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Welcome to the ARKive Help page. This addresses both general questions about the site (FAQs)
and questions of a technical nature. If your questions are unanswered below, please
forward them to the ARKive team (if your question is of a technical nature, please advise as to
which operating system (MS-DOS, Mac-OS, Unix, etc)
and which browser you are using).
Contents
- What do the icons mean?
- Which browser?
- Resources on the ARKive pages
In addition to the navigational tools provided by your Web browser,
additional tools are to be found on all ARKive pages. Not all tools appear
on all pages, only the ones that are relevant and useful.
Use them like the buttons on other applications. There are different buttons,
and different designs, to be found on each of the 'levels' of this ARKive
website. The ones for the opening pages (like those to the left) are hopefully
self-explanatory, albeit marked in English. The others are summarised below.
Home (Public)
This button returns you from any ARKive public levels page to the main, opening public levels page.
Help
Click this picture on any ARKive public levels page to bring you back to this Help page.
Species type
A link to a page showing all the species currently in the ARKive which are of the same type.
Type depends on a classification system, and we have used the western concept of
kingdoms, phylla and classes.
Geographical location
This button links to a page showing all the species currently in the ARKive which inhabit the same
region. Of course, regions are an invented concept, but this gives some idea of which creatures
share the same part of the world.
A to Z Index
Click this picture on any ARKive public levels page to reach an alphabetical listing of all
species on this website (note: other species may be available on the 1996 website).
Read name
Sometimes it is helpful to hear an accurate pronunciation of the name of a species. This button
plays a spoken-voice reading of both English and Latin, scientific, names.
Home (Educational pages)
This button returns you from any ARKive educational levels page to the main,
opening educational levels page.
Help
Click this picture on any ARKive page to bring you back to this Help page.
Geographical location
This button links to a page showing all the species currently in the ARKive which inhabit the same
region. Of course, regions are an invented concept, but this gives some idea of which creatures
share the same part of the world.
Species type
A link to a page showing all the species currently in the ARKive which are of the same type.
Type depends on a classification system, and we have used the western concept of
kingdoms, phylla and classes.
A to Z Index
Click this picture on any KS3/4 level page to reach an alphabetical listing of all
species on this website (note: other species may be available on the 1996 website).
Read name
It may be helpful to hear an accurate pronunciation of the name of a species. This button
plays a spoken-voice reading of both English and Latin, scientific, names.
Whereas the 1996 site was designed to be viewed on most image-capable browsers, the 1997 site
was designed to take advantage of technologies like Javascript and Shockwave to explore their
potential for educational interaction with an online database of images and text. For this reason,
we strongly recommend Microsoft Explorer version 4 (or later) or Netscape Communicator (or later)
for these pages.
However, you may still view the pages with earlier versions of these browsers (they have been checked with
version 3 of each, on both Windows and Macintosh computers).If you wish to view the 1997 pages on
Netscape Navigator 2 or 3, or Internet Explorer 2 or 3, we recommend the following plug-ins...
- Apple's QuickTime Plugin to show Quicktime movies on your pages
- ViewMovie Plug-in to show Quicktime movies
- MPEG Viewers for Netscape 2 and
above
- Macromedia Shockwave (Director player)
It is possible to access images and/or video files from most ARKive species pages. This is done by
clicking the small thumbnail pictures on the page. In such cases, a subsidiary window is opened by your
browser, in which the image or video is shown.
Note that these windows stay open until you close them, allowing you to compare images of
different species, for example. However, you may find that your browser runs out of memory if
you keep too many open. In such cases you must either close some windows or quit your brwoser
and give it more memory (if possible).
Some file (especially video files) are large, and may take time to download.
On the public pages file sizes are indicated as a guide to download times, but on the
educational pages we recommend that teachers download and cache the video files in advance.
Remember that you will only be able to watch video if you have suitable software. If you cannot
watch the embedded video online (or do not wish to do so), you can
save the video file to disk to view offline. In this case, please respect the copyright-holders'
rights to the video.
Video files are presented in Quicktime format flattened
for use on Windows,Unix and Macintosh machines, or in MPEG format (which may also be played
by modern Quicktime players) for the larger frame-sized clips. Again, these files can be very large,
and download times can be significant.
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