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Long before the Internet age, abstracts of the astronomical literature
were published annually in the Astronomischer Jahresbericht
by the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg
(www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/publikationen/ajb).
The series started in 1899, one year after the first issue of Science
Abstracts was published, the precursor of INSPEC (§;
cf. www.iee.org.uk/publish/inspec/inspec.html).
Abstracts of many papers which originally
did not have an English abstract were given in German. Since 1969 its
successor, the Astronomy & Astrophysics Abstracts (AAA), published
twice a year, have been THE reference work for astronomical bibliography.
The slight drawback that it appears about 8 months after the end of
its period of literature coverage is compensated by its impressive
completeness of ``grey literature'', including conference proceedings,
newsletters and observatory publications.
Until about 1993, browsing these books was about the only means for
bibliographic searches ``without charge'' (except for the cost of the
books). In 1993 NASA's ``Astrophysics Data System'' (ADS)
Abstract Service with initially
160,000 abstracts became accessible via telnet. After a few months
of negotiation about public accessibility outside the US,
the service was eventually put on the WWW in early 1994,
with abstracts freely accessible to remote users world-wide.
Shortly thereafter they turned into (and continue to be) the most popular
bibliographic service in astronomy (see [Kurtz et al. (1996),Eichhorn et al. (1998)]).
Upon the announcement during IAU General Assembly XIII (Kyoto, Japan,
Aug. 1997) that AAA is likely to stop publication at the end of 1998,
some Astronomy librarians compared the completeness of AAA with that
of ADS and INSPEC (§). The results show that,
in particular, information about conference proceedings and observatory reports
is missing from ADS and INSPEC. After the demise of AAA, ADS would be the
de facto bibliography of astronomy literature, and there is a danger
that it will not be as complete as AAA (see
www.eso.org/libraries/iau97/libreport.html for a discussion).
It would indeed be to the benefit of all astronomers if some day all abstracts
from Astronomischer Jahresbericht and AAA (covering 100 years!)
became available on the Internet (see § for ARIBIB).
Many bibliographic services in astronomy use a 19-digit reference code or
``refcode'' ([Schmitz et al. (1995)], see e.g. cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/refcode.html).
They have the advantage of being unique, understandable for the human eye,
and may be used directly to resolve the full reference and to see their
abstracts on the web. Lists of refcodes are also maintained by
NED and ADS (adsabs.harvard.edu/abs_doc/journal_abbr.html). Note,
however, that ADS calls them ``bibcodes'', and that for less common
bibliographic sources occasionally these may differ from CDS refcodes.
Unique bibcodes do not exist as yet for proceedings
volumes and monographs, but work is under way in this area.
Next: Abstract and Article Servers
Up: Internet Services for Professional
Previous: Future Surveys
9/7/1998