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From: Eric Lease Morgan <[email protected]>
Subject: Alcuin: a script to organize WAIS indexes
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Alcuin is a perl script used to organize WAIS indexes in a gopher
server's data directory.

There exist over 400 publicly available WAIS indexes around the world. (A
list of these indexes can be FTP'ed from think.com.) Besides the problem
of figuring out how WAIS searching is done, a librarian is concerned with
organizing and managing a collection of WAIS indexes. With the gopher
protocol is it easy to put a front-end on WAIS, but the matter of
organization and management still exist. This is where Alcuin comes in.

The other day, while playing frisbee golf, Mr. Serials met a man by the
name of Alcuin. As it turns out, Alcuin (Al in this millennium) is an
unemployed librarian from the Middle Ages looking for work. Mr. Serials
referred him to me, and I hired him. After all, Alcuin has more than 1000
years of experience, was an advisor to Charlemagne, set up a school and a
couple of libraries, studied the seven liberal arts, and wrote extensibly
on the subjects of rhetoric, logic, and dialectic. I figured he would be
a good person to systematically collect and manage WAIS indexes.

This is how Alcuin works. First, I have to FTP the list of publicly
available WAIS indexes from think.com. I then de'Z and un-tar the archive.

Second, I put Alcuin to work. Alcuin reads the list of WAIS indexes and
puts the list into an array (new list). Alcuin then reads a list of the
WAIS indexes I already own (old list). He then subtracts the old list
from the new list. Next, Alcuin reads the list of WAIS indexes I don't
want in my gopher server and puts that into an array (trash list), and
Alcuin subtracts the trash list from the new list. The final list
contains items that are new to my server. The initialization process is
complete after Alcuin creates a directory-tree listing of my gopher
server.

Third, Alcuin presents me with a menu similar to the one below:

      There are 356 new items remaining.
      The next item is ANU-Pacific-Manuscripts.src.

           What do you want to do?

           (V)iew it    (E)valuated it
           (S)kip it    (A)dd it
           (T)rash it

           (L)ist the remaining items
           List the (O)ld items
           List the t(R)ash items

           (Q)uit

           (V, E, S, A, L, O, T, or Q) ==>>

This is what the choices do:

 V - displays the .src file with the more command
 S - goes to the next item
 E - runs the waissearch program
 T - adds the .src file to the trash list
 A - prompts me for a cool name for the index,
     displays my gopher server's directory tree,
     prompts me for a directory,
     saves a link file in the specified directory, and
     optionally saves the link file in other directories
 L - lists the remaining new items
 O - lists the old items
 R - lists the trashed items
 Q - quits

Depending on your menu selection(s), Alcuin cycles through the list of
new WAIS indexes until each one has been processed. Then, about once a
week, I will download the list of WAIS indexes from Thinking Machines and
start the whole process over again. Granted, the first time through I
have many items to inspect, but after that the job gets easier.

Alcuin makes a number of assumptions. First, he assumes all your WAIS
indexes are located in one directory within your gopher server's data
directory. Second, he assumes you have the waissearch binary that came
with the Thinking Machines WAIS distribution. Thirdly, Alcuin assumes you
use a terminal with a large scroll-back buffer because the gopher tree
listing and output from waissearch can be many, many screens long.

Alcuin can come work for you too. FTP to dewey.lib.ncsu.edu and download
/pub/software/perl/alcuin. You may use Alcuin, but you can't say you
wrote it. "Use it but don't abuse it."

 Eric Lease Morgan, Systems Librarian
 NCSU Libraries
 Box 7111, Room 2316-b
 Raleigh, NC 27695-7111
 (919) 515-6182
 [email protected]

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