A university lives partly by its teaching and partly by its research. Some of our research can be seen in 6.4.
Figure 6.4: Research Top Level
Its research must be published (at least that is still the expectation this decade!). Often, finding ones way through the maze of publications to the current hot topics and hot places is fraught with dead ends and so on. Research is often in a global context, and the Web as a way of publishing work in progress, and placing it in context is very powerful.
However, we can also provide a very simple and useful function: searching and ordering of old reports - the cost of OCRing and storing these on line may be prohibitive, but the cost of storing titles and abstracts going back several decades may be very small. An interface to this is shown in .
Figure 6.5: Research Publications
To provide indexing and searching, the most common trick is to use the WAIS index and search programs. This is then accessed via CGI, as described in the chapter all about servers.