AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 120. Computational Techniques, Catalogs and Literature
Oral, Saturday, January 9, 1999, 2:00-3:30pm, Room 9 (C)

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[120.04] Astronomical Journal On-line Back to Volume 1; 1849

G. Eichhorn, M.J. Kurtz, A. Accomazzi, C.S. Grant, S.S. Murray (SAO)

With permission from the AAS, the Astrophysics Data System has scanned the Astrophysical Journal back to Volume 1; 1849. The complete AJ is now available on-line. The scanned volumes 1-114 (1849-1997) are available through the ADS, subsequent volumes are available through the on-line library at the University of Chicago Press. Putting the complete AJ on-line was helped greatly by Jane Holmquist and Alain Tschanz, Princeton Librarians, who provided us with the tables of contents for all the early AJ volumes in electronic form.

The AJ has been on-line back to the 1944 issues for almost one year. We present access statistics that show that there is consistent use of even the oldest on-line volumes. This indicates that the historical literature is important for Astronomers. Having this literature available on-line will enable researchers to easily access information that is currently not available everywhere and can sometimes not be used freely because of the deteriorating conditions of some of the older journals and books.

To further increase the availability of the historical literature, we have started to put scans of historical observatory literature on-line in collaboration with the Harvard Library. The Harvard Library, in collaboration with the library of SAO is microfilming publications of astronomical observatories. The ADS scans these microfilms and makes the page images available together with the regular journal literature.

Plans for longer-range future enhancements of the access to the historical literature include the conversion of the scanned images to electronic text through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This will enable researchers to search the complete on-line literature.

We need your help: ~We are looking for conference proceedings and review book tables of contents pre-1950. If you can provide us with an electronic version of your favorite old conference proceedings or book of review articles, it would help us greatly to increase our coverage of the historical literature.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://adswww.harvard.edu. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: gei@cfa.harvard.edu

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