Ghana Library Journal, Vol. 14, 2002 
SERVICES, RESOURCES AND BENEFITS OF THE 
INTERNET AVAILABLE TO ACADEMICS IN GHANA 
EVELYN D. MARKWEI. 
Department of Information Studies, University of Ghanr;l, Legon. 
ABSTRACT subject from all part~ of the world is 
The lntemet, or the Intemational network available to any lecturer, or student 
of computers, offers many se1'vices and once he or she has access to the 
resources which academics in Ghana can Internet (or the net) . 
exploit to enhance th eir academic 
pursuits. The paper discusses some of The Internet is a powerful worldwide 
these services, namely e-mail, telnet, ftp, network of computers, which 
Archie, news groups, and information interconnects thousands of national, 
discovery services like gopher, WAIS, regional and local computer networks 
search engines, dir ectories and scattered around the globe. It has a 
information gateways . The benefits to be huge mass of online information from 
derived from the use of the Internet by computer files , library catalogues, 
differen t categories of academics, bibliographie databases, government 
parti cularly lecturers, students, organisations, ind ustrial and 
administrators, researchers, librarians commercial sources, newsgroups, 
among others, are dis cussed. The major individuals and others. The Internet 
benefit is access to information on any is therefore a major information 
conceivable subject located on library resource to all categories of 
catalogues, online databases, newsgroups organisations and individuals, 
etc. These sources abound on the Internet including academics. 
f or scholarly work. Other benefi ts are book 
se lecti on medium, acquisitions, and It has become an integral part of the 
vir tual universities. economies of developed countries like 
the North American countries, where 
INTRODUCTION Internet access is widespread. It is 
C urrent and complete information is actively used to augment classroom 
a vital and indispensable component work and also as a maior addition to 
of any academic environment. It library resource in these countries. It 
makes for effectiveness in academic is commonplace to find both staff and 
pursuits. Both lecturers and students students accessing information on the 
need to use information daily in their net for academic purposes . In fact, 
various academic endeavours. For access to the Internet is viewed b y 
decades, both academic staff and faculty and students as a core resource 
students have actively used the library and ranked similar to a library card. 
a nd its resources as their main (USA Today, 1996). 
information source . Today, 
information on any conceivable The Internet started as a United States 
21 
Evelyn D. Markwei 
Department of Defense project, the File transfer protocol (Ftp) 
ARPANET. It was put into place in Ftp is the Internet resource used for 
1969 as a pioneering project to test transferring computer files around 
packet-switching networks. the Internet. It enables 'a, user to get 
ARPANET also provided links copies of any text or article of interest, 
between researchers and remote or other computer file by transferring 
computer centers, but was dismantled it from a host computer to his personal 
in 1990. Its successor, the Internet, computer. A user can also use ftp to 
continues to grow (Kahn et aI, 1997). access anonymous accounts, which 
The Internet offers several services are host accounts that are open to the 
and resources which academics in public, usually without charge. This 
Ghana can exploit to facilitate their procedure, referred to as 'anonymous 
acpdemic pursuits. ftp', often requires the provision of a 
password usually a personal e-!11ail 
SERVICES AND RESOURCES. address. Once a user gains access, he 
For academics to make effective use can navigate through authorized 
of the Internet, the~ must know the areas of the directory structure of the 
services and resources available on it host computer and access any 
and what they are used for. These reqUired information. 
serv ices are elec tronic mail, fi le 
transfer protocol (ftp), telnet, Telnet 
newsgroups, talk services, private Telnet is used for logging into other 
enhanced mail, and net-news among computers on the Internet. It is used 
others. These services have been to access lots of public se rvices, 
d ocumented and discussed by many including library catalogues arid other 
a uthors and researchers, among kinds of databases . There are various 
who m are Ed Krol (1992), Sheldon Telnet clients available with different 
(1994), Dawso n (1997) and Klobas local capabilities and options, but they 
(1997). Some of these services are all fulfill one basic function . With 
brie fl y explained below. telnet, a us er is able to access 
whatever services the remote machine 
Electronic mail prOVides to its local terminals. The 
This is the basic activity of the Internet user must have an account and a 
an d a substitute for postal password registered on the host before 
communications. It links compu.ters he can log into its public services and 
by wired or wireless connections and library catalogues. However, a non-
allows users through their keyboard account holder may be able to log on 
or other input device to post messages to some of these facilities as a 'guest', 
and read responses on their monitors. or use a public password to access a 
E-mail prOVides an excellent particular type of service from the 
opportunity for the rapid and cheap facility. 
