Hann MIInfSc, Managing Editor
e: william@freepint.co.uk
t: +44 (0)1784 455435
f: +44 (0)1784 455436

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                 ***  2b Free Email Goes Live  ***

2b, the UK's hottest new portal has expanded on its great new 
services with Free Email. 2bmail features not only the usual web 
based email, but it allows you to check your pop account mail as well.
You can also setup ICQ and Pager forwarding so those important emails
get to you straight away for no extra charge. To sign up to 2bmail or
any other great service at 2b visit http://www.2b.co.uk/

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        >>> Shouldn't your company be advertising here? <<<
  18,000 subscribers, free banner adverts, placement in Web archive

   Call for our free "Guide for Advertisers" on +44 (0)1784 455435
Visit http://www.freepint.co.uk/advert.htm or email ads@freepint.co.uk


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                        TIPS AND TECHNIQUES

                 "Review of Online Information 98"
                        by Dr Anne L Barker

Reading through the pre-publicity for the Online Information 98
exhibition and conference you might have been excused for concluding
that the whole thing centred round Knowledge Management (KM) and
intranets, and not the provision of online information at all! Most of
the "key themes" listed involved one of these two topics - there was a
one-day "executive business briefing" on KM the day before the
exhibition/conference opened, and "Track One" of the conference's
parallel sessions covered intranets (day one) and KM (day two). Martin
White of TFPL http://www.tfpl.com gave a conference paper on the
technical and contractual issues involved in delivering commercial
database information to intranets, which should be recommended reading
for all concerned; David Snowden (IBM http://www.uk.ibm.com/) talked
about "communities of competence", such as professional associations,
and organisational structures and co-dependence, the latter being at
the heart of entrepreneurial teams.

"Virtual communities" were the subject of one conference session and
featured in the exhibition. In his paper, William Town of ChemWeb
http://chemweb.com, admitted that ChemWeb start-up costs totalled
$6M, development costs were around $2M and running costs are $2.5M per
year. The service is currently heavily subsidised, its income coming
from adverts and sponsorship and commission on sales of full text and
other products via the site. The different payment models used for
purchases from the various publishers are the publishers' own choices.
The aim is for ChemWeb to become self-supporting within the next 2-3
years. Sift plc's stand http://www.sift.co.uk featured AccountingWEB
http://www.accountingweb.co.uk and TrainingZONE
http://www.trainingzone.co.uk; they also run BusinessZONE
http://www.businesszone.co.uk for SOHO and SME businesses. The
Institution of Electrical Engineers also has a forum for news,
discussions, careers and recruitment at http://forum.iee.org.uk/.

Engineering Information Inc. http://www.ei.org, who run the
award-winning Engineering Village, is to release Ei Computing Village.
Created to support computer scientists in academia and industry, the
new Internet-based subscription service will provide information for
programmers, IT managers, researchers, engineers and other
professionals. In addition to links to relevant web sites, the service
will provide an index of and direct access to the full text of over
1,000,000 conference papers and journal articles through Ei Compendex
for Computing, including access to electronic journals.

"Content aggregators" were to the fore, selling themselves and their
services this year, the phrase being used by companies who bring
together and package for resale related information sources (such as
databases) in one service (usually via the web), for easy user access.
Funny, we used to call them "online hosts" ...

Reuters' fourth research document in the "information overload" series
was released, indicating that 76% of the 1,072 managers interviewed
(worldwide) think that information is "mission critical" to their
businesses. Nearly half said "information overload" is getting worse
but a similar proportion said that the Internet had made the problem
better! The top two constraints preventing these managers from
obtaining the information they require were said to be time and not
knowing how to get the information. Of the 210 UK managers
interviewed, 63% use the Internet weekly and 34% use an intranet
weekly, 73% have a home computer used for work, education and
entertainment.

Judging by the queue outside at 9 a.m. on the opening morning, many
"old hands" were caught out by the change in exhibition opening times
this year, from 9.30 a.m. to 10 a.m. Some exhibition visitors were
disappointed to find the likes of British Telecom and Internet Service
Providers such as America Online, Demon and Compuserve once again
absent. Others not up-to-date with their knowledge of online industry
mergers and acquisitions struggled to find well-known names like
Kompass, LEXIS-NEXIS and Butterworths (now all part of Reed Elsevier),
or Disclosure and Datastream (both owned by Primark) as the index in
the exhibition guide did not include cross references between
products, services and the names of the companies paying for the
stands.

