Suppose you want to find out if someone has information on a topic of interest to you or you would like to get others opinions on something and none of your friends or associates knows anything about it. You could go to the library and start browsing the stacks. Or you can use the part of the Internet called Usenet (sometimes also called ``Network News'') and get current information and feedback from other network users like you. Usenet is a global community of computer users who communicate information using an online bulletin board system. You can search bulletin boards for information on topics of interest to you, browse them, or add to a bulletin board by posting a message to it. The idea is that everyone with access to computers can communicate information on a one on one basis. Usenet encompasses government agencies, large universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes, home computers of all descriptions, etc. Over 250,000 messages are posted to Usenet each day and millions of people around the world read it. Typically, users post questions and the Usenet community responds -- exchanging everything from artichoke soup recipes to tips on installing a web server.

Mailing lists are similar to Usenet, except that instead of having messages posted to a bulletin board, the messages are delivered directly into peoples' electronic mailboxes. Like Usenet Newsgroups, each mailing list has a specific topic. There are tens of thousands of Mailing Lists available on the Internet. Reference.COM has an index of over 100,000 of them to help you find the mailing lists of interest to you. We have also subscribed to many of those lists (subject to being granted permission by the list owners) so you can search the postings to those lists just as you can search Usenet postings. Just finding the names of interesting Usenet newsgroups and Mailing Lists can be difficult. To help you in this task, Reference.COM has searchable Directories of newsgroups and mailing lists. You can think of these as being like the card catalog at the library: they aren't the book itself, but they help you find the book you want. We archive all newsgroups in our directory, but mailing lists are only archived (and hence are only searchable) with the permission of the list owner. Stanford University allows you to sift via E-mail more than six months of archives from more than 13,000 Internet newsgroups and 1,000+publicly-accessible mailing lists.

Enter any word or phrase to search for list servers, and independently managed mailing lists.

Keyword searchable source of Census data.

This resource provides WWW access to the electronic versions of the 1988 and 1994 County and City Data Books. This service provides the opportunity to create custom printouts and/or customized data subsets. The data presented here were obtained from the CD-ROM versions of the 1988 and 1994 County and City Data Books, which were made available to over 1400 depository libraries across the country. The data on the CD-ROMs are presented as a series of linked dBase files with an extraction utility (GO) for those without access to dBase or a package that can read *.dbf files. By converting these files into SPSS files and then merging them into a single file for each year/level, we are able to offer a more flexible and convenient point of access