exc hange of ideas, questions and 
answers within moments, rather than News Groups 
days. News groups are variously referred to 
22 
Services, resources and benefits of the internet avail3ble to academics in Ghana 
a s b ulle tin boards, open forums, or anything in between. 
disc u ssi on groups, o r electronic • talk- Forums Jor debate on 
co n fe re n ces (Klobas, 1997) . A controversial topics .. The 
longstanding and widely used set of discussions tend to be long-
news g roups is Usenet. Usenet is a winded and unresolved. 
g rou p of systems that exchange news. • misc- Anything that does not fit 
I t e n compasses unive rsities , into the above categories, or that 
government agencies, businesses, and fits into several categories 
hom e users . Users post 
a nnoun cements , goss ip arid Information Discovery Services 
speculations; th e y also pose and The volume of information on the 
answer questions, comment on issues Internet is staggering. An April 1998 
a nd d evelopments, and ask for article in Science magazine measured 
comments on drafts of papers. There the size of the Internet and reported 
a re seven major news categories, these 320million pages at the time. This 
are: figure has grown to 380million in 
• Com p- Computer Science and addition to hundreds of new 
rela ted topics . This includes databases. (Kassel, 1999) . 
cOlnputer science "proper", Consequently, the most difficult task 
software sources, information for Internet users is navigation; that 
on hardware and software is, finding the relevant files or 
systems, and topics of general databases on a subject of interest and 
interest. where they are located . Several 
• news- Groups concerned with Internet services have been designed 
the news network and news to improve file location and transfer 
software. These include the and also aid information retrieval in 
important groups news.- general. These retrieval services 
newu sers.questions (questions include directories, search engines, 
from new users) and news.- meta-search engines, and information 
announce.newusers (important gateways . A few of these services 
information for new users) . namely, Archie, Gopher, WAIS, 
•. rec- Groups discussing hobbies, WWW, among others, are discussed 
recreational activities, and the below. 
arts . 
• sci- Groups discussing scientific Archie 
research and applications (oth~r Archie facilitates the searching of 
than computer science). Sci indexes of what files are available on 
includes news groups for many public servers of the Internet. It 
of the established scientific and indexes over 1000 servers and 
engineering disciplines, 2.1million files worldwide. It is the 
including some social sciences. place to start when searching for 
• soc- Groups that address social programs, data or text files. A user 
issues, where' social' can mean may ask Archie either to find file 
politically relevant, socializing, names that contain a certain search 
23 
Evelyn D. Markwei 
string or suggest files whose document is organized as a number 
description contains a certain word. of pages, each of which has parts of 
It then returns the filenames that meet the text acting as pointers to other 
the search criteria, and the name of pages in the document. If users want 
the servers containing those files. to know more about one of these 
I 
linked elements, they simply select it, 
Gopher to display the relevant page. That 
Gopher was one of the first tools that page too may contain both ordinary 
made a big difference to information and linked text from which they can 
provision and retrieval on the Internet. proceed down a new path, or return 
It started out as a distributed campus to the previous page tp take a different 
information service at the Un!.·.  ..:rsity track. 
of Minnesota . It is a menu-based 
system, and allows information Search Engines 
providers to make their existing files Search engines are used to find specific 
of information accessible across the information. They are web pages 
net. It also provides., the-Internet user containing forms into which a user 
with a simple interface to browse what types search requests in the form of 
is available, and to retrieve any keywords. The search engine scans its 
information of interest. database and presents the user with 
a list of web sites matching the search 
WAIS criteria. 
