Subject: Re: Mirror copy at Vilspa

From: [email-masked] (anton koekemoer)
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 94 20:48:07 EST

> Could Villafranca maintain a mirror copy of the AstroWeb Database?

a great idea; fine by me too.

Also, Re: harvest broker, i've finally had a bit more of a chance to play with
it - it does have a lot of potential alhtough I'm still puzzled by some of the
results. For example, I tried searching for 'preprint' with and without the
'Keyword match on word boundaries' option. With this switched on (default)
it gives 34 results. Switching it off would have produced more, I naively
thought (ie it looks for the substring preprint and not the exact word?...)
- but no, it only found 29. Some of the ones it missed with this option turned
off only have preprint as a category in our database and not in the document
text itself. But then why does it find them using the first option?..

However, all in all I like it and think that it would be of considerable use,
particularly in terms of keeping track of new resources added to pages we
already know about (eg institutions adding preprint lists to their homepages)
- and this will probably be reasonably common for quite a while yet since many
of the homepages are still under development. It would also be interesting to
look at the results of a two-level search (or three-level - depending on how
many gigabytes are available..).

						cheers,
						 - anton.

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From: [email-masked] (Don Wells)
Date: Sat, 3 Dec 94 08:44:28 EST

Dear AstroWeb colleagues (and Daniel),

 > a great idea; fine by me too.

OK, I will add my name to the apparent consensus.  
But there are some things that I want to say about it.  

1. The bandwidth limitations which currently justify regional AstroWeb
centers are short-term problems which are steadily disappearing.
Loading on servers has never been a problem (none of us are CERN or
NCSA!).  The really important long-term justification for multiple
copies of AstroWeb is the visibility which our respective institutions
have in distinctly different astronomical clienteles. As I see it,
VILSPA's role in IUE (ultraviolet astronomy) and in ESA operations is
the real long-term justification for putting a server there.

2. All servers which carry the "AstroWeb" name should be updated from
the master database regularly, preferably every day. It is my
understanding that CDS intends to assist VILSPA in installing an
update daemon. 

3. If this proposal (for another AstroWeb server) is agreed to, then
it seems to me that Daniel's address should be added to the "astroweb"
Email exploder list. If he is on the mailing list, why shouldn't he
get a password at the master database? If he has a server with the
"AstroWeb" name, is on the mailing list and has a password to the
master database, then he will be -- effectively -- a member of the
Consortium. Therefore, I suggest that we, and Daniel, address the
question of whether we and he want Ponz/VILSPA to join the
Consortium fully, including accepting the responsibility of helping to
maintain the database. My "yes" vote should be understood as endorsing
full membership (and responsibility) for Daniel/VILSPA.

If we, and Daniel, agree that he should become a full AstroWeb member,
and we announce that fact on the networks, it is likely to trigger
other requests to join the Consortium. I think that that will be a
good thing, but we should all be aware of the probable consequences of
our actions. There is no advantage to simply adding more names to the
membership list; instead, we should try to accept new members who add
new visibility for new astronomical clienteles and who add new
expertise to our database maintenance. In particular, solar, planetary
and high-energy astronomy are under-represented in the Consortium, and
probably we will need to add an astronomical library specialist at
some point.  What we really need are more people who are willing and
able to help in the database maintenance. It appears to me that we
have no human or technical limitations on our ability to scale up the
Consortium by as much as a factor of two.

-Don