Help Page
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

  1. What do the icons mean?
  2. Which browser?
  3. Resources on the ARKive pages

Icons 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.

Icons on the public pages

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.

Icons on the educational pages

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.

Which browser?

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)

Resources on the ARKive pages

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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