The following is a news announcement from the Research Libraries Group. It
is being posted to other museum and library-related LISTSERVs.

New Distributors for Ariel(r) for Windows(tm)

The Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) is pleased to announce wider
availability of Ariel, its document transmission system for the Internet,
through new distributorship agreements with two major library support
networks in the United States and a variety of service vendors overseas.
While RLG will continue to provide Ariel worldwide, many potential users
will prefer to acquire it from local sources, possibly as part of regional
resource-sharing arrangements.

The AMIGOS Bibliographic Council, based in Dallas, Texas, is providing
Ariel to its members and other purchasers in the Southwest.  SOLINET, the
Southeastern Library Network, Inc. based in Atlanta, Georgia, will be
doing the same in the Southeast.

Sites outside the US already comprise about 20 percent of registered Ariel
users.  A growing set of foreign distributors is led by the Pica Center for
Library Automation -- a long-time partner with RLG in efforts to improve
service to the two organization's users.  Based in Leiden, Pica will
provide Ariel software in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and
Luxembourg.

In Italy and Switzerland, Ariel can be obtained from Cenfor International,
based in Genoa.  Potential users in Rumania and Israel will be served by
TELDAN, based in Tel Aviv.  And Info Access & Distribution, whose home
office is in Singapore, is both Ariel's first overseas distributor and the
one with the widest territory -- Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Ariel is a software program running under Microsoft Windows that relies on
a combination of hardware -- PCs, scanners, and laser printers -- that
libraries often already have available.  It has three times the resolution
of a typical fax, a feature valued by its users, who often use Ariel to
fulfill interlibrary loan requests and send essential documents between
widely separated offices.  Ariel can convey superscripts, subscripts, and
small type, scientific formulae, graphs, charts, and foreign-language text
in clean, complete detail -- and it has document-handling capabilities that
fax systems do not match.

For more information, please send e-mail to bl.sal@rlg.stanford.edu.