News
Reports
PAMnet News
Dorothy Manderscheid
DISTRIBUTED DATABASE FOR ASTRONOMY PREPRINTS
Two PAM librarians, Sarah Stevens-Rayburn and Ellen Bouton, are among the five investigators for a recently funded project to adapt currently available software to develop a centralized index for astronomy preprints and documents. The papers would be maintained at the authors' site but an integrated index would be provided for searching. The system may include a notification service based on a profile submitted by the user.
URANIA
The American Astronomical Society has announced Urania, a digital library for astronomy and astrophysics. Urania includes scholarly journals, bibliographic information, original data, astronomical catalogs, and historical scholarly literature, as well as a reference system archive organized by object in the sky.
SPRINGER ELECTRONIC JOURNALS
Several librarians have expressed concern that access to Springer electronic journals may require user ID and password rather than being based on IP address. Those wishing to express their opinions on this topic can contact Robert Badger, Director, Electronic Development, Springer-Verlag; his e-mail address is bbadger@springer-ny.com.
INSPEC ON FIRST SEARCH
Molly White summarized responses to her request for reactions to INSPEC on First Search. Positive features noted included: Gives access to everybody at small colleges at reasonable rate, no online thesaurus but does have "wordlist," service works fine without requiring regular teaching, patrons catch on very quickly, searchers can send citations to their e-mail addresses (but 20 record limit is too small), quite satisfactory for most searches. Negative features noted included: limitations of software frustrating to librarians trained on Dialog, important to check author names in "wordlist," superscript or subscript or "or-ing" strings cannot be done, no chemical or numerical indexing, no document type searching, not easy to get what you want using a complicated database like INSPEC on a simple system like First Search, cannot tag records but can specify record numbers when downloading or printing, allows only a one-character truncation symbol (+), can search by title keyword but not by exact title.
PAM DIVISION AWARD
A new award has been established which will recognize PAM Division members for outstanding contributions to the Division. It is reserved for recipients whose professional work is marked by distinction and dedication to librarianship in astronomy, mathematics and/or physics. The award will be presented annually.
INSPEC TO BIBTEX CONVERSION
In response to a query regarding a PC-based program that converts the INSPEC tagged field output to BibTex format, Laurent Guillope suggests looking on the ftp server malherbe.ujt-grenoble.fr, in the directory pub/bibtex.
GRANT MONEY FOR JOURNALS
Bob Michaelson reports that it is possible to charge photocopying to a federal grant if it is written into the grant and if that part of the proposal is approved. But it has never been legal to charge individual subscriptions to federal grants.
MARC FOR LPI PUBLICATIONS
Bibliographic records for the publications of the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) are now available, via anonymous FTP, at: ftp://cass.jsc.nasa.gov/pub/outgoing/marc.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
Steve Wilcox, Manager, Electronic Product Development, IEEE Computer Society, reports that the online files for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems are temporarily available to everybody. Later this year they will be restricted to testers of the Digital Library that is being developed. Access will be limited to subscribers only beginning in 1998, with online, print, and combination subscriptions.
ASTRONOMY DONATIONS
The "Departamento de Astronomia" of the University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, founded in 1995, would appreciate donations of astronomy materials to supplement its library. For further information please contact Dr. Heinz Andernach .
INTERNET RESOURCES FOR CHILDREN
Liz Bryson is still maintaining her "Children on the Internet" listserv. Further information can be found at http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/~bryson/children.html. She recently distributed the 6th hardcopy version of K-12 Resources on the Internet. Please e-mail her if you would like to be added to the list for this publication.
ELECTRONIC MATH JOURNALS LIST
To join a listserv for those interested in editorial and technical issues regarding electronic math journals, send a note to listserv@cnsibm.albany.edu with the message: subscribe emj [your name]
INTERNET SITES NOTED
Mars sites:
Title ordered list of astronomical catalogues from Astronomical Data Center: http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/adc.html.
World Book Forum (an online community for everyone working in publishing and related fields): http://qa.cursci.co.uk/simonb/home.htm.
International Information & Library Review -- free table of contents and article abstracts to nonsubscribers, plus articles to subscribers: http://www.hbuk.co.uk/ap/journals/lr.htm.
Scientific anomalies from Science Frontiers: http://www.knowledge.co.uk/frontiers/.
Binary star simulation: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/~tlh10/java/binary/binary.htm.
American Institute of Physics' FYI Newsletter: http://www.hep.net/documents/newsletters/aipfyi/aipfyi.html.
Inference Find (parallel search engines): http://m5.inference.com/ifind/.
Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues: http://sunsite.unc.edu/reference/prices/prices.html.
URL Minder (keeps track of Web pages and other resources on the Web and sends you e-mail whenever your personally registered resources change): http://www.netmind.com/URL-minder/.
Science's Next Wave (job picture for young Ph.D.s): http://www.nextwave.org.
Art by Math website: http://www.ArtByMath.com.
Conference Papers and Session Notes from the conference, "Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property," January 21-23, 1997, sponsored by Coalition for Networked Information, along with Council on Library Resources, the Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard Law School: http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/iip/econ/econ.html.
Database of European science and technology vacancies: http://www.sciencejobs.com/.
BOOKS NOTED
Albert, Burt. Fat Free Meetings: How to Make Them Fast, Focused, and Fun! Peterson's, 1996. ISBN: 1-56079-597-2, pap., $16.95.
DuBrin, Andrew J. The Transforming Power of Self-Discipline: Getting It Done. Peterson's, 1995. ISBN: 1-56079-470-4, $22.95.