A Michael F. Schwartz 

A Darren R. Hardy 

A William K. Heinzman 

A Glenn Hirschowitz 

T Supporting Resource Discovery Among Public Internet Archives
Using a Spectrum of Information Quality 

R Technical Report CU-CS-487-90 

J Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on
Distributed Computing Systems 

C Arlington, Texas 

D May 1991 

P 82-89 

X Available from
ftp:ftp.cs.colorado.edupubcstechreportsschwartzRD.For.Anon.FTP.ps.Z or
ftp:ftp.cs.colorado.edupubcstechreportsschwartzRD.For.Anon.FTP.txt.Z 

X Abstract: "Wide area networks offer access to an increasing
number and variety of resources, such as documents, software, and
network services.  Yet, it is difficult to locate resources of
interest, because of the scale and decentralized nature of the
environment.  We are interested in supporting a global
confederation of loosely cooperating systems and users that share
far more resources than can be completely organized.  Therefore,
mechanisms are needed to support incremental organization of the
resources, based on the efforts of many geographically
decentralized individuals, and a range of different information
sources of varying degrees of quality.  In this paper we describe
a prototype implementation of a set of mechanisms intended to
explore this problem in the specific domain of public Internet
archives, accessible via the "anonymous" File Transfer Protocol. 
This is an interesting test case, because it encompasses a very
large scale, administratively decentralized collection of
resources, with consirable practical value."