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Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VII
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 145, 1998
R. Albrecht, R. N. Hook and H. A. Bushouse, e
Ö Copyright 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific. All rights reserved.
ds.
Literature and Catalogs in Electronic Form: Questions,
Ideas and an Example: the IBVS
A. Holl
Konkoly Observatory, P.O.Box 67, H­1525 Budapest, Hungary, Email:
holl@ogyalla.konkoly.hu
Abstract. While transforming astronomical journals and catalogs to
electronic form, we should have in sight two questions: making it easier
for the human reader to locate and comprehend information. At the same
time, some of the text read by humans in the past, will be --- or already
is --- processed by machines, and should be laid down in a di#erent way
than formerly. Information should flow more easily, but references to the
origin should be kept all the way along. With the same e#ort, references
could be checked automatically. To achieve this goal, appropriate markup
should be used. Software technology has applicable ideas for this problem.
In this paper we discuss the problems of transferring old issues of
astronomical journals to computerised formats, and designing formats for
new material, using the example of the Information Bulletin on Variable
Stars, along with experience with other journals --- like the AAS CD­
ROM and JAD. Some problems with machine­readable catalogs are also
investigated, with ideas about improving formats (FITS) and access tools.
1. Introduction
While transforming astronomical journals and catalogs to electronic form, we
intend to make them easier to access for the reader, and, at the same time,
making them more easily processable by computers.
In this paper we discuss problems of transforming a small astronomical
journal, the IAU Comm. 27 & 42 Information Bulletin on Variable Stars (IBVS)
to electronic form --- including about 15000 pages of previous issues, back to
1961, to the present, computer­typeset ones.
2. The Old Material
Rendering printed textual information to an ASCII computer file is a di#cult
problem. There are ambiguities in the typesetting (some old typewriters used
the same character for zero and capital o, for digit one and the lowercase l
character etc.), some places ``redundant'' characters were spared for economical
reasons, math formulae, non­Latin characters and accents are common.
One could re­typeset the text in T E X , for example, but that would be
very di#cult. We decided to use a format as simple as possible. We have
dropped the non­Latin accents; Greek characters, math signs were replaced by
474

Literature and Catalogs in Electronic Form 475
their names (as in T E X , but without the leading backslash); for superscripts and
subscripts either T E X ­like or fortran ­like syntax were accepted. We remove
hyphenation, for the sake of simple text string searches.
Errors introduced by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process
make the situation worse. IBVS was published mainly from camera­ready ma­
terial, therefore pages were extremely heterogeneous. The OCR and primary
correction was done by many di#erent persons.
In spite of a three­pass error checking and correction process (including a
spell­checker), errors still remain in the text. But what should we do with the
errors originally in the text? Our accepted policy was: correct the obvious typos,
spelling errors (if found), do not correct foreign spelling, nor semantical errors.
We have not checked the references in the papers (except for obvious spelling
errors in the names of journals).
In retrospect, we see now that we should have laid down a rule­set for the
rendering in advance. It would be desirable to develop a standard, which would
produce easily readable, and at the same time, computer­browsable information.
The next question is the format, in which we provide the information to
the community. We have chosen plain ASCII text and PostScript images of the
pages. We could have devised a simple markup for the ASCII text version, which
would have enabled us, for instance, to create tables of contents automatically,
or any bibliographical service provider (BSP), like ADS or SIMBAD, to process
the references in the papers --- we have not done this.
There is one obvious shortcoming of the ASCII text version: the figures
are missing. In the final form, we will use a simple markup in the place of the
missing figure, adding a brief description, if not available in the caption or in
the text (e.g.: [Fig. 1.: V lightcurve for 1973] ).
3. The New Material
For the past few years, IBVS has been typeset in L A T E X . Source code and
PostScript versions are available. Recently, we have introduced a new T E X style
file, which uses a simple markup using appropriate macro names, which enables
automatic extraction of the title, author name, date information, makes possible
the insertion of object, variable type (GCVS standards) and other keywords,
and also abstracts. Keywords and abstracts do not appear in print, but they
are part of the L A T E X source. Macros were designed to enable the extraction of
information with very simple and generally available text processing tools (i.e.,
Unix grep). With these new features, IBVS issues get to the Web automatically,
tables of contents, object and author indices are generated automatically too.
BSPs could easily process the source text (sometimes using the IBVS­specific
markup, otherwise removing all L A T E X markup completely).
Here we have to deal with the question of errors. Electronically produced
material contains less misspellings, thank to the spell­checkers. But what should
we do if we find a mistake in an electronic journal? Should we resist the temp­
tation to correct such a mistake in a paper which has been already available on
the Web since some time (after publication)? We adopted the following prac­
tice: we do not correct the error, but issue an erratum, which is attached to
the end of a new issue (as traditionally), AND gets attached to the end (one