WAIS stands for Wide Area 
Information Server. It is designed to The larger the index compiled by a 
access indexed data. It has servers that search engine, the greater the chance 
maintain indexes of Internet of a successful search. The sizes of 
documents. The system works in the three of the popular search engines as 
following way : a user selects his at April 6th, 2001 were as follows; 
sources from a list held by the WAIS AltaVista - 560million, Northern Light 
system and gives it the search - 350million and Excite - 250million 
instructions. The client server contacts (Searchenginewatch.com). The key 
other servers on which the user's features of two of the largest search 
selected resources reside. These engines as recorded by Kassel (1999), 
servers are prompted to run the are as follows: 
searches and return the results to the 
user. AltaVista (http: 
www.altavista.com) 
The World Wide Web (WWW or W3, • Good for specific searches. 
or the Web) • Offers an advanced query 
The web is the fastest growing part of feature with more search 
the internet. It is a vast collection of options. 
multimedia documents located • Allows for a natural language 
around the world and is based on query. 
hypertext documenting. A hypertext • Provides a translator between 
24 
Services, resources and benefits of the'internet available to academics in Ghana 
English and five languages that Oneseek, Metacrawl~r, and others. 
is useful but has been criticized 
as not "too good" Directories 
• Offers Boolean" and proximity The Internet offers 9nline directories 
searching. also . These are onlifte catalogues of 
• Includes field searching. websites and other Internet resources 
arra~ged in a complex hierarchy of 
Northern Light (http:// categories and s,ub- categories; for 
www.northernlight.com) example, Yahoo. The Yahoo directory 
• Provides content that encom- is valuable for searching broad 
passes both the web and general topics. Queries sent to Yahoo 
Northern Light's SpeCial are forwarded to a major search 
Collections, which are articles engine. This is especially useful since 
that can be purchased from it is selective, rather than all 
more than 5,000 publications on encompassing like search engines. 
a pay-as-you-go basis for $1.00 
to $4.00 each. Some of these Information Gateways 
publications are not available Information gateways are online 
from other commercial vendors. catalogues of Internet resources that 
• Advanced power and industry are used to locate high quality 
searches narrow results by resources that are relevan t to 
document type, such as press academic wqrk o~ the Internet. They 
release, or product type. are produced by librarians or sllbject 
• Automatically refines every specialists . Some of the leading 
search by creating Custom information gateways are: 
Search Folders with similar sites • Bizjed: business and economics 
by subject, source, or type. • BUBL: library and information 
• Enterprise accounts for science 
corporations and organizations • EELS: computer science and 
are available. mgineering, cold region 
technology 
Metasearch Engines • OMNI: health and biomedicine 
Metasearch engines are search tools • SOSIG: Social sciences. 
that allow a user to use several search 
engines concurrently to trace and BENEFITS. 
retrieve information. Dogpile is an The Internet isa major information 
example of a meta search engine; it resource by virtue of the huge mass 
allows one to search: 1) large search of information , from computer 
engines such as Infoseek, Excite, Lycos networks and online resources like 
etC'. , 2) Usenet: Reference.com, library catalogues, bibliographic 
Dejanews, 3) More than 2 dozen databases, individuals' collections, 
online news services or other types of newsgroups, government organi-
sources concurrently. Other zations, industrial and commercial 
metasearch engines are Metafind, sources, on it. 