The pre-publicity heralded "over 350 stands", which turned out to be
about 300 stands, but that's 50 (20%) more than last year's total. As
one exhibitor commented, this does not suggest an industry in
recession. In fact, according to IRN http://www.irnxxx.co.uk, the
European market for online business information alone will have grown
by 10.9% to 644m pounds during 1998. Between 17-18,000 people visited 
the exhibition over the three day period.

And finally, acknowledging the limitations of current Web browser
technology, Dow Jones http://ip.dowjones.com has announced it will
launch a Windows-based interface for the Dow Jones Publication Library
on April 1, 1999, and at the same time shut-down dial-up access to Dow
Jones Interactive. The Windows interface offers improvements in the
formatting and printing of articles, features that cannot be
implemented in a Web browser interface. Will others follow?

If you weren't able to visit the exhibition to pick up the traditional
freebies of pens, mugs, mouse mats etc, you can still pick up on some
of the free services or free trials offered:

Free services

Encyclopaedia Britannica's http://www.britannica.co.uk/ eBLAST is
available free of charge at http://www.eBLAST.com, is "the 
thinking person's guide to the Web". eBLAST's team review and present 
the most useful sources of information on the Internet. Featuring a
sophisticated search-and-retrieval system and an outline of subjects,
eBLAST makes it easy to find worthwhile sites.

European Patent Office http://www.european-patent-office.org
esp@cenet (sic) is a new free patent searching service provided by the
European Patent Organisation on the Internet. UK access is at
http://www.dips.papent.gov.uk/. Coverage is all patent applications
published in the past two years by EPO national offices. Full
bibliographic details are displayed, with links to PDF page images for
patents from the EPO, France, Germany, Switzerland, UK, USA and WIPO.

PubList.com http://www.publist.com
A free directory of "the world's periodicals". Searchable by title,
browsable by title, publisher and subject discipline.

Top Jobs on the Net http://www.topjobs.net
For management, professional and technical positions.

Free trials (to subscription services)

Anbar http://www.anbar.co.uk/anbar.htm
Guest access for 30 days is offered to the Anbar Electronic
Intelligence library, which covers more than 800 top international
journals (450 in management, 200 in computer science and 150 in civil
engineering).

BIOSIS http://www.biosis.org
BIOSIS is offering free one-month trial access to its MethodsFinder
service http://www.methodsfinder.org/. During their introductory
period, anyone submitting an original protocol will receive three
months' free access to the service.

Derwent http://www.derwent.com/
From 1st December, Derwent Discovery
http://www.derwent-discovery.com/ offers web access to the Derwent
Drug File (DDF) and the Derwent World Drug Alerts (DWDA), two of
Derwent's most important pharmaceutical databases. 30-day free trials
are available.

Economist Intelligence Unit  http://www.eiu.com
EIU are offering 14-day free trials to companies wishing to access
CountryNet http://www.countrynet.com/. Information is available on
more than 80 countries, detailing business customs, etiquette and
protocol, tax and immigration laws, and key developments likely to
affect businesses.

ILI http://www.ili.co.uk
Free trial subscriptions are available to Standards Infobase, Eurolaw,
Metals Infobase, Materials Infobase and Technology Infodisk.

Ovid Technologies http://www.ovid.com
Free demo databases from Ovid's collection of 90 bibliographic
scientific, technical and medical databases are available at
http://demo.ovid.com/libpreview/

HW Wilson Company http://www.hwwilson.com
HW Wilson offer 30-day free trial access to 35 of their bibliographic
databases.

