MnLink Gateway A gateway catalog has been created to allow Minnesotans to search a wide variety of libraries, including public, school, and university library catalogs, all at once or by geographical region. Found at http://www.mnlink.org, this site is part of an ambitious project to share the state's resources more easily. Though interlibrary loan is not currently enabled, there is an interlibrary loan feature in development. Along with library catalogs, other databases are available from this site, including WorldCat, the searcher-friendly version of the massive OCLC shared library catalog database (also available in our library through FirstSearch).

Guides Online Librarians who prepare bibliographies and guides tailored to the needs of a course have begun to put them on the web. Currently available: guides for the U.S. constitution, women's health care, international relations, and more. Find them at: http://gustavus.edu/Library/bi.htm.

The internet was born thirty years ago on October 29th. Known then as "Arpanet" the project, sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, began with two nodes three hundred miles apart. The first message to travel across cyberspace was, simply, "login." And it caused the system to crash.

Thirty years later, the internet has become an essential part of the infrastructure for academic life. In its infancy and adolescence, the 'net was used mainly by scientists sharing information among a relatively small community. But the development of tools that made it easier to send messages and access servers made its uses far more widespread. And through the medium's youth, there seemed to be a lighthearted search for metaphors that would describe the potential of the 'net while emphasizing the deliberate lack of hierarchy in its design. Gopher, named for its point of origin at the University of Minnesota, also played off the notion it would "go fer" information through a maze of menus that burrowed through sites like gopher holes. The Archie program for searching for files quickly led to other programs being christened Jughead and Veronica. And then, as browsers were developed to find and display texts with embedded hyperlinks, metaphors of navigation, exploration, and (more light-heartedly) surfing developed, suggesting travel travel across an uncharted sea, or perhaps skimming across the surface of a huge, 
advancing wave. But a competing metaphor of the spider webseems to have become the defining image.