Slide 1 of 36
Notes:
This a time of rapid and fundamental change in the way academic
information is created and disseminated. The roles of all the players in the information
chain are changing. New players are emerging. Where does that leave the
traditional players -- specifically the libraries and the publishers?
This
talk will draw upon the experience of the astronomical community in creating
a set of linked, distributed, electronic information resources to show how the world of
scientific information is undergoing rapid and fundamental changes. Done well, the
creation of electronic resources is a tremendous boon to an academic community, aiding
the researcher and scholar to do their work faster, better, and cheaper. The experience
of the astronomical community illustrates how a good, interlinked, and interoperating
set of electronic resources can remove an enormous amount of the drudge work associated
with finding and using information. It also indicates how the underlying
structure of scholarly information is changing. Plans made today, which fail to take
these changes into account, are doomed to produce systems which will be either
irrelevant of will hinder progress.
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The author was the Executive Officer of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) for 16
years, and led the Society's efforts to move its journals and meeting abstracts into
the electronic world. He now serves in a consulting role to aid the AAS and other
interested societies, publishers ,and government agencies to improve their electronic
information services.
Some of the information presented here stems from the
author's work to improve and extend the links among the distributed, electronic
information resources which serve the discipline of astronomy. NASA is supporting
this aspect of the authors work, for which the author is grateful.
