National Network of Libraries of Medicine
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Mosaic is a point-and-click browser program for the World-Wide Web (WWW or W3). To understand Mosaic you need to know a little about the Web. World-Wide Web, an ongoing project of CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, is a "dist ributed hypermedia system." Using a browser program like Mosaic to access the Web, one searches many sources with one uniform and easy-to-use interface. WWW documents use hypertext technology. Hypertext allows selected words in a document to be linked t o other documents that may include text, graphics, audio, video, or other files.
To illustrate this concept, think of a library catalog card of Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell on your computer screen. Hypertext might allow you to point-and-click on the author's name and call up a biography of Margaret Mitchell. Or to point t o the publisher information and call up the publisher's name, address, and phone number. Or to point to the subject heading of Civil-War-1861-1865 and get an encyclopedia article on that topic. Using the Web you can search databases like the card catalog at the Library of Congress or other libraries, or visit special exhibits like the University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology, or review documents stored on various government compute rs.
Now back to Mosaic. This particular W3 browser is being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urban a. It runs on the Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and X-Windows platforms and your computer must have a direct or SLIP Internet connection to use it. To take full advantage of Mosaic, your computer also needs to have the hardware and software necessary to produce audio and video. With these capabilities, once you are into the program a simple point-and-click on the screen can bring forth text, graphics, or sound. You start your explorations from a "home page," usually at NCSA or CERN. From your home pa ge, you can jump to the listing of Web Servers Directory. For example, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) offers a WWW server (i.e., www.nlm.nih.gov). Pointing to NLM brings for th HyperDOC, a MultiMedia/Hypertext Resource of the NLM. Clicking on the name Donald A. B. Lindberg, M.D. brings up a picture and textual information (see illus trations on facing page). The HyperDOC resource contains links to all kinds of information about NLM, including on-line information services (like the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Gopher), upcomin g events, and visitors' guides and maps.
Mosaic is available FREE -You can download it from NCSA on the Internet. However, Mosaic is not the only browser for the World Wide Web. If you have a dial-up connection, don't feel left out. You can use a character-oriented browser. Try telneting to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu and login as www. You will find a VT100 full-screen browser called Lynx. While you cannot get the graphics or audio portions of documents you will still find lots of valuable information available. Try it. There is on-screen help a nd information on all aspects of the Web.
We connected to NLM's WWW server which displays a
page called the NLM HyperDOC. Then we clicked on Lindberg's name
to get the screen shown in the first
illustration. Next, we went back to the NLM HyperDOC and
clicked on On- line Biomedical Resources. From the next screen we
selected, The
Virtual Hospital, which took us to the screen shown in the
second
illustration.
