Carl Malamud interviews two leading figures in online resource discovery, Peter Deutsch and Cliff Lynch. Deutsch, who has helped develop Archie and whois++, talks about his philosophy for online services and standards. Lynch, the director of library automation for the University of California, talks about SGML and other issues in online publishing.

Peter Deutsch, President of Bunyip Information Services, was one of the co-developers of Archie, a service that scans anonymous FTP sites and maintains distributed databases that allow users on the Internet to locate copies of files they are looking for. Since then, he has been instrumental in the IETF working group seeking to deploy a white pages service called whois++. Peter talks about his philosophy for services and compares Archie to X.500. He also talks about what kind of standards we need for networked information retrieval.

Cliff Lynch is one of the most thoughtful participants in the race to move libraries and publishers onto electronic publishing platforms. Cliff is currently the director of library automation for the University of California. He discusses online publishing, looking at the issue of SGML as a markup language and examining the question of presentation integrity versus the desire for revisable form documents. He also discusses the Z39.50 protocol, the scaling of very large databases, the democratization of publishing, and the need to develop new standards for Internet publishing.