                Introduction to the Directory Service

The directory service helps you to find out information about people and the
organisations they work for: in particular it can provide electronic mail
addresses, postal addresses and telephone and facsimile numbers.
Once you have provided information about a person's
NAME and where they are based, the directory service will search various 
local and remote databases to try and find information about people with a
name matching the one you have given.

The directory service can, of course, only find entries for people who 
work for organisations who are participating in this pilot service.  At the
time of writing (May 1991), there are over 400 participating organisations
and approximately 350,000 individual entries in the Directory.

If you cannot find an entry for the person you are looking for, it may be
that the entry is in the Directory but that the Directory Service does not
recognise the name you have provided.  In this case, you might like to
BROWSE the Directory: you can list people within a DEPARTMENT, DEPARTMENTs
within an ORGANISATION, ORGANISATIONs within a COUNTRY, and the list of
countries with participating ORGANISATIONs.

When using the directory service, you will be prompted to type in:

:- the NAME of the person whose address you are looking for 
   (e.g. "Paul Barker", or "P Barker", or even just "Barker"))
 
:- their DEPARTMENT
   (e.g. "Computer Science")

:- the ORGANISATION they work for
   (e.g. "University College London", or "UCL")

:- the COUNTRY in which the ORGANISATION is based
   (e.g. "gb", "uk" or "Britain"  for Great Britain).

The line above the prompt (:- ) indicates what information the system
is expecting.  This line also indicates the default (what the
directory service will fill in as information if you just press the
RETURN key).

On line HELP is always available: type 

?      for HELP on information currently expected
??     for HELP on HELP (how to use on-line HELP)
?TERM  for HELP on any topic, where TERM is any of the words displayed 
       in capital letters in this and any other HELP screen

Further useful commands:

Control-C   to abandon whatever you are doing: i.e.
            abandon a current query and allow for the entry of another query;
            abandon the entry of a query and allow the re-entry of the query;
            if no current query, exit the Directory Service.

q           to quit the directory service, when given in response to a 
            request for a person's name

