Since 1979 the Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe produces the bibliographic database PHYS which covers the worldwide literature in physics. The database is available on STN International. The database contains about 1,2 million citations in all fields of physics ranging from mathematical physics, elementary particles and field theories, nuclear, atomic and molecular physics, optics, acoustics and fluid dynamics, plasma physics, condensed matter physics, materials science, physical chemistry and biophysics up to geophysics, astronomy and astrophysics. The annual update contains more than 120.000 citations. The database is updated bimonthly. All kinds of literature are included from journal articles, conference papers, books and reports up to dissertations. The citations in the database are in English, publications in other languages have translated English title and abstract. Astronomy and astrophysics are covered in PHYS completely as possible. In 1987 there were more than 21.000 citations in these fields. There are many citations which are classified in PHYS into other fields like atomic or plasma physics and optics and which are not numbered to astronomy but may have a specific relevance for astronomers.

Searching in online databases for specific numerical data and for chemicals by formulae has always been difficult or, at best, complex. Two new additional indexing services were introduced to the INSPEC database at the beginning of 1987 to overcome these problems: Chemical Indexing - for searching all kinds of inorganic compounds and material systems, and Numerical Data Indexing - for limiting searches to a specific value or range of values of a particular physical quantity. The literature of SN 1987A, the first supernova to be discovered in 1987, is used to demonstrate the powers of these new indexing tools and how they compliment traditional retrieval aids such as classification, descriptors, and identifiers.

The general users requirements for the ESIS project are presented.

I would first like to present a little history of this project. I started working at Yerkes Observatory in March of 1972 and found out about the informal meeting in June of that year of observatory and astronomy librarians meeting at Harvard-Smithsonian after the Special Libraries Association meeting in Boston. I arranged to go to that one-day meeting to meet some of the people working in the field; especially in order to know who to call for some good advice once in a while.

My notes from the business meeting that day tell me that “a Union List of Observatory Publications/Astronomy Journals was discussed; no decision.” So I first heard about a union list of astronomy journals in 1972, but it may have been discussed many years before that. The Union List was further discussed at meetings in Pittsburgh in 1973, Toronto in 1974, Chicago in 1975, Denver in 1976, etc., etc.,

The compilation of a common listing of the serials holdings of the main astronomy libraries in the UK was proposed at the first Meeting of Astronomy Librarians of the UK held at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge in March 1980. The Library of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh was at that time already engaged in a project to catalogue its serials holdings and at the same time to compile a separate, briefer, computerised listing for use in the library. Although the original idea had been that the proposed union list should record only the astronomy serials held by the participating libraries, the Royal Observatory Library offered to assume responsibility for the project as a natural development of its own list and to construct a union list that would record the complete serials holdings of all the participating libraries as it was felt that this would be of even greater benefit to these libraries.

Astronomical directories are available as CDS Special Publications. They provide practical data that one seeks to have always at one’s disposal on astronomical organizations and related items of interest.

Over the years, these directories have proved to be very effective tools not only for improving national and international relationships in amateur and professional astronomy, but also for helping amateur astronomers, laypersons and public bodies to easily contact astronomical organizations as the need arises.

IDPAI 1989 (CDS Special Publication 12 - about 500 pages) will be the second edition of the International Directory of Professional Astronomical Institutions. It will gather more than 2600 entries from about 80 countries: professional astronomical observatories and institutions; organizations, universities, departments, groups or companies employing astronomers or researchers in astronomy; related entries of general interest: IAU adhering organizations, professional associations, funding organizations, academies, as well as bibliographical services, software producers, journals, publishers, manufacturers, dealers, etc.

The basic principles of networks, the terminology used and the features offered by the most commonly used systems are summarized.

Astronomers have always had a special need for rapid communication over large distances, partly because of their interest in experiments requiring long baselines. Examples: Eratosthenes’ measurement of the circumference of the Earth; determination of longitude at sea; solar-eclipse tests of general relativity; very-long-baseline interferometry. Of these, at least the second has prompted innovations in communications techniques (beginning with the Greenwich time ball).

