The Peabody Museum is pleased to offer several additions/enhancements to
its collections gopher (gopher.peabody.yale.edu, port 70):
 
(1) the Anthropology Division is now online and has posted 60,084 records
    from its Caribbean archeological collections to the gopher; notes and
    descriptions of the material can be found on the Anthropology menu.
 
(2) there is a new service on the main menu that lets you search for any
    labeled feature appearing on topographic maps put out by the US
    Geological Survey; there are 1,233,933 records to peruse from across
    the USA, covering populated places, parks, lakes, mountains, and all
    sorts of other features; please read the help file before exploring.
 
(3) the WAIS indexing/search engine has been modified so that search
    hits are returned in alphabetical order by header (for the
    collections databases, this means your results will always be
    sorted by taxon, which should simplify scrolling through hits); the
    alphabetizing holds for searches that specify untruncated keywords
    and/or booleans, but it does not necessarily hold when substrings
    are used (i.e., trailing "*" as in "substri*").
 
(4) restrictions on allowable keywords have also been relaxed in the WAIS
    engine as much as possible; now, all words except for single
    characters (a-z) and the coden "YPM" are potentially valid (this is
    essentially a purging of the file stoplist.c; a few other odd WAIS
    limitations remain in effect, and we are working on expunging them).
 
(5) all catalogued lots in the Ichthyology databases now have at least
    partial collecting event data added to them (previously, only about
    30 percent of the 9,908 lots had any such data); the "Notes" file on
    the Ichthyology menu discusses this a bit more.
 
Enjoy!
 
Larry Gall                 [log in to unmask]
Systems Office             203-432-9892 voice
Peabody Museum             203-432-9816 FAX
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06511