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Dr Anne Barker is nearing the end of a five-year contract lecturing
and researching in information retrieval (with a focus on online and
Internet searching and related quality issues) in the Department of
Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales
Aberystwyth. Recent research projects include a study of the usability
and functionality of web-based interfaces for online searching, and
the summative evaluation of the parallel print/electronic journal
ARIADNE http://www.ariadne.ac.uk. Before joining DILS in March 1994,
Anne spent 15 months as a member of a "change management" team within
Corporate Estates at AEA Technology (the UK Atomic Energy Authority),
helping to prepare the facilities management division for
privatisation. Prior to this, Anne managed the Technical and Business
Information Centre at the AEA's Risley site near Warrington.

Anne may be contacted by email: Anne.Barker@aber.ac.uk

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              >>> Easy way to recommend Free Pint <<<

         Want us to send a sample of Free Pint to a friend?
          Simply visit http://www.freepint.co.uk/reco.htm

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                          FEATURE ARTICLE

                        "Free Pint in 1998"
                 by William Hann, Managing Editor

What a fabulous and enjoyable year "Free Pint" has had. I have
therefore devoted this section to bringing you the highlights of Free
Pint's year and some interesting facts about the newsletter.

I have also sent a separate email with the full "Free Pint 1998
Index".  This is your handy reference guide to all the articles and
feedback subjects so that you can easily find previous items of
interest. Please feel free to print out the Index for future reference
or distribute it around your company or organisation.


Publication
-----------
Free Pint has been published every two weeks on a Thursday and this
year's issues have contained over half a million characters. To print
this all out would take 200 sheets of paper. It was only published
late once and that was due to the birth of my daughter Imogen.  Even
then it was being compiled in the hospital and sent out at 8am on the
morning after (sad, I know!).

The production team here have a great time and, although it is free,
have calculated that we have spent around 2,000 hours this year
working on Free Pint. This does not take into account the time taken
by authors to research and write their articles.  Producing,
distributing and promoting each issue of the newsletter is therefore a
major undertaking. Indeed simply publishing the newsletter has
involved sending almost 200,000 emails or 5.5 Gigabytes (5500
Megabytes) of data.


Subscribers
-----------
Free Pint now has over 18,000 subscribers and started the year with
2,000.  We have subscribers in 115 countries around the world and know
the geographical location of 93%. If all of our subscribers stood
shoulder to shoulder, the line would stretch 6 miles (or 9
kilometres). 

We get at least 50 new subscribers each and every day, or 500 each
issue. Around 77% of our subscribers are professionally employed and
to print a list of all subscribers would require 200 sheets of paper.


Articles
--------
We have reviewed over 1000 Web addresses this year and have scanned
them for some interesting quotes ...

... for instance, can you believe that this appeared ...

   "You can read thousands of testimonials and listen to medical
   scientists argue for and against the benefits of shark cartilage,
   but until you try it yourself you will never reap the benefits of
   this incredible white powder." Issue #6


We've also found some other interesting comments:

   "It will be a great year if you remember - eagles soar and
   chickens flap." Issue #8

   "There is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas
   Wilson - Chairman of IBM, 1943)  Issue #9

   "Year after year Intelligent Environments have doggedly stuck
   with the banana theme.  Near naked men and women painted green 
   keep everyone supplied with bananas. Why? Who knows?'" Issue #14

   "You've never really experienced a shopping high until you've
   paid for a tailor-made gene knocked out mouse." Issue #17


There have been a number of interesting acronyms, including:

   "EEVL" - Edinburgh Energy Virtual Library http://www.eevl.ac.uk
   "EELS" - Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden
            http://www.ub2.lu.se/eel/
   "SPIN" - Science Policy Information News
            http://wisdom.wellcome.ac.uk/wisdom/spinhome.html
   "SCAN" - Science Awareness Newsletter
            http://www.britassoc.org.uk/info/scan.html


Or how about some intriguing Web sites:

   "Video clips of cells in action to the accompaniment of 
   appropriate sound effects.  Cells squirm, contract and engulf each
   other." Cells Alive - http://www.cellsalive.com/  Issue #17

   "The real story about smoking, drinking and getting high"
   Ask Dr. Steve - http://www.DrSteve.org/  Issue #26 

   Dates from Hell http://www.datesfromhell.com/dfh/index.htm  #26


Advertising
-----------
As you know, the newsletter is free to you because it is supported by
advertising.  We have had over 50 newsletter adverts this year, and we
also carry banner adverts on the Web site and have displayed over
200,000 banners at http://www.freepint.co.uk/


Online Information 98
---------------------
The popularity of Free Pint this year culminated last week in us
enjoying a large stand at the "Online Information 98" exhibition at
Olympia, London.

