Robert Guralnick writes: quote -- I think this is a REALLY good question. It, luckily, has what I consider to be a very simple answer. The world does not need any more sloppy, unorganized, cluttered gopher. The world needs lots more well organized and well maintained, specific, topical and useful gophers. end quote -- Of course, the really big problem is parsimony. Who has the big overview here, and who decides what is, or is not, useful? We may need a new William of Ockham to help us out here. The question of organization and quality of content is clear though, this is absolutely vital. Whether or not Gophers and/or WWW servers are the ideal answer to this, and to the more general "retrie val-relevance-volume" problem that WAIS and Veronica have trouble coping with is of course another matter. pat Pat Coppock The University of Trondheim Faculty of Arts and Science The Department of Applied Linguistics The Multimedia Lab N-7055 Dragvoll Norway PS as regards the wood-pulp electronic blip issue, there is one clear advantage with the blips, they do not (in themselves) "pollute" (nature, that is), they are infinitely "biodegradable" and they can be "cleaned up" more easily than oil spills - or can they? Unfortunately many of these "blips" seem to obtain some kind of "charmed" life of their own, once they get stored on some server harddisk out there into cyberspace, and they seem to have an increasing tendency NOT to get cleaned up. I have some real problems with my desktop computer, especially after I started using the Internet many hours each day. A really incredible amount of stuff gets generated by net activities and stored. Most of it I might never need again, but there is this kind of obsessive little (researcher?) voice inside that keeps saying: "Yes, but you never know; that particular file just might contain some vital information that you may need later when you are doing a paper or a grant proposal". What we probably need are better paradigms for identification of the relative "values of documents", and preferably some kind of system that allows semi-automatic filing and stepwise junking of stuff in terms of its (user-perceived and defined) relevance or usability criteria. Some ftp servers I have been at have shareware stuff lying there from years back. Once very complex "statically organized" information systems are set up, it seems often difficult for people to both maintain/organize/reorganize AND update them. Most often seem to get updated from time to time, but they rarely get "sheared" down to the bone and rebuilt. It is generally perceived as more work than it is worth. The insights museum people have in relation to the amount of storage space available in relation to the perceived "preservation/ collection value" of some piece or other must be relevant here. I suppose it is a variant of the "type-token" distinction, with the general idea being to try and identify the tokens that most closely embody the particular set of qualities associated with the type, as judged by "qualified knowers". Or perhaps I'm talking rubbish since I am not a museum person? Maybe we need more cyberspace museums where we can keep some examples of various datatypes to remind us things that were, but that weren't all that useful..?? Then it might be able to throw away stuff!! oops, sorry, this little "aside" got a bit out of hand.... have a nice weekend! ;-) pat