2S 
Evelyn D. Markwei 
For academics in a developing country mailing lists of different subject 
like Ghana, the In ternet could not groups, online dire-ctories of 
have come at a more opportune time. professionals in various fields and 
There is an acute shortage of current organizational home pages. These 
books and journals in academic pages feature the people who work in 
libraries; resources which are essential these organizations, among other 
for successful academic and research things. For example, 'College and 
endeavors. The shortage has arisen University home pages' (at http:/ / 
from years of inadequate funding. geowww.uibk.ac.a..tj univ /) is a 
homepage of universities and colleges 
With the advent of the Internet, it is worldwide, which is arrange~ both 
now possible for academics in Chana alphabetically and geographically. A 
to gain access to much needed lecturer who needs to pIa the content 
information more readily for their of a new course can access the 
various activities . All categories of websites of universities doing the same 
ac a demics , namely, lecturers, course, for such information . Some 
s tudents, researchers, librarians, lecturers are making their course plans 
I 
administrators and others, can benefit and lecture notes freely available over 
ft om the resources of the Internet. the net, in fact. An example is 'The 
World lecture hall' (at http :/ / 
Lecturers can subscribe to alerting www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/) . 
services, n ews and discussion groups This site contains links' to pages 
in their subject areas so as to remain created by faculty staff worldwide 
current in their subject fields. For who are using the web to deliver class 
e xample, discussion groups of material. The collection is managed by 
·different subject areas can be staff of the University of Texas to 
identified by accessing a database allow academics to share their 
called ' List of lis ts', News groups and resources. 
Electronic serials (at WAIS list.src) . This 
database contains all known The net is most beneficial to academics 
electronic mail discussion groups. in Ghana for research. With regard to 
' Scout report for social scien ces' a t student researchers, Kisiedu (1997) 
(http :/ / s cout.cs .wisc. edu/ scout/ has stated that, li the net can aid 
report / socsi/) is a US A Internet students writing term papers to select 
awareness service fo r academics , research topics by browsing through 
students and librarians in the social databases". Libra r y catalogues 
sciences. It offers an annotated list of (which abound on the net) and online 
new Internet resources that have periodicals, (for example 'lngenta' at 
been selected b y librarians and http://www.ingenta.com) offer free 
content speCialists working in the searching of millions of academic and 
social sciences. professional articles from about 
25,000 journals . Abstracts are 
Academics can make professional accessed free of charge, a nd there are 
con tac ts by accessing electroni c links to full text services on a pay per 
26 
Services, resources and benefits of the internet available to academics in Ghana 
view basis. These resources can be conferences of all types". It is possible 
accessed by both lecturers and for an academic to ascertain the 
students for literature reviews. various conferenc.es available in his 
subject area, select the ones of interest 
Bibliographie. databases with abstracts to him and obtain ~ll the necessary 
can help researchers to decide quickly information he may require on them. 
on articles, to order. Those with full Some conference websites make 
text articles are a bonus, since the provision for registering online, in fact. 
researcher can download articles of 
interest to save cost and time. Academic librarians can also take 
advantage of the net to improve their 
Researchers can also contact services. Reference librarians can use 
specialists in their 'fields of interest by the net actively as a reference source. 
iden tifying their addresses from Apart from the many online library 
mailing lists, conference reports and catalogues and other databases, they 
electronic journal articles. Doctorate can also use BUBL (Bulletin Board for 
students can avoid duplicating Libraries), which is an information 
research topics by browsing databases service for library and information 
of research in progress on the net. For science professionals and the wider 
example, 'Research libraries information community they support. BUBL, 
nenvork' (at telnet rig. Stanford .edu) according to McMahon ·(1995), "is an 
is one of the largest online catalogues excellent reference tool which can 
encompassing most major research help with all sorts of enquiries" 
libraries in the United States. It has, (BUBL can be accessed at 
among other resources, a database of Gopher:BUBL.BATH.AC.UK). 
research in progress (one needs to 
register first before accessing it). Acquisition departments in most 
academic libraries in the developing 
Students who want to pursue world are experiencing inadequate 
postgraduate courses abroad can funds and adverse changes in 
identify the universities offering exchange rates, coupled with higher 
courses of interest on the net, monograph and periodical costs . 
