MicroMechanics Information Clearinghouse Announcement

Dear MEMS Researchers, Designers, and Developers,

The ISI MEMS Clearinghouse is now operational. This Clearinghouse will provide
three services to the MEMS community: an archive for material on the MEMS
field, a discussion group to be conducted by electronic mailing, and a
newsletter to be published quarterly.

The MEMS archive is accessible over the Internet by FTP (File Transfer
Program), World Wide Web, Gopher, and Prospero. Within the next six weeks it
will also be accessible by electronic mail. At present the archive is rather
vacant; so, we are looking for help in gathering useful information for the
archive. Any and all information that you think would be of value to the MEMS
community is welcome. In particular, we wish to solicit information about
laboratory and fabrication facilities, process schedules and descriptions,
newly developed and sharable CAD software, technical notes for distribution,
conference announcements, and bibliographies. If you can help us with the
archive then please send us e-mail at "[email protected]".

If you received this e-mail message directly from us then you are already on
the discussion group mailing list. This list will be moderated. We will be
linking our list to the Bay Area MEMS Club and to the LA Robotics group. We are
also planning to link our archive with the Microelectronics Center of North
Carolina MEMS Fabrication Information System and the National Nanofabrication
Network. We would like to look into linking to other MEMS related archives and
discussion groups; if you know of any, please let us know.

Attached are some notes on how to access the archives. Please share them with
your colleagues and students. If you have any suggestions on how we could
improve the Clearinghouse then please send you comments to "[email protected]".

The ISI MEMS Clearinghouse is staffed by Peter Will (project leader), Sridhar
Gullapalli, Bill Athas, Cliff Neuman, Steven Augart, Carole Sumler, and Jeanine
Yamazaki. We wish to welcome you to the MEMS Clearinghouse and hope that you
find it to be a useful resource in your MEMS activities.

Instructions for Using the MicroMechanics Information Clearinghouse

The MEMS Information Clearing House was established at ISI by the Advanced
Research Projects Agency to provide a repository for and periodic updates to
information about micromechanics. The intended audience is those interested in
micromechanics, including: researchers; developers of micromechanical devices
and systems; users of such devices for EE, ME, CS, chemistry, physics, and
medicine; companies and universities offering services in the field; and
newcomers to the field. The service consists of a discussion group supported by
electronic mail (e-mail), an archive of messages sent to the discussion group,
a newsletter to be distributed by electronic mail, back issues of the
newsletter, and an archive of available information related to micromechanics.
The archive will include bibliographies and, where possible, on-line databases,
data sets, articles, and pictures.

Access to this information will be supported by electronic mail, file transfer,
menu browsers, and hypertext browsers. These instructions explain several ways
to access the Clearinghouse. It is not expected that you will use all of these
approaches. Instead, you should choose the method that is most comfortable for
you.

1.0 The MEMS Discussion Group

We are hosting a discussion group to be used for discussing any topic of
interest to the MEMS community. Special interest discussion groups may be
created in the future if demand exists.

To become a regular reader of the discussion group, send e-mail to
[email protected]. To send messages to the readers of the group, send e-mail
to [email protected]. The message will be reviewed by the moderator and forwarded to
the members of the discussion group if appropriate. The discussion of the group
will be archived. Readers may obtain copies of past messages using one of the
methods described later for accessing information that has been stored in the
Clearinghouse archives.

2.0 The MEMS Newsletter and Announcement List

If you want to receive a newsletter and occasional announcements but don't want
to receive messages from other members of the discussion group, you can ask to
be added to the list for announcements only. To do this, send e-mail to
[email protected] asking to be placed on the MEMS announcement
list. Please note that if you are in the discussion group you will
automatically receive the newsletter and announcements.

3.0 The MEMS Archive

3.1 Contributing materials to the archive

If you have something to contribute to the archive, send e-mail to
[email protected] asking for further instructions. We will then contact you
about how to submit the information.

3.2 Retrieving materials from the archive

Information to be retrieved from the archive can be accessed by any of the
methods listed below. Instructions on using several of these services can be
found in books such as "Zen and the Art of the Internet" by Brendan Kehoe or
"The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog", by Ed Krol, published by
O'Reilly and Associates (1992).

3.2.1 File Transfer Program (FTP)

The program called "ftp" has been implemented on many types of computers. If
you currently access your e-mail by logging onto a computer running Unix(tm)
then you will very likely be able to access ftp in a similar fashion. If you
are a personal computer user and have telecommunications software such as TCP
then you may be able to use ftp directly from your computer. For example, if
you are a Apple Macintosh user and have MacTCP installed then you can use a
program such as VersaTerm(tm) or Fetch to access the archives from ftp.

When using ftp there are four pieces of information that you must provide: the
name of the host computer, the user ID, a password, and a directory. For
accessing the Clearinghouse archives the host computer name is "mems.isi.edu",
the user ID is "anonymous", and the directory is "mems". For the password use
your e-mail address. If you don't know what your e-mail address is then just
type "guest".

Below is a sample dialog exchange for accessing ftp from a Unix(tm) computer.
In this example the "mems" directory is connected to by using the "cd" command.
The file named "README" is then retrieved. If you need more help with using ftp
we suggest that you consult a PC or Mac guru or contact your system's user
consulting staff.

% ftp mems.isi.edu
Connected to gum.ISI.EDU.
220 gum.isi.edu FTP server (Version 2.0WU(10) Sat Apr 10 11:08:20 PDT 1993)
ready.
Name (mems.isi.edu:will): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password.
Password:[email protected]
230-
230-Welcome to the Prospero and MEMS FTP server.
230-The Prospero Resource Manager is in /pub/prm.
230-The Prospero Directory Service is in /pub/prospero.
230-The Micromechanics Clearinghouse is in /mems.
230-General papers are in /pub/papers.
230-
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd /mems
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> get README
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for README (1437 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
local: README remote: README
1466 bytes received in 0.0081 seconds (1.8e+02 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quit
221 Goodbye.

3.2.2 World-Wide Web

You can use a World-Wide-Web client such as Mosaic to look at information in
the archive. To do so direct your World-Wide-Web client to look at the document
with URL "http://mems.isi.edu/mems". You may have to ask the World-Wide-Web
administrator at your local site how to do this.

3.2.3 Gopher

If you have access to a gopher client, direct it to the gopher server on
MEMS.ISI.EDU. If you need to specify a port number, specify port 70. You may
have to ask the Gopher administrator at your local site how to direct your
Gopher client at MEMS.ISI.EDU. The first menu you retrieve from MEMS.ISI.EDU
will include a menu item at the top named 'MEMS Information Clearinghouse.'
Select that item.

3.2.4 Prospero

If you are using the Prospero menu browser, type:

    menu #/INET/EDU/ISI/mems:/mems

The first menu you retrieve will include a menu item at the top named 'The MEMS
Information Clearinghouse'. Select that item.

3.2.5 Using electronic mail to access the MEMS archive

Unlike the other services discussed above, this service will not be available
until mid-March.

The Electronic Mail retrieval system "MEMS-ARCHIVE" will send text documents in
response to e-mail queries. This service is provided for users who do not have
direct connections to the Internet, but who can exchange electronic mail with
Internet users.

Details and help for this service may be obtained by sending an e-mail message
to "[email protected]" with the message body "help:
ways_to_get_info". For example:

    To: [email protected]
    Subject: getting info

    help: ways_to_get_info