476 Holl
might use links in HTML format material) of the original issue too, and the
Web­page containing the table of contents would also get a flag, notifying the
reader. (This way papers could become more dynamic --- one can see a journal
publishing comments, discussions of papers --- as in conference proceedings ---
attached to the original paper.)
With the references in the papers we have not done anything so far. Dis­
cussing the problem with BSPs, it would be possible to design L A T E X macros in
such a way, to help automatic reference processing.
We also have to think about the question of figures. To facilitate indexing
the information content of the figures, we suggest moving most textual informa­
tion from the bitmapped or preferably vector­graphic figure to the caption.
The next point to stop at is the question of tabular material. Tables in
the IBVS --- and in other journals available in electronic form (like the AAS
CD­ROM or the Journal of Astronomical Data, also on CD) are often formatted
for the human eye, and would be very di#cult to read in by a program (to plot
or analyze). Publishers of such journals should take care to provide tables easily
processable by programs. A good example is the ADC CD­ROM series. IBVS
will make available lengthy tables electronically, in machine readable ASCII text,
or FITS ASCII Table form. Those tables are easily readable for humans too.
The simple catalog format introduced by STARLINK should be also considered.
Besides the widely used graphical or text processing tools, there are specific tools
for such tables --- like the Fits Table Browser by Lee E. Brotzman for the ASCII
FITS Tables. We have just one complaint: FTB is slow. With introducing
the notion of unique (for catalog numbers) or ordered (like right ascension for
many tables) variables to the FITS standard, those tools could be considerably
improved.
4. Formats, Media and Policy
We have decided to put all text (plain ASCII or L A T E X source) on­line, and
PostScript format issues for recent material. At the moment we do not expect
to introduce PDF format, but, in the future, we might add HTML format with
converting the L A T E X sources. Our opinion is, that large volume, static material,
which has a well defined user community, who regularly use the information,
should be distributed on CD­ROM. So we will put old, digitized IBVS issues to
a CD­ROM, in PostScript format --- which we do not have storage capacity and
bandwidth to provide on­line. The CD­ROM will contain IBVS issues 1­4000
and an HTML interface.
Information, which is dynamic, changeable, which is accessed casually (when
a user of a BSP follows a reference), should go on­line. So we serve PostScript
versions of the recent issues, and text for all. We must keep in sight that this
information should be accessible to the broadest community. In consequence,
we serve IBVS with di#erent distribution methods: anonymous ftp and WWW.
Readers using a public FTPMAIL server could access IBVS via e­mail too. We
intend to use such HTML tags on the Web­pages, which work with all possible
browsers.
We want to retain control over the textual material too --- so BSPs could
have it for indexing, and they could put links to the issues residing on our server

Literature and Catalogs in Electronic Form 477
for full text. The reasons for this decision are the following: the errors in the
old and new material get corrected by us, reader services are provided by us, so
the best place for the material is with us. On the other hand, those investing
in the project wish to retain full rights over the intellectual property. But with
the Web there should be no problem with it --- the interested reader, following
a link, could get the material promptly, wherever it resides.
5. Conclusions and Remarks
Astronomical literature --- old and new alike --- gets on­line at a rapid pace.
Besides the publishers and readers, third parties: the BSPs are concerned as
well. Establishing conventions, standards would be desirable.
One can also envision --- similar to software development tools and envi­
ronments --- publication development aids. Such tools, for example, could help
check the references, whether they really point to an existing paper or not. The
focus of the present FADS session is ``the prospects for building customized
software systems more or less automatically from existing modules''. Would it
be possible to build ``customized scientific papers'', automatically from existing
modules? In other words, is component re­use possible for astronomical papers?
I think the case of figures, tables and references should be considered.
Acknowledgments. The electronic IBVS project was supported by the Hun­
garian National Information Infrastructure Development Programme (NIIF).
References
The IBVS homepage, URL: http://www.konkoly.hu/IBVS/IBVS.html
A. Holl: The electronic IBVS, Konkoly Observatory Occasional Technical Notes,
No. 5, 1996