Hi all --- The question of how to make a database Internet ready is a good one, and one that I can (sort of) answer. The standard way to do an Internet database is to take the database and dump it into ASCII format. Each line of ASCII text is a row in the database and each field is delimited with some standard character. Once in ASCII format, you need to reformat the ASCII into "paragraph" format. Then, the whole file is full text indexed, with each "paragraph" as the returnable item. The full text indexer is usually a free program called WAIS. WAIS can be easily incorporated in the functionality of gopher, which is now a standard Internet retrieval tool. Once linked to gopher, any gopher user can perform searches on the database and have the search results returned. The main drawback to this method is two-fold. One, you need to have a "real" database and an ASCII version lying around... it doubles space. Two, you cannot perform some sophisticated searches like "depth>300" because the indexer does not recognize numerics. I think later versions of the indexer might fix this problem. The other method for linking a database would be to run a World Wide Web server and link your database to the server using forms functionality. This is still somewhat in a prototype stage and requires the database be SQL compliant. Otherwise, it works fine. To see an example of a database set up via gopher, check out the UCMP gopher (gopher ucmp1.berkeley.edu). Look under Museum Type Specimen Catalogs and Indices. Cheers, Robert Guralnick Museum of Paleontology University of California Berkeley, CA 94720 [log in to unmask] (510) 642-9696