We had some great fun on the stand meeting new and current subscribers
and inviting them to post messages on our Free Pint Forum wall. We had
some A6 size sticky notes printed with the Free Pint logo (a beer jug
of course!) and people wrote their comments, tips and ideas on the
notes and literally stuck them on the wall. We even had contributions
emailed in from around the world which we wrote up for our absent
friends.  There were about 50 contributions in all and here is a
selection for your interest:

   "Tip: File all your Free Pint articles in a specific directory in 
   your email, then any time you're struggling for ideas on where to 
   look for information, "search and find" will give you a quick 
   reference."

   "Free Pint is informative, useful and interesting. Can easily get 
   drunk on the information.  Great work - make it go from strength to 
   strength."
   
   "Please tell me: why do people believe what search engines tell 
   them?  Because they believe computers tell the truth?  Let's 
   enlighten them!"
   
   "We love Free Pint and came out of gratitude"

   "When oh when will we get fast access after our Americans friends
   wake up?? (3pm onwards)"

   "Free Pint is one of my favourite e-zines, which I forward to 
   several other information specialists.  High impact articles, with 
   a constant quality. Keep up the good work!"

There were also discussions on topics like setting up a free presence
on the Net, whether digital TV will become a prime Net access medium,
and if Free Pint could be translated into French or have low-cost
classifieds at the end.  All good suggestions that we will think about
for the future.

Ten Free Pint authors also helped out on the stand, meeting people and
answering questions. They also helped us give away free beer (yes,
over 100 "free pints" were given away at various times) and we even
had specially-commissioned "Free Pint" 12-pint beer glasses!
One of these collected business cards for the draw for our two
Christmas hampers. We are pleased to announce that these were won by    
Melissa Richardson, Business Information Officer at the Institute of
Directors, and Dr Chris Chapman, Senior Information Officer at The
Boots Company.


Free Pint in 1998
-----------------
So this was a fabulous end to a fabulous year. I would like to thank
the other members of the Free Pint team, namely Rex our Editor and
Jane our Administrator, and to you, our loyal Free Pint readership.

     Please raise your glasses to another fun year at Free Pint!

William Hann
Managing Editor, Free Pint
william@freepint.co.uk

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     Sue Hill Recruitment & Services Ltd - new jobs every day

We are always keen to hear from flexible, adaptable individuals
seeking a move within the information sector.  Our clients are blue
chip companies who want the best and trust us to provide it.

T +44 171 732 6671/F +44 171 732 6718 jobs@suehill.com www.suehill.com
Seasonal Greetings to all 'Free Pint' readers from Sue, Jo & Claire.

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                          FREE PINT FACT

                 Over 80% of new subscribers find
                 Free Pint through recommendation

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                        FREE PINT FEEDBACK

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Subject: News search engines / Publishing newsletters
From:    Ted Mole, Head of Information Services, Uranium Institute
Date:    Thursday 10th December 1998

First of all thanks for an excellent service. I only signed up 
yesterday and have now read 3 issues and found something useful in 
each. I also find the whole idea useful as a possible input into a 
virtual community which I am in the process of building. I've tried 
bulletin boards: too passive, listservs: too impersonal, etc.

On the subject of news search engines I'm surprised no-one mentioned 
the NewsTrakker service at Excite which is current, broad ranging, 
though rather US biased, and tuneable i.e. you can build your own 
profiles, as many as you like. I do a trawl everyday using a mix of 
hardcopy newspapers and Yahoo (Reuters tends to be more current 
here), Infoseek, Excite and NewsPage. The answer really depends on 
what you want to cover.

