Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 9, 1995 TAG: 9505090093
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The 9th District Democratic congressman from Abingdon moved the computer's mouse, clicked and voila - Congress online.
Southwest Virginia's top technocrat visited Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center on Monday to show off a new database set up by his office. He designed it to give users summaries of his current bills, reports on projects specific to Southwest Virginia and other information.
Boucher said he's the first congressman in Virginia and one of only 26 in the 435-member House of Representatives to launch such a database, known to computer-cognoscente as a ``gopher site,'' after software first developed at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers.
The computer service became available to congressional offices only within the past month, though Boucher has been preparing to go online since last year.
Anyone with access to the Internet, the global computer network of networks, can reach the database, whether through the Blacksburg Electronic Village in Montgomery County or through a commercial service such as CompuServe, America Online or InfiNet.
With the laptop and Internet hookup provided by G3 Systems Inc. at the research center, Boucher pulled up his schedule of weekend town meetings for the next month and displayed the text of a speech he made at Tech in March on changes in telecommunications law.
The Boucher gopher site resembles its maker: It's not too flashy (all text, no images), and it's full of details about the technical and scientific issues that Boucher champions. We're not talking NASCAR online here.
Boucher called the service a ``solid step'' in the direction of greater access to government information for citizens. He conceded it's a bare-bones service, in part because of the old-fashioned copper-wire phone connection in Washington, D.C., between Congress and fiber-optic lines that provide access to the Internet. But that way it's accessible to computer users with the most basic software, Boucher said.
With improved technology could come audio, still photographs, then video. For now, the gopher doesn't include voting records. Nor does it include the text of bills; Boucher believes summaries to be more useful.
Besides Montgomery County, very few portions of his rural district have local Internet service providers. Boucher's short-term goal is to extend local call-up connection to the Internet throughout rural Virginia, a topic about which he's sponsoring a conference this summer. The long-term goal, included in the telecommunications reform bill, is to provide market incentives to encourage companies to provide high-speed fiber-optic access throughout the country.
The Boucher gopher can be reached at this address:| gopher://gopher.house.gov:70/1D1%3A31257%3AVirginia
Memo: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.