EcoLinking#7
by Don Rittner

Please Copy This Disk

Those words are usually not legally uttered much in the computer industry.
 Disk copying often refers to pirating commercial software and is frowned
upon!!  Not this time.  I've said in previous columns that there are millions
of files on the Internet and other online sources that are free for the
asking.  Of course you need to have access to these sources and must know
where they are and how to get them.  No easy task even for those of us who
live in Cyberspace.

There is an alternative.  B&R Samizdat Express and Global Education
Motivators (GEM, Inc.) have been surfing Cyberspace looking for important
collections of data that educators, lay people, or just everyday computer
users might like to have.  They download the material (mostly plain ASCII
text files) at their expense, put it on 3 1/2 inch high density PC or Mac
disks, and make them available to anyone for $10 per disk.  They also
encourage you to make copies of the disk and pass them around -- hence the
program's name "Please Copy This Disk."  This is certainly a worthwhile
project and saves you money and time.

Who are these folks?  B&R Samizdat is a small book publisher specializing in
children's books and GEM is a 12 year old non-profit educational organization
(and a NGO which manages the UN's Department of Public Information UNISER
database).

They have over 100 disks available now (adding about a dozen per month) and
you can get a catalog by writing B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 161, West
Roxbury, MA 02132 (send a self addressed , stamped business envelope).  If
you have access to Internet email send a request to samizdat@world.std.com.

Their collections fall into ten categories: World & Government Information,
Tools for Teachers, History, Computers & Networking, Mathematics, Literary
Classics, Philosophy, Languages, Children's Classics, and Science
Fiction/Fantasy Classics.

The first three categories are real "must have" disks for environmentalists:

*World & Government information.  Here you can find four disks on all aspects
of the UN and its organizations; or the 1992 World Factbook that contains
almost everything, including a great deal of environment and natural resource
information, on every nation on this planet; or KGB documents including
enlightening Chernobyl documents; or the 1990 US Census on population and
housing, or how to access the electronic records in the U.S. National
Archives -- lots of good environmental information there. 
* Tools for Teachers.  41 Digests on Math/Science/Environment From ERIC (the
Educational Resources Information Center). 
*History.  Here you can get Charles Darwin's classics The Origin of the
Species and the Voyage of the Beagle.

My guess is if you asked them to keep an eye out for your particular
interest, they would oblige. The other advantage of getting information this
way is the obvious environmental benefits.  The World Factbook is 1000 pages
of paper.  Instead, it comes on two disks!