THIS YEAR the Nobel Foundation announced its prizes-considered the most prestigious in the world-for the first time online through its Web site on the Internet.

The handsomely designed Nobel World Wide Web Server contains information about the Nobel Prizes as well as the Nobel Laureates and their discoveries. In addition, it provides information about the Nobel Foundation, which confers the prizes (its history, organization, and budget as well as the statutes and rules governing its activities), and the man who established them-scientist, inventor, and explosives manufacturer Alfred Nobel.

One of the primary goals of the Nobel Server is to explain discoveries in the natural sciences and medicine, to highlight important literary contributions, and to promote world peace. The site contains the full text of the press releases announcing the winners in chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology, literature, peace, and economics. These press releases, which are really short essays, describe the nature and significance of the award-winning work. They also include photographs, illustrations, diagrams, charts, and even hypertext links-as in the case of the press release profiling Irish poet and essayist Seamus Heaney, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which includes a link to copies of his poems archived on a server maintained by the University of North Carolina Press.

The Nobel Server also includes a searchable database of Nobel Laureates which you can search by prize category, year, name, institutional affiliation, keyword (either English or Swedish), and date of birth or death, or any combination thereof. Entries include the full citation for the award (the entry for UB's Herbert Hauptman cites his work with Jerome Karle on "the development of direct methods for the determination of crystal structures"), and the Nobel Foundation has plans to enhance the database with pictures, press releases, and the cv's of the laureates at some future date.

You can connect to the Nobel Server on the World Wide Web at http://www.nobel.se through a text-based interface such as Lynx or through a graphical browser such as Netscape. For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Loss Pequeno Glazier and Nancy Schiller, University Libraries