Access to Bibliographic Databases



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Access to Bibliographic Databases

NSE users need easy-to-use tools for carrying out comprehensive bibliographic searches in their research areas. On possibility would be for the NSE to maintain its own comprehensive bibliographic database. Populating and maintaining such a database would require a great deal of human effort, however, and would duplicate efforts of existing on-line bibliographic databases. An alternative approach would be to provide a hypertext forms interface to existing on-line databases. Most of these databases require an account and a password, but once the user had obtained these, the forms interface could facilitate querying the database and retrieving and manipulating the search results. The hypertext interface could also give information on how to obtain an account. Even with this second approach, newly published and unpublished papers might be kept in a supplemental database maintained by the NSE. This supplemental database would be populated by user contributions and could contain pointers to on-line versions of papers. The BibNet project, led by Stefano Foresti and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah, is an on-line bibliography that is mirrored by the Netlib sites and which consists of user contributions of Bibtex files in the field of scientific computing. Contributors to BibNet may include pointers to on-line copies of papers in the form of URLs. BibNet could be used as the supplemental NSE bibliographic database if it were advertised and made accessible through the NSE WWW pages.



Jack Dongarra
Sun Dec 18 14:22:28 EST 1994