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Viktor P. Vasylyev
Institute of Radio Astronomy, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
4 Chervonopraporna St., Kharkiv, 310002, Ukraine,
e-mail: vicv@ira.kharkov.ua
Generalizing one's personal experience in astronomical investigations may happen to be very useful from the viewpoint of the methodology of employing and reproducing of the astronomical information. As a classical example we may consider the experience of Prof. Otto Struve, one of the most prominent astronomers of the first half of this century, who was born a hundred years ago and received a University education in my native city of Kharkiv. Otto Struve's experience is unique because he not only left his creative heritage of over 700 scientific works and books, but for many years he also had combined his efforts as a manager, who founded a number of observatories, with his tutorial and publishing activity, being Professor of the Chicago University and Editor-in-Chief of Astrophysical Journal.
According to his opinion, all astronomers who achieve success (and therefore, we assume, in the first place need an active library service), can roughly fall under three main categories. To the first belong the researchers, who develop new instruments and methods and work with rather powerful telescopes. The second category includes the theorists, who effectively exert all their knowledge in mathematics and theoretical physics, and to the third belong the intuitive interpreters producing new ideas in explaining the nature of phenomena and objects in space. Of course, combinations of these approaches are possible, which increases the probability of success.
The present world level of information supply of astronomical libraries does not underestimate the Struve classification of end-users. On the contrary, his approach allows to some extent to optimize introduction of the information service close to the needs of users, who belong to either of the above categories, on hunting for new information about the space objects and problems.
This report carries the author's 30-year research experience in different fields of astronomy (solar physics, planetary atmospheres, atmosphereless solar system bodies, cosmic ray physics, large telescope development) and discusses some of the main practical problems for the end-users from the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) area with the aim to improve the effectiveness of the library service and encourage the international information resource sharing.
Let us consider a simplified interaction scheme
``information-librarian-end-user'', shown in Figure 1.
Obviously, the informational needs of the end-users belonging
to the afore-mentioned categories differ considerably, though each
of them taken separately can in general employ all accessible
channels of information. As Figure 1 shows, the computer
service, oral & poster service and own searching activity can
be identified as the main channels.
Cooperation of end-users with librarians has always been close and important. Under present conditions this cooperation becomes even more necessary and professional, i.e. astronomers need more skills in searching for the required information, while librarians have to learn more about the present astronomy.
Generally speaking, the required information can be obtained by the end-user himself. However, this strongly depends on the degree of its accessibility and abundance. In case the required publication is rather rare and aperiodic, the difficulties in obtaining, say, the article or abstract's texts may arise even when ``the entire power'' of modern libraries is applied. Not so long ago such was the case encountered by me and a very qualified librarian in the library of the well-known American University while searching for an abstract fresh-published in the Supplement Series of Annales Geophysicae. Therefore, the end-users of all the above activity-categories are interested in efficient assistance of highly-qualified librarians, who accumulate their preceding experience in retrieving such kind of information. How to make this assistance more convenient, easily accessible and useful for the end-users? How to neutralize the informational shock, caused by the avalanche of information, and to streamline this avalanche into the identified channels? Can we find a universal, effective and convenient language for communication between the keepers/distributors of the information and those who need it as the breath of life to conduct their research? These questions are extremely interesting for all of us, both for the librarians and for the end-users. Besides the well-known and vastly used approaches and manners in interaction between the end-users and the librarians, we may propose as well to develop a ``working'' (home-library) subject classification of astronomical information.
This classification employs the idea of a ``tree'' of the International
Patent Classification and is shown schematically in Figures 2 and
3.
The mentioned peculiarities and difficulties in using the astronomical information by the end-users typical both for traditional and digital forms aggravate in less-developed regions. This occurs mainly due to the reason that these countries have worse technical and communication facilities. Therefore, despite rapid spread of local nets and recent accessibility of the Internet, the opportunity of employing the on-line computer service is still insufficient. As a kind of alternative capable to partially remove these difficulties we may regard propagation of astronomy information through high-density carriers (especially CDs). This permits to rapidly distribute the articles, databases, software, etc. using local nets thus providing the required information sharing.
In this sense a very important part could be played by the international cooperation between astronomers as well as between librarians. In addition to the powerful means of information retrieval already available, there is a pressing need for effective but simpler methods for the analysis and compression of both texts and graphics and these methods should be made easily available to non-professional programmers.
The author extends his profound gratitude to
Dr. Sergei V.
Vasylyev for creative discussions.
Next: Distributed Information Search and Retrieval
Up: Us and Them: So What Do You Want?
Previous: Library & Information Services: an Astronomer's Wishlist
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