Subject: A&A preprints and abstracts

From: Sarah Stevens-Rayburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Feb 1994 17:20:11 -0500 (EST)

Hi Don--
Following a `conversation' with Ellen about a brochure she and Caroline
are working on to help folk find net resources, I looked again at NRAO's
homepage.  Having wended my way down to your stuff about preprints and
abstracts, I wanted to let you know that we've added a separate file
of the preprint database for 1982-1991 (which will really be 1982 through
two years ago, with the regular STEPsheet always being current and 
previous year for speed and accuracy).  It's stsci-old-preprint-db if
you're interested.  Also, I'm curious to know why your pointer to 
the STEPsheets is via CERN
.  Isn`t that a rather round-about way to go?  Or is there some Mosaic
subtlety 
I'm missing?  I note you go to the RAPsheet via the same route....

Cheers,
Sarah

---

From: dwells (Don Wells)
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 94 20:00:08 EST

Sarah,

Sarah Stevens-Rayburn writes:
 > .. we've added.. stsci-old-preprint-db ..

OK. I will add that to my resource list soon.

 > .. curious.. why.. pointer.. via CERN.. rather round-about..

The problem is that Mosaic was not able to talk directly to WAIS
servers as recently as November. This capability was added to Mosaic
with the 2.0 release. Those URLs were put in the page back when all we
had was Mosaic 1.x. I (and many other people maintaining pages) were
reluctant to switch the URLs to direct-access at first, because we
knew that many people were still running Mosaic 1.x. But many weeks
have passed, and by now I don't have much sympathy for people who are
running obsolete Mosaic versions. Those pointers need to be updated. I
will do that soon.

                -*-

I am right now in the process of re-designing my resource list. I am
talking to several other people about the problem of maintaining these
lists. I am particularly interested in seeing improvements in the
representation of library, preprint and other scholarly-support
resources for astronomy. I will be glad to talk to -- and cooperate
with -- my favorite librarians about these matters!

                -*-

I gather that the thesaurus project has finally been concluded. I saw
some annoncement about this, and it used the verb "published" about
the thesaurus. What about a machine=readable version? It is obvious
that one must exist; will it become available on the Net?

-Don