There are also hosts of agents (some intelligent and some less so) 
which can do the job for you, to a greater or lesser degree. A good 
site to visit for an overview of these is Botspot http://botspot.com/ 
I have to say that I tend to have passing enthusiasms for these 
agents, I download one, set it up and get it running and then find 
it's not really what I'm after and go back to other methods (see 
above).  One of the best I have come across was the Autonomy desktop 
product, alas no longer available now that Autonomy has won some 
venture cap and moved up to server side bigtime products. The last 
time I used Autonomy it would not only search according to your 
profile but retrieve the complete item (not just the link) and 
compile it into a personalised newspaper for you. Very neat but 
essentially just a demo of the product potential which was ruined 
by the duff nature of the sources you could choose from.

If your need is not just for news but also new pages on sites of 
interest, which may of course include press releases, try a free 
service called Mind-It from NetMind http://mindit.netmind.com/ 
which lets you specify URLs which you would like to have monitored. 
Changes are then notified to you by email. If you can afford the time 
to visit a host of sites every day, or the space and line time to use 
WebWhacker or something similar, then Mindit is maybe not for you. 
As you might expect it lags a bit behind postings but I have found 
it quite useful for monitoring the news and press release pages of 
companies in which I have an interest.


I heard your presentation, William, at the Online Information 98 
Conference on Tuesday and was interested that your experience with 
Free Pint was so close to my own with regard to a weekly nuclear 
industry news review which I publish by email and then post to 
our web site http://www.uilondon.org/   We started with fax, moved to
Compuserve and then to direct email distribution from our Exchange 
server. Through these changes and over the 7 year life of the 
newsletter it has always been kept to the equivalent of 2 sides 
of A4, has kept to short items with citations to find more if you 
need to and the dominant response has always been: "great service, 
saves me loads of time, whatever you do don't change it."

It has never become interactive in the way that Free Pint has, I 
suspect because its audience is executives rather than information 
people, also of course it never contains direct requests for help or 
information. User response is usually heaviest when it doesn't hit 
the desk at the expected time (very rare).

All for now

Ted Mole, Head of Information Services
Uranium Institute  http://www.uilondon.org/

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Subject: Bnet - free to academic librarians and lecturers
From:    Fiona White, Bnet Information Manager
Date:    Friday 27th November 1998

Dear William

Thanks for featuring Bnet as part of the article by Diana 
Grimwood-Jones on business management case studies - 26/11/98.  I 
would just like to point out to Free Pint readers that Bnet is also 
free to academic librarians and lecturers.  

Bnet is a business management knowledge base containing Management 
Guides, Case Studies, Management and Marketing Abstracts from PIRA, 
business and management courses, training and events, useful contacts 
and directories of venture capital providers, business grants and 
MBA courses. 

Bnet has recently been relaunched with a new easier navigation system 
and a business news service.

Fiona White
Bnet Information Manager
http://www.bnet.co.uk/

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Subject: Telephone/Internet Costs
From: Various

"Your American correspondent who stated that the system in Canada is 
the same as the US is wrong.  Somewhere around there is also 
the statement that "most things in the US are cheaper...."

                        wrong! wrong! wrong!

The US has some of the highest costs in the world - health and dental 
care for example - no free rides. As to Internet access and telephone 
Canada is - generally speaking - cheaper than the States. 

My example (using current exchange rates) - my phone costs - per
month 9 pounds sterling and that includes ALL calls within roughly a
50 miles radius of the city in which I live (Edmonton, Alberta. pop 
about 650,000). Then I pay 90 pounds sterling per YEAR for unlimited 
internet access including a 10 mb web site - I still have many 
friends and family in the UK - I left there in 1958 but get back 
there every couple of years. Your cost of living has shot out of 
sight since the EEC (so has the COL of every EEC country, for that 
matter) and I see the poor old Brit public being screwed glued and 
tattooed - and BT is still a joke compared with telephone service 
here. I can get phones installed (or removed) within 24 hours - I 
have a choice of 4 long distance companies (who are all cutting one 
another's throats for business) - for example, right now I can call 
the UK (any time of day, 7 days a week) for approx. 9 pence per 
minute). I can put in as many extensions through the house as I 
want - without paying extra for them - I do not even have to use 
the telephone cos. own phone - I can buy my own in plenty of local
stores, for as little as about 5 pounds. 

