
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 20, 1994                    TAG: 9406180020 
SECTION: DAILY BREAK                     PAGE: E1    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: BY CRAIG A. SHAPIRO, STAFF WRITER 
DATELINE: 940620                                 LENGTH: Medium

FINDING EXPERTS NOT SUCH A MONSTROUS JOB ONLINE

{LEAD} IT SEEMED like a pretty tall order: Someone who could talk at length and with insight about the cultural and psychological implications of the latest round of horror films.

Jack Nicholson opened in ``Wolf'' Friday. Coming later this year are Tom Cruise in ``Interview With the Vampire'' and Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro in ``Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.''

{REST} Those icons - the werewolf, the vampire, the Frankenstein monster - recur regularly in literature and film, most often when there's been some rip in the social fabric - world war, a health crisis, economic upheaval.

I wanted to know what might be happening out there right now that would explain all this high-profile monster activity. I needed an expert.

Enter ProfNet.

Administered by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island, ProfNet's membership lists nearly 1,100 public relations offices at 650 institutions, including:

Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Duke and most of the schools in the Ivy League and Big Ten.

Medical centers at Vanderbilt, the University of Michigan and USC.

Schools of business and public policy at Dartmouth, Harvard and Princeton.

A number of federal agencies also belong. Among them: the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution. The roll also lists the national laboratory at Los Alamos.

Since it signed on in January 1993, ProfNet has expanded into Canada, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia.

Finding someone to talk horror was a snap. Two days after submitting a request via electronic mail, I had a list of experts from Louisiana to Boston to Ohio, Pennsylvania and Berkeley.

Raymond McNally, a history professor at Boston College and author of five books on Dracula and vampires, told me monsters are a coping device, a way of helping us deal with the horrors of the real world. He added that as science and technology advance, the more we like to think about the unthinkable. Monsters give us that outlet.

Dan Forbush, associate vice president for public relations and creative services at SUNY-Stony Brook, is the man who created ProfNet.

One thing: ProfNet isn't a pubic access bulletin board. It's limited to authors and journalists. Forbush said requests are distributed to all members twice daily, the first time from his home at 6 a.m. and later around noon. On an average day, he moves 20 to 30.

My request, he said, was ``right in the ballpark.''

But there have been others:

The Connecticut newspaper doing a science page on belly buttons.

Kids and trances, a request from Florida following a proposal to introduce yoga and meditation into public schools.

Canine mind drugs.

Forbush's favorite? The reporter from Poughkeepsie writing a column about crickets as house pets. ProfNet turned up six experts.

Every avenue on the information highway is paved.

by CNB