Scholastic Network (NY) recently won NSF funding to create a "school of the future" online. The year-old service reaches 250K K-12 students. Its point-and-click interface gives access to curriculum projects, lesson plans, workshops, professional forums, libraries of free resources, an online bookstore, AOL services, Usenet newsgroups, and Internet WAIS, Gopher, and mailing lists. 212-924-4735. [Nick Anis, Newsbytes, 10/21/94.] (For info on sign-ups, try [email protected] or [email protected], 1-800-473-2500. I believe it's $295/year for schools, $16.95/month for individuals.)

Macmillan Digital USA is a new electronic imprint from Simon & Schuster Inc., for reference, travel, and computer texts in CD ROM and online. [WSJ, 11/15/94, B4. EDUPAGE.]

Dialog and Data-Star will nearly eliminate connect-time charges over the next 18 months. "Connect-time charging does not work anymore." Cost for the average search session will remain constant due a fixed charge (of up to $10K/year) and a new $1 "view fee" for every Type, Print, or Display command, much as CD-ROM services are priced. [Information World Review (iw[email protected]), 7/94. [email protected], 9/11/94.]

The UnCover article delivery service indexes nearly 5M articles in 15K English-language periodicals. 3K citations are added daily, at the same time journals are published. Fax retrieval takes 1-24 hours, for about $8.50 plus copyright fee. See http://www.carl.org/uncover/brochure.html for free online author/title searches or for free notification of journal tables of contents. [[email protected], 11/7/94.] (Tim didn't care for the interface, but coverage was good.)

Mercury Center NewsHound is a full-text filtering service from the San Jose Mercury News, but covering Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News, the NYT, AP, Kyodo, Scripps-Howard, Business Wire, PR Newsire, and other sources -- about 2K articles/day, with more to be added. You can also search the 2K daily SJM classifieds. The search engine comes from Verity, Inc. (Mountain View). Each filter specifies words (or word stems) which must, must not, and "should" appear, plus a 0-100 threshold for the overall score. (Must and must-not words are given high weight, but are not absolute.) Matching full texts are emailed hourly. $4.95/month charter rate (then $9.95) for five filter profiles, first month free; no charge for profile changes. To start, register your credit card number with 1-800-818-6397 or 408-297-8495. [[email protected], 11/20/94.]

If you need a news/market search, Mercury Center News Search will check its own archive (since 1929), AP, and other newspaper and wire services for you. Results can be mailed, faxed, emailed, or mailed on diskette in 24 hours, or 2 hours for rush jobs. (408) 920-5999, (408) 271-3799 Fax. [SJM, 12/4/94, 8E.]

Usenet is expanding with alt.binaries.multimedia.erotica. [Bill Park ([email protected]), 12/6/94.] (If you build the bandwidth, they will come. For those of you with kids, note that automated filters often pick up the darndest things from alt.personals and alt.sex.stories. Adding "not sex" keywords won't always stop the Verity or db.stanford.edu filters; you may have to specify "not sex sex sex." A full list of stop words might itself be obscene.)