The official answer is that the CD-ROM data are for our collaborators. It is not within our mission, nor do we have financial support, to provide a free service to the Internet community. We are pleased that public gateways are being established to our data; however we cannot guarantee that they will be supported in the future.
Additional funding is urgently required if the CDs are to be kept on line beyond September 30, 1995.
We do not guarantee the on-line availability of the CDs, nor the correctness of the data contained in them.
But unofficially, we intend to maintain the system as long as sufficient funding is available. As long as our system is not overburdened we will continue to export the CD-ROMs publicly, via both NFS and FTP. That is simpler for us than administering a system for registered users only. We welcome constructive suggestions and (of course) success stories.
We will discuss more reliable long-term arrangements with any organization that is willing to share maintenance costs or collaborate in joint development of a combined system.
If you set up anonymous FTP links, for example ftp://cedrcd.lbl.gov/CEDRCD/disk1/ those links must be updated whenever the CDROM contents are changed. If you set up NFS links, for example misty.lbl.gov:/export/cdrom/cd001 those links must be updated whenever the CDROM contents or NFS locations are changed.
You may use any of our "contents and locations" files to update your pointers automatically. Please contact dwmerrill@lbl.gov if you wish to be additionally notified by e-mail when these files are updated.