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Table of Contents -- Index

Library and Information Services in Astronomy III
ASP Conference Series, Vol. 153, 1998
Editors: U. Grothkopf, H. Andernach, S. Stevens-Rayburn, and M. Gomez
Electronic Editor: H. E. Payne

Conference Overview

Good morning! We are pleased to welcome you here to LISA III on behalf of the Scientific Organizing Committee. We have been working hard at planning this meeting for the past 18 months and hope that you are as excited about being here as we are. Our aim in all of our planning was to make this a worthwhile and educational experience for astronomy librarians. This conference is unique, we believe, in that it really is designed solely to educate and inform a very specific group of people - those information professionals who aid and abet astronomers in their pursuit of the secrets of the cosmos. Thanks to enormously exciting new instrumentation and new ways of looking at old data, we are participants in an era of discovery not seen since Galileo first pointed his telescope at the moons of Jupiter. Just as new technology is changing the ways astronomers do their research, it is also changing the ways in which we assist them in that task. During the next three days, we'll take a guided tour along the information highway, led by our colleagues and other experts in astronomical publishing and information retrieval.

Today, we are honored to have Ann Okerson as our keynote speaker. Although not closely associated with the astronomical community, Ann in many ways epitomizes what we are about here: she is the information provider's information provider. Without her path-breaking leadership in the areas of electronic publishing and licensing issues, first at the Association of Research Libraries and more recently at Yale University, most of us could easily have been pushed off of the information highway by those more interested in profit taking and information monopolies than in providing access to information.

Following Ann's presentation, we'll have two potentially very illuminating sessions. The first, moderated by Marlene Cummins, is really designed to explain why we do what we do and why we came here to talk about it. Two librarians and two astronomers will talk about what they want and expect from each other. With any luck, they may even agree on a few points!

This will be followed this afternoon by a session we can only describe as ``Robots Are Us.'' For those of you blessedly not familiar with advertising slogans, this is a take off on an international company called "Toys R Us" and, we must admit, for many of us information discovery on the Internet is quite analogous to playing with toys. Rudi Albrecht will moderate this session on what's new, good, bad, helpful, and useless among the information discovery tools currently available.

Wednesday promises to be information packed and extremely thought provoking. Sarah Stevens-Rayburn will lead off in the morning with a session that looks just a bit into the future, with presentations on the interrelatedness of astronomical publishing and a current project to streamline astronomical bibliographic discovery even more. Just so we don't get our heads too high into the dreams of tomorrow, Brenda Corbin will then moderate a ``reality check'' for us, as we look at the challenges presented by electronic publishing, including copyright and archiving, topics that indeed could be and have been complete conferences in and of themselves.

And all of that before lunch! In the afternoon, Heinz Andernach will be chairing a session in which we'll look more closely at electronic publications, with speakers first explaining and describing metadata and different search engines. This will be followed by what we expect to be a lively panel discussion on what's being done with links to full text from bibliographic indexing services, moderated by Peter Boyce.

Wednesday will also be our cocktail reception and conference dinner, a chance to relax after what looks like will be a mentally challenging day.

On Thursday, Uta Grothkopf will lead off with a session that promises to be another reality check, as we look at how the Internet is being used and abused in the pursuit of knowledge. This will be followed by a look back: a panel presentation, moderated by Peter Hingley, on the usefulness of historical materials, an enormously important topic for us to consider as we explore our call to be not just providers of information, but its protectors as well.

Last, but far from least, on Thursday afternoon, Ethleen Lastovica will lead a session helping us to focus on the reality of our interdependence; how we can and do provide support for each other through various cooperative agreements. We will end the day and the conference with an open discussion. Jeanette Regan and Suzanne Laloë will guide us in pondering these important questions, as we look to the future and figure out for ourselves, ``What now?''

Again, let us welcome you and hope that you'll enjoy the next few days as much as we expect to.

Sarah Stevens-Rayburn and Uta Grothkopf

© Copyright 1998 Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 390 Ashton Avenue, San Francisco, California 94112, USA