****************************************************
*                  INTRODUCTION                    *
*                       or                         *
* "The Who, What, Where, When and Why of the Hunt" *
****************************************************

WHO IT IS
---------
The Hunt is composed and administered by me, namely:

   Rick Gates        				(805) 893-7225
   Dir. of Library Automation
   Univ. of California Library
   Santa Barbara, CA  93106		lb05gate@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu

The Hunt players are anyone who cares to play.  Players from
all over the world have taken part.

Other Hunt contributors include the large number of Net
users have have sent extremely valuable advice in the form
of comments, corrections, kudos, questions, and criticism.

Finally, the Hunt is a lot easier to get to thanks to the
efforts of

   Glee Cady & Paul Holbrook of CICNet

      and

   Craig Summerhill of The Coalition for Networked Information.

WHAT IT IS
----------
The Hunt is a set of 10 questions that can be answered using
only the resources of the Net (Bitnet, Internet, Usenet,
etc.)

The Hunt questions cover the spectrum of available
information on the Net.  There is no theme (yet), to any
Hunts.

Each question carries a weight that indicates difficulty,
from 1 (easy), to 10 (difficult).

Each Hunt usually includes an extra-credit question (1
point), and a Mystery question, who's Net-answer evades me.

WHERE IT IS
-----------
I post the Hunt questions from my home site here in Santa
Barbara to a variety of listservs, Usenet groups, a Gopher,
and an ftp site.  Read the file on Hunt distribution (file
distrib.txt, in the same directory as this file), for more
information.

WHEN IT IS
----------
The Hunt is a monthly occurrence.  

I try to start on about the last week of each month with an
announcement of the exact distribution time of the next
month's Hunt questions.

I try to post the Hunt question very late in the evening on
the very last day of the month.  For instance, the February
Hunt questions were posted at midnight, on January 31st.

Players have one week from the date of the posting of the
questions.  All answers must be e-mailed to me.

Answers get posted within a week or so after each Hunt has
ended.

The first Hunt occurred in September, 1992.

WHY IT IS
---------
1. Lets us find out more about the different ways in which
people use the Net.

2. Allows novice users to try out the answers in order to
learn more about how to access the resources of the Net.

3. Informs us about the variety of information available via
the Net.

4. Lets us observe as Net tools abstract and evolve over
time.