Previous
abstract 
Next abstract
STELAR is a pilot project designed to study the technical and practical aspects of making the refereed scientific literature available on line. The primary database contains machine readable abstractions, supplied by the NASA STI program, of articles from eight journals of interest to astronomers. The current publicly-accessible system contains the text of the abstracts, which are being indexed and made available using WAIS, providing a plain English query capability and simple document retrieval. The complete prototype, which includes the ability to retrieve scanned images of the pages of selected articles, is available to test subjects through selected astronomical libraries.
Results from the first eight months of operation will be presented, demonstrating rapid growth in the number of queries and document retrievals from the system. Enhancements of the search and retrieval system and additions to the current holdings will be discussed.
