A Brief Bibliography of Internet Theatre Resources Beyond Email: Excerpts from Ken McCoy's "Guide to Internet Resources in Theatre and Performance Studies"

COMMENTS ON PROCESS A Brief Bibliography of Internet Theatre Resources Beyond Email: Excerpts from Ken McCoy's 'Guide to Internet Resources in Theatre and Performance Studies" Ken McCoy The Internet, even for those of us who understand it and regularly access its resources, is a changing entity. Rather than existing as a "superhighway" where entrances and exits are few and plainly marked, the current state of the Internet is more akin to a web of county roads that occasionally converge on entrance ramps to those 3-digit interstates that circle large cities. In other words, it's often just one big, confusing mess. Surprisingly, many community-minded individuals, mostly librarians and other information management specialists, are hard at work mapping the highways and byways of this terra incognita, neither asking for renumeration nor imposing particularly stringent copyright rules. Not so surprisingly, major book publishers are wasting no time in plotting their own versions of "superhighway " maps, always at a profit, to the unsuspecting consumer. I find it perfectly ironic that we must resort to a print medium to navigate an electronic network of networks which changes every day simply because it can. The latest and greatest "Internet guide" at your local bookstore is doomed to obsolescence , often before it even goes to press. And yet, here we are, with me typing my opinions on my home/office computer and you reading it from the printed page, many months hence. I am somewhat surprised that, as far as I know, Deb Torres, Martha Vander KoIk, and I are the only people making a concerted effort to maintain our guides to theatre on the Internet. My list is short; theirs is very well annotated. Perhaps one or two guides swimming around in cyberspace is enough. Perhaps there are other people out there, secretly compiling lists of 89 90 Ken McCoy resources that have been useful to them. Perhaps, for the most productive use of these new tools of the information age, we must each become list-keepers, note-takers, and sharers of the resources we cull from the ether free of charge (or bibliographic credit as we know it) to the academic community and to other seekers of knowledge (like Andrew Kraft—see below). In that spirit, I undertake to share with you, the reader, my meager knowledge of Internet resources in our discipline, which I discover and catalogue by perpetually browsing these same resources for announcements and invitations from those new resources which appear at random across my computer screen. In Internet slang, I am a "lurker," only occasionally joining in a debate, asking or answering a question, or responding to a plea for help. What follows is a list of resources—beyond e-mail listing services (listservs)—which have been of value to me in my Internet "surfing" over the past couple of years. Since it probably took several months for my article to get to press, what follows may be already obsolete, as resources rise and fall, and those who have the time to be the keepers of these resources become occupied with more pressing career matters or lose access to the site where their resources reside. After all, graduate students must graduate, and professors have been known to change jobs occasionally. The resources listed below are accessed most productively through a variety of software tools, usually gopher, telnet/ftp, e-mail, or a World-WideWeb client such as lynx or Mosaic. For a truly useful understanding of the terms "gopher," "telnet," "ftp," "e-mail," "lynx," and "Mosaic," I suggest that you consult one of the many articles that are written daily concerning basic access tools to the Internet, or better, consult your site's help documents or system operator. Since the computer world runs on software, and many different versions of software types, packages, and operating systems exist to perform the same function, publishing a cogent step-by-step explanation of how to run the gopher program from my university DCL/VAX account, for example, would only leave those who connect outside my campus in the cold. So I present to you the fruits of my own curiosity. Go forth and do the same. 1. Online Databases and...