Where you can FTP back issues of newsgroups and mailing lists. A list which needs to be compiled at some point. Also pointers to innovative means of accessing old news and mail, e.g. WAIS, lq-text based indexes, etc. The files in this directory are slowly but surely moving to the WWW format for referring to remote files. That's why there's all of those funky angle brackets. One important resource for this is the "List of Periodic Informational Postings" produced by rsk@gynko.circ.upenn.edu, and the archive of those postings kept by jik@pit-manager.mit.edu. Check out for lots more information. The "news.answers" group is a good one to read to track these things; it collects up many of these periodic postings. This directory should eventually become irrelevant as the important stuff in it migrates to the periodic postings. That said there's always room around the fringes for more or different stuff. --Ed emv@msen.com