Sarah Stevens-Rayburn
library@stsci.edu

Given the pervasiveness of our wired society, it's a little tricky trying to put together a "news" column these days. Instant informing is the rule of the day and it's unlikely that I have anything much to share that most of you haven't already read anyway. With this in mind, I anticipate that these columns will be more "astronomy librarian thoughts" than "astronomy news." If any of you have thoughts you'd like to contribute, please feel free to send them along. This includes what's been bugging you and what's new/recently discovered that helps you. Note that my interest is specifically what goes on in small libraries, so I'm dependent on others for the large university/research center perspective.

First the buggings: This time of year, those of us on the federal dole become ever mindful of the politics of budgeting. What do we do when we're told to anticipate budget cuts? How often do we review subscriptions we've maintained for years to see if they're still being used? Asking researchers if they need something is likely to result in adamant affirmations of the worth of everything, but looking at what our staff are citing in their papers often reveals a very different picture. One of the neat things I picked up at SLA this year was a brightly colored "candidate for withdrawal" weeding slip that Mount Holyoke puts in monographs they're considering excessing. It occurs to me that a similar tool could be used with journals: attach or slip one into each new issue that arrives and into recent bound volumes and wait to hear any shouts. If you hear none, you have a prime candidate to consider for dropping. Of course, this is a bit trickier for e-pubs, but a note next to the homepage hotlink could accomplish the same purpose. Similarly, being prepared for cuts makes it a much easier exercise when the time comes.

Second major bugging is how to cope with the increasing requests/demands for metrics to measure departmental or observatory productivity. As funds get tighter, more and more questions are asked about the "bang for the buck" from national centers and research institutions. One of the only quantitative measure we've got has lots of problems associated with it: ISI's citation analyses. We've purchased their High Impact Papers database a couple of times and used that to see where our staff rank among similarly sized institutions, but it's a very slippery undertaking to judge a group based on this one criterion. Similarly, we've provided ISI with search keys from our HST bibliography and matched the resulting numbers against the expected citation rate, but here again, it's extremely difficult to draw any real qualitative conclusions from such data. The second way of trying to quantify observatory productivity is comparing publication statistics from similar institutions, but here again, trying to get comparative statistics from observatories is extremely difficult (for a discussion of this, see Uta Grothkopf's paper on telescope bibliographies in this issue as well as the article by Uta and Jacqueline Bergeron in the June 1999 ESO Messenger). I'd be delighted to hear how others are coping with these buggings.

Newly (discovered) things that help:

From Greg Youngen:

The UIUC Physics/Astronomy Library has inventoried its observatory publications and compiled the results into a single database accessible at: http://g235.grainger.uiuc.edu/physics/ These publications reside at various locations around campus and the exact holdings have been difficult to ascertain using the existing online library catalog. The database is searchable by institution, title of publication, or call number.

Since UIUC was not one of the contributing libraries to the Union List of Astronomical Serials ( http://sesame.stsci.edu/lib/union.html) and because Greg's list is much more up-to-date than ULAS, this is a great tool for finding observatory publications.

From Ellen Bouton:

Please note the new URL for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory online catalog: http://annie.cv.nrao.edu/catqbe.htm The online catalog shows holdings at all NRAO site libraries, and is updated every night.

Ellen also calls our attention to the new NSF strategic plan for astronomy: http://www.nsf.gov/mps/ast/strategicplan/index.htm#tocstart

And finally, from me:

The ST ScI Library has new URLs, representing new versions of previously available databases, for both the online catalog and the preprint databases. The catalog can be accessed directly at http://stlibrary1.stsci.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi.exe/tbHOy14bWG/6923010/60/69 and the combined file of preprints, including all preprints received since 1982 and the full HST bibliography, may be found at http://NTweb.stsci.edu/STEPsheet/

As you may recall, we add citations to the STEPsheet as papers are published, so it's a pretty useful tool. One might wonder, as we did, if this effort is still needed in these days of astro-ph and other preprint databases. We recently checked a few STEPsheets and some of NRAO's RAPsheets against the astro-ph database to discern the overlap. We were astounded to discover that, depending on the week, anywhere from 52-62% of the papers in the STEP/RAPsheets were NOT in astro-ph. And naturally there are many preprints in astro-ph that aren't in our local databases.

That's it for this time. If you have news that you'd like your colleagues to know about, but think it perhaps not up to the immediacy of PAMnet, please send it to me ( library@stsci.edu) for the next column.