More recently, the pressing need to travel widely for clean air and aether, and the international flavour of the resulting collaborations, has given astronomers particular incentive to explore the latest communications innovation: electronic mail.

An important channel of communication in many scientific fields is “Preprints.” The Astronomical Community uses this method very effectively for speedy communication. One of the main reasons for the prevalence of this practice in Astronomy is to reduce the time gap between the submission of an article and its actual publication in a scientific journal. Preprints are circulated by Astronomers among their colleagues. Libraries receive preprints either from authors or from institutions at which the authors are working.

At La Silla, we receive on average between 90 and 130 preprints a month from institutions all over the world. The preprints are extensively used by our staff as well as visiting astronomers who come to perform observations at La Silla. Most of the preprints are received as donations, others are requested directly from the publishing institute.

The European Southern Observatory has among other publications, its ESO Scientific Preprints. At La Silla, the library does not deal with the distribution of these preprints, since this is made directly from ESO in Garching, FRG.

A couple of different facts coalesced in the mid-70s that forced us to try to come up with a manageable scheme for handling preprints. First, as librarians at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, we were charged with tracking papers by NRAO staff and by visitors using Nrao telescopes to provide an annual listing of staff and visitor publications and to aid in compiling statistics on telescope use.

Second, staff and visitors kept asking for preprints — by series and/or by author, subject, or cover color — and the number of preprint series being received had increased to the point where we could no longer always pull that information off the tops of our heads. So, after consulting with colleagues who had similar concerns, we put together a database in 1978, modestly based on the highly successful Preprint/Antipreprint lists produced by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. We decided to produce a biweekly list of new papers received and an as-needed list of recently published papers. The scientific staff were very enthusiastic from the beginning, seeing that our efforts would make their efforts to keep up with the literature that much easier.

Many modern catalogues and/or observing lists are too large for easy printing in a magazine, or have too short a life to be economically worth printing as a catalogue or a book. We have therefore two ways of presenting them:

• (a) on microfiche

• (b) on tape (or diskette).

One could add computer print-outs, but by experience there are mostly made for private use.

Microfiches have never become very popular, although they are quite handy for long catalogues. The Henry Draper catalogue, weighting 10 kgs occupies 14 microfiches weighting 42 grams and can be accommodated in a common envelope. Durability of good microfiches is guaranteed for several decades and its price is cheap. Except thus for the reading device, which is bulky, the microfiche is a handy way to store information, especially when only small amounts of information are to be retrieved.

At NOAO/Tucson the various sky surveys are not kept in or kept by the Library. Instead, the person who is responsible for their acquisition, care, handling and preservation, is someone whose area of expertise is scientific photography and instrumentation, and he has given me the information that follows.

At NOAO we have a very complete set of the sky surveys. In Tucson we have one set of the Palomar survey on print and one on glass, the ESO/SRC southern atlas, red and blue, on glass and film, the SRC infrared atlas on film, the SRC equatorial atlas on glass, the ESO quick blue survey on glass, and original KPNO telescope plates on glass. At the observatory on Kitt Peak there are two sets of the Palomar survey on print. Basically, all of these can be divided by format into three kinds: paper print, film, and glass. I will tell briefly what we do with each.

The microficher received at the Library E.S.O. - La Silla, come from different sources: old journals out of print, articles in current journals which often include microfiche for long tables, catalogs and figures not suitable for normal printing, and larger catalogues of data (IUE, IRAS, etc.). These microfiche, coming either in journals or being a publication themselves, are ordered in the same way:

• - Every microfiche is assigned a running number.

• - Three cards are typed: the main one being by author, the second one by title of the article, and the third one by title of the journal. In addition, the running number that identifies the microfiche is typed on the upper right corner of each card. The total amount of microfiche that make up the article or publication is given at the lower center of each card.