(previously such information was Therefore, they are only able to 
obtained from the British Council acquire a very small portion of the 
libraries and the United States world's publications. This has made 
Information services in most third access to information on the Internet 
world countries). Virtually all the very important (Hollis, 1998). The 
correspondence with these acquisitions librarian can use the 
universities can also be done by e- Internet to access Publishers' 
mail. Information on academic catalogues and library catalogues, 
conferences also abounds on the net. which will aid in the acquisition 
According to Kirkwood (1997), "the process in several ways. It can be 
web is an excellent source of used, among other things, to check 
information on past and future what will be published in the near 
27 
Evelyn D. Markwei 
future and whether a title is in print beneficial to academic libraries in 
or in stock, and how many copies are Ghana . It is an efficient and fast 
available. Boo~ selectio,n can be means of obtaining materials. 
enhanced by the ability to check 
databases for information. Some The Internet can be used to make 
library catalogues provide circulation course information available and to 
details, which can indicate the supplement classroom instruction. 
popularity of a particular book (Hollis, Entire courses are now being offered 
1998). on the Internet (rerry et aI, 1998) and 
some universities are offering both 
Databases on the net can be useful undergraduate and postgraduate 
also. For example, OCLC's Firs !:..Karch. courses online. Africa too is a 
OCLC (Online Computer Library participant in the formation of virtual 
Catalog) is one of the best known universities. The African Virtual 
network catalo-gues. Originally University (AVU) started operating in 
American in membership but now July 1997 as a World Bank project, but 
international, it spal)'s the Americas, is presently an independent 
Australia, New Zealand and most of organization with its headquarters in 
Europe (Kisiedu, 1997). Its catalogues Nairobi. AVU's mission"is to bridge the 
are available to users of every member digital divide and the knowledge gap 
library. Users of non-member libraries between Africa and the rest of the 
can only access OCLC by special world by dramatically increasing 
arrangement. Firstsearch is a search access to global education resources 
mode established by OCLC to be used throughout Africa . It maintains a 
by libraries. The service is not directly sophisticated, Internet-based digital 
accessible to individual users except library of journals, academic studies, 
through an OCLC library. The and textbooks that allow both student 
catalogues on Firstsearch consist of and teacher alike access to the world 
over 36million records which cite database of information . One of the 
material owned by libraries project's objectives is to reduce the 
worldwide. Such databases can be brain drain by offering an attractive 
used to check bibliographie alternative to studying abroad; that isp 
information, to ensure that order quality education of international 
records are of a high standard and standards and with international 
contain sufficient information for the accreditation, at an affordable cost. 
supplier to identify the book. AVU's focus is on areas of knowledge 
According to Hollis, (1998) most which are critical to economic 
university presses and many development, but which are, 
commercial publishing companies in inadequately catered for by local 
the United States and United African institutions of higher learning; 
Kingdom, have their catalogues such as science, engineering and 
online; some with the facility to order technology, management and health 
online, meaning a book can be programs. The courses are taught by 
ordered immediately. This can be very world-renowned professors froJ;ll 
28 
Services, resources and benefits of the internet available to academics in Ghana 
universities in Africa, the United that the Internet indeed is a valuable 
States, Canada and Europe. Courses resource, and everything necessary 
are presently offered in English and should be done by government and 
French. AVU is offering pre- university authorities to enable 
university courses, language academics in Ghana to make effective 
instruction, business training, and use of its immense resources. 
seminars on various subjects, 
presently. Since the project was A recent study conduded at the 
launched in 1997, it has accomplished University of Ghana showed that 
the following: academics in Ghana have started 
• More than i2,OOO students have using the Internet intensely; especially 
completed semester-long the e-mail service. Only a small 
courses in engineering and in percentage of academics were found 
the sciences. to patronize services like telnet, ftp, 
• Over 2,500 professionals have metasearch engines and information 
attended executive and profes- gateways (Markwei, 2001) . The study 
sional management seminars on recommended among other things, 
topics such as Strategy and the training of lecturers and students 
Innovation, Entrepreneurship, in the use of these services to equip 
Global Competences, E-com- and encourage them to take full 
merce and Y2K. advantage of the Internet in their 
• 1.0,000 free e-mail accounts academic endeavours. 
have been opened and can be 
accessed through the AVU web REFERENCES 
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nd 
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29 
Evelyn D. Markwei 
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