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Session 38 - Electronic Journals and Other AAS Web Services.
Display session, Tuesday, January 16
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
The on-line edition of the Astrophysical Journal provides the first opportunity for astronomical researchers to interact with the literature in a network context. Other electronic journals will follow. Astronomers will continue to develop ways to take advantage of information on the network, and these will be most effective when ApJ articles, observations from data centers, proposals for telescope time, communications with collaborators, and so on, are meshed.
Astronomical literature, as a resource on the Internet, is not unique from the viewpoint of function or management, and astronomers are not unique as scholars in their desire to use the Internet as a tool to advance their work. We need to ensure as a community that all our resources for research --- journals and data --- fit in a global context on an Internet being used by everyone. In other words, we have to be sure that the ApJ fits into all the digital libraries of the future, including the ones we don't build.
This paper will present a scenario in which many varied forms of information, astronomical and otherwise, can be catalogued and distributed so that they can be discovered and used by the research community.