• - The cards are kept in a special catalogue cabinet labeled Microfiche., in strict alphabetical order, where the cards by author, title, and publication are mixed together.

• - The microfiche themselves are kept in a plastic tray with fiche separators and index dividers with insertable label holders. These label holders are placed at an interval of every five fiche separators. The holders display the running numbers of the microfiche.

• - In addition, every fiche separator carries on its front side an adhesive label which contains the same information as that found on the main card.

Major astronomical facilities generally use a large number of machine-readable catalogs and data sets. These are requested over a long period of time, usually by individual staff members who seldom request data through their library services. An important drawback of this procedure is that the same catalogs are often requested by different persons at the same institute, thus requiring a duplicate effort on the part of the service organization (usually the data centers) and longer than necessary delays for the persons requesting data. It is suggested that libraries at major facilities build collections of important data sets and maintain library catalogs of these collections for use by staff astronomers. This paper discusses simplified and efficient methods of building such collections and details possible ways of storing and retrieving particular catalogs easily when they are required by staff members.

The Library of Warsaw University Observatory is a small one, but it is one of the oldest astronomical libraries in Poland. The library collection has been gathered almost since the beginning of the Warsaw Observatory, that is since 1825. Although a large part of our collection was burned during the Second World War, the remaining part contains many unique items. Scholars doing research in the area of the history of astronomy often find our collection very helpful in their work.

Observatory publications play a significant role in my library. In general, we have limited possibilities for buying publications with hard currency. Therefore, any free publications obtained by my library constitute an extremely valuable source of information about new research and discoveries all over the world.

In our library we define observatory publications as all materials disseminated in serial form and on its own behalf, by an observatory, astronomical institute or university department. Included are annual reports, research reports, reprints, newsletters, and monograph series. Preprints, though fitting the description, are handled separately. Excluded and catalogued separately are individual monographs and users manuals. Sometimes items such as catalogues and atlases are catalogued and shelved elsewhere with a dummy left in the appropriate place.

Traditionally, libraries have shelved observatory publications alphabetically according to the city or town in which the observatory is located. Reference tools such as Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts and the Bibliography of Non-commercial Publications have used that arrangement too. One of the problems of this system is that without a number, it does not provide a single, unique, identifier for observatories with many locations. The same holds true in cases where there are many observatories in one location. In addition, the location may not be known or the library’s arrangement may have idiosyncracies.

I can imagine that many of us here represent a small institute library, and we can only look with wonder and envy at the vast collections of the US Naval Observatory and other such large and long-established libraries. We have a library of approx. 10 000 monographs, 13 000 bound serial volumes, 200 current serial titles and a report/observatory publications collection which grows at the rate of about 650 items per annum. In addition we receive about 800 - 1000 preprints a year. We have a staff of 2 and 2 halves. One of our part-time people deals almost exclusively with the ordering and distribution of our Extraterrestrial preprints, reports and reprints.

My library dates back to 1904, shortly after Dr. George Ellery Hale came west from Yerkes Observatory to the sleepy little town of Pasadena, California to start the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory. The classification system used in this new library was published for the International Council by the Royal Society of London. Over time the librarians managed to acquire many complete runs of observatory publications from all over the world, and they were arranged alphabetically according to the place where they were published. University publications have been included in this collection as well.

Session 3 on “Handling and Use of Special Format Materials” dealt with diverse items which are of unique importance in astronomical libraries.

Preprints and reprints are important in several ways. Libraries’ collection and dissemination of information about pre-publication journal and conference papers boosts the astronomer’s awareness of current research in a timely fashion. Individual libraries’ practices range from very basic—the receipt and physical display of preprints—to the more elaborate activities including production of lists, gathering of subsequent publication information about the papers themselves, construction of local databases listing preprints, and electronic network exchange of listings.

There was a consensus that the sending of reprint series is far less important than it was in years past.

We heard a call for formal recognition or designation of a central clearinghouse for information about astronomy preprints.