So I was just noodling around in cyberspace today and I accidentally discovered that the SCREEN-L archives are now available via Gopher. This makes them *much* more accessible than they used to be. Now every message ever posted on SCREEN-L--almost three years worth of film/TV discussion--can be easily located and retrieved. Plus, you can *search* the archives for specific words (e.g., film/TV titles or subjects), making it a virtual database of film/TV knowledge. **For those of you who know about Gopher already: 1. Burrow over to UA1VM.UA.EDU. 2. From the menu choose "Local UA1VM Listserv Archives." 3. Then choose "Film & TV Studies Discussion List." (Note: it doesn't say SCREEN-L at this point.) 4. From there you may search the archives or you may descend through the menus to the monthly files of SCREEN-L messages. **For those of you who think a gopher is just an annoying rodent: Gopher is a piece of software that greatly simplifies the use of the Internet. It allows you to move around (burrow through) the Internet by making choices from a series of menus--instead of trying to remember arcane commands like FTP and Telnet. With a press of a button you're quickly connected with distant computers all over the globe. Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota (the fighting? rampaging? golden? Gophers). There are two parts of Gopher: client software and server software. The client is what you use to connect with a distant server which might house databases or files you can transfer back "home" to your client's computer. Gopher is available in a variety of flavors: mainframe, PC, Mac, Unix, and so on. The cool thing is, they all talk happily (more or less) with one another. The UNcool thing is, the computer your client runs on must be *directly* hung on the Internet. So, if you just have an e-mail connection to the Internet and you can't normally do things like Telnet and FTP, then you won't be able to Gopher either. To see if you can gopher, try this experiment: The next time you're connected to your school's mainframe computer or VAX cluster, or you're hooked up to America On Line or Delphi, and you're at some sort of a command prompt, type gopher UA1VM.UA.EDU or gopher UA1VM.UA.EDU 70 If your machine understands Gopher-talk it'll connect you with the Gopher server at the University of Alabama, where you can browse the SCREEN-L archives till your eyes start twitching from overstimulation. ******************************************************************* Jeremy Butler [log in to unmask] SCREEN-L Coordinator [log in to unmask] Telecommunication & Film Dept. * University of Alabama * Tuscaloosa *******************************************************************