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[Zhaoran Xu]

                SERFIS  On-Line

     SERFIS, SouthEast Regional Floristic Information
System, is back on-line in INTERNET.  SERFIS is a regional
multi-institutional database that intends to accomodate all
the southeastern herbarium collections, about 6.25 million
sheets in 112 herbaria.  Although still far away from the
ultimate goal, SERFIS now has accomodated 60,000 records of
collection data from 14 institutions, including ALU, AUA,
FLAS, FUGR, NCU, TENN, UNA, and USF, among which >50% are
UNA holding.  The collections are from different continents,
but >90% are U.S. collections.

     The on-line system is designed for curators that do not
have much computer experience, and users only need to press
either <Enter> or <Esc> key to select queries and to type in
the search constraints.  When it was tested (on Saturday,
October 1, 1994) in the recent Systematics Symposium at
Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, the SERFIS system
performance was satisfactory from remote login (Telnet), and
queries were executed instantly.

     To get into SERFIS at an Internet terminal:
        telnet serfis.by.ua.edu<Enter>
        (Wait for "login: " prompt, then)
        public<Enter> (Login as "public"; case sensitive!)
     (Follow instructions on screen to search data.  After
     searching, you may mail output files back to your
     own terminal by typing at the "serfis%" prompt:
        mail email-address < ~/output/filename<Enter>
     Email-address is your own email address, and filename
     is "ser + query#  + .txt".  For example, you have done a
     query "4-1. Search by Taxon Names only", output
     filename will be "ser4_1.txt")
        logout<Enter> (To leave SERFIS)

     SERFIS began on-line in a SQL database format in
April 1992 when Association of Southeast Biologists meeting
was held in Tuscaloosa.  But in the last two years,
Southeast curators had difficulties in using the SERFIS SQL
database.  Therefore, we removed the SQL database in April
1994, and re-engineered the system so that it can be
friendly enough for our curators.  The current on-line
system has tremendous improvement in both user-friendlyness
and system speed.

     Comments, suggestions and questions may be addressed to
the system manager at the following address.  Detail
documentation is available upon request.