HEP Libraries Webzine
Issue 5 / November 2001

Editorial Issue 5

In Issue 5 of HEP Libraries Webzine we concentrate on the nuts and bolts of our profession: cataloguing and classification, a subject which seemed old-fashioned for a while with all the hoop-la about the Internet, but which now shows its lasting relevance to our daily work. The more we progress with electronic publishing, the more we realise that proper classification, now aided by more and more sophisticated automated tools, is more important than ever.

We are given a full description of the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a central facility of bibliographic research in Astronomy, by Guenther Eichhorn et al.
At CERN we learn about the automated acquisition of structured citations from Jean- Blaise Claivaz et al. and also about automatic keywording from Alberto Montjo Ráez and David Dallman.
Interconnection of discipline-specific subject classification with general schemes is discussed for Mathematics by Antonella De Robbio and her colleagues at Padua and Milan.
Away from purely bibliographic schemes, we learn from Davide Papotti and Alberto Salarelli about a system for mapping the landscape through digital photography, The Landscape Digital Library (LDL).

Professor Tom Wilson has created a 'Webring' in the journal Information Research so that we can all be informed regularly of the publication of other open-access e-journals http://informationr.net/ir/titlepages.html

We are pleased to welcome two new Editorial Board members: Josette de la Vega (France) and Simeon Warner (USA). A few words about them: Josette de la Vega works as a researcher at the Cnet (Centre national d'études des télécommunications - CNRS). She wrote a very interesting book last year about scientific communication in the Internet era: "La communication scientifique à l'épreuve de l'Internet : l'émergence d'un nouveau modèle". See the book review in French at http://www.enssib.fr/bbf/fiches_lecture/bbf00-4-chartron.html. She is interested in scientific communication, especially in the field of theoretical physics, and her approach is mainly a sociological one.

Simeon Warner: "For the past two years I have been working on the arXiv.org e-print server at Los Alamos. I will soon be moving with arXiv to Cornell University and hope to extend my research activities in the field of digital libraries. I have been actively involved with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) since its inception and currently serve on the technical committee. My background is in physics, my PhD work was in experimental condensed matter physics. More recently I have worked on Monte Carlo simulations of dynamical triangulations (in the context of quantum gravity) and random surfaces."

They give us the opportunity to enrich our Webzine with two very different points of view. Welcome to both of them.

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Last modified: 23rd November 2001