Last updated: July 1993
 
Welcome to the Bar-Ilan University (Israel) Information System
 
What is Gopher?
 
   gopher  n.  1. Any of various short tailed, burrowing mammals of
   the family Geomyidae, of North America.  2. (Amer. colloq.)
   Native or inhabitant of Minnesota: the Gopher State.
   3. (Amer. colloq.) One who runs errands, does odd-jobs, fetches
   or delivers documents for office staff.
 
Now there is a fourth definition.  Gopher is a distributed information
delivery system that connects to thousands of information sources
throughout the world via the global Internet.  Gopher can run on
almost any computer platform.  This Gopher server (developed at Rice
University) runs on an IBM mainframe using the VM/XA operating system.
 
To use Gopher, you merely select items from a menu and continue to
travel automatically from computer to computer around the world.  By
examining the upper right hand corner of your menu screen, you can
determine which computer system is providing you with the current
menu you are viewing.
 
The Bar-Ilan Gopher server has a number of menus and documents in
Hebrew.  You need a terminal that is capable of displaying Hebrew in
order to view these documents.  The intenational standard - ISO8859-8
is used for Hebrew support.
 
One item in Bar-Ilan is a CCSO qi server.  What is a CCSO qi server?
The protocol was designed at the University of Illinois at Urbana
and the initial VM implementation was written by Yossie Silverman
of UCSF.  CCSO qi is a "user name lookup system".  This was modified
locally to support Hebrew.  In order to search a qi server you need a
ph client.  Most gopher clients have an imbedded ph client to allow
seraching of the qi server.
 
Any field that says it is a Hebrew field can only be searched if you
type in the text string in ISO-8859-8 Hebrew.  This is the standard
international Hebrew that all terminals that claim to support Hebrew
should be using.
 
There are also some phonetic fields that can be searched based on a
phonetic lookup.  There is a phonetic lookup in English as well as
for Hebrew last names.
 
The Bar-Ilan user data is not complete and is only experimental at
the present time.
 
If you have questions about this Gopher server please contact:
Hank Nussbacher (hank@vm.biu.ac.il)
.