No, Canada is a far cheaper place to live than the States - and I 
would estimate that living costs here are about half what they are 
in the UK - salaries about level. Gas - sorry, petrol - is presently 
79 pence per Imperial gallon (although Canada has long been metric I 
still think imperial) and you can get a good hotel for 35 pounds per 
night - less in the smaller towns and less for motels on the road. 
But don't rush out - we've a fair amount of unemployment too!."

Ron Garland, Canada


"Continuing on the theme of my last message - boycotting the 
Internet. Perhaps you would like to check out this site for news of 
a French boycott which was planned for yesterday. 

http://www2.nando.net:80/newsroom/ntn/biz/121398/biz6_23989_noframes.html

Unfortunately I didn't find it till today.

It seems that there is a Europewide movement to persuade national 
telecoms companies to make the Net cheaper to access.  As Information 
Professionals it is important that we all support this in order to 
close the gap between the 'information rich' and 'information poor'.  
Many will agree that access to information is the key to opportunity, 
to improving individual circumstances, as well as society in general.

I hope a similar movement will gather momentum in Britain."

Lynn Robertson, Aberystwyth University


"You have recently published a number of comments about phone rates. There
is absolutely no reason why ISP's cannot provide freephone access. In the
USA, where freephone is considered a key element of good PR, it accounts
for about 50% of all toll and trunk (i.e 'regional' and 'national') calls
and they have twice run out of freephone numbers. 

In Europe, on the other hand, it is seen as an unnecessary expense and
there is a tendency for companies to move information services to premium
or other expensive rates, so that users 'learn' that information cannot be
obtained for nothing. Recent British examples of such thinking are
Eurostar, Eurotunnel and Air UK/KLM (a 'quick' call to Eurotunnel to make
a reservation can now cost several pounds - and you are not guaranteed a
place, anyway). 

This attitude is clearly demonstrated by a recent British Airways Concorde
promotion: they gave a freephone number and were inundated by callers. A
senior member of the telecomms industry asked why BA 'wasted' a
potentially profitable opportunity (and returns to shareholders) in this
way, when they could have used a shared-revenue (premium-rate) number and
made a substantial profit!

Perhaps, therefore, pressure for freephone numbers would be more useful in
Europe than Internet strikes.

Thanks for a great mag,

P.S. Your US correspondent might be interested to know that London has the
world's largest local-call area.

Also, your readers might like to know that in 1996 the US Telecom Act 
introduced what is known as the Library Tax or Universal Service Fund.
This tax is assessed at 4.9% of a person's total phone bill and is
designed to pay for schools' and libraries' Internet access costs. 
I've no idea of its effect - but it's an interesting policy."

Ralph Adam, City University

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Subject: Business Leads - Profiling
From:    Bobby Choudhury
Date:    Monday 14th December 1998

Dear Free Pint,

I would just like to say that as a Market Researcher I have found 
the "Free Pint" newsletter to be of enormous help and it provides a
wealth of information especially useful websites for Industry news 
and streamlined searches for your particular area of interest.

As mentioned I work as a Market Researcher and am currently looking 
for software that is able to search for companies that fulfil
specific criteria, e.g. 30+ IT development staff within the finance, 
IT and Pharmaceutical Industry.  

This may seem fairly straightforward, but unfortunately I have yet 
to find a software which can cater for my requirements.  Most 
directories and on-line CD-ROMs do not provide the number of IT 
staff specifically working on software development or IT Projects.  
The Software Users Year Book is the only source which fulfils my 
requirement (only just).  

Is there anyone out there who can provide some assistance in my 
quest?  Any information would be greatly appreciated.  

Many thanks
Bobby Choudhury 

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Subject: QUESTION:  Public libraries using porn filters on the Web
From:    Lance Housley, Reference Librarian, North Devon Library, UK
Date:    Wednesday 9th December 1998

Towards the end of November 98 (I'm working from memory here, and I 
cannot be sure of the details) there was a court judgement in 
Virginia, USA to the effect that it is illegal for an American public 
library to insist that people using its computers to access the Web 
MUST use a porn filter.  It was, I think, something to do with 
freedom of speech.  Now, I think that I caught a glimpse somewhere of 
a subsequent ruling from the US Supreme Court, but I cannot find any 
details.  Does anyone know anything about this?

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