Donna Thompson and Virginia Smith
dthompson@cfa.harvard.edu and superbv@yahoo.com

Gaylord Opryland Hotel, Nashville, TN
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Sponsor: ISI Thomson
Notes: Sara Rutter
Moderator: Donna Thompson

Roundtable One

The first session began at 2:00 pm. Audience members introduced themselves.

Update on the Journal of Cosmology & Astroparticle Physics (JCAP)

Steve Moss, sales representative from the Institute of Physics (IOP) gave an update on JCAP, an e-only journal that was launched at the 2003 SLA conference. The journal is a collaborative effort between IOP and the International School of Advanced Studies, SISSA in Italy. The focus of the journal is impact research. The journal has published 144 papers, 57 by North America based researchers, and has counted 15,000 full-text downloads. The journal has 345 subscribers and is available in IOP Package Z, B, and H or as a stand-alone for $740 annual subscription fee. The URL is http://www.iop.org/journals/JCAP. Moss thanked the audience for supporting this new journal.

American Astronomical Society Journals

Bob Milkey of the American Astronomical Society talked about subscription rates for 2005 for AAS journals, the future of the Astrophysical Journal supplement series and the ApJ and AJ indexes. ApJ page count has increased and the ApJ supplements pages counts have decreased so a rebalancing for 2005 subscription costs was done. The cost for ApJ will increase from $1680 to $1800, a 7.1% increase. The cost for the ApJ supplement series, paper copy, will go from $270 to $200, a 26% decrease. Subscribers placing a combination order will receive a $50 discount, so there would be essentially no increase in cost over 2005. The per-page subscription cost for ApJ will remain at $.06 and for the supplement series will go down from $.09 to $.065. AAS will not have tier pricing yet. Astronomical Journal will increase by 4% or $20. The full AAS package will increase by 1% for both print and online. International shipping rates will go up. Milkey suggested that the supplement series may be increasingly used to highlight special issues, such as the Spitzer space telescope results. Eventually the supplement may merge into the journal, but that decision has not yet been taken.

Author page charges will remain unchanged for 2005, $110 for ApJ, ApJS and AJ, $155 for ApJL. Earlier, Sarah Stevens-Rayburn sent out a message to the PAM list asking for feedback about the need for indexes for ApJ, ApJ supplement, and AJ. Milkey reported that AAS will not create a 5 year cumulative index but AAS needs to know if annual printed keyword and author indexes are needed. After several votes by a show of hands it was evident that most of the audience could function without any annual indexes, but if an index could continue to be provided and author index could be useful.

In response to a question about whether AAS will move to using Astronomy and Astrophysics Abstracts subject headings, Milkey said that they would consider adopting those headings. Another question to Milkey was about the page charges and whether they were acceptable to authors. Milkey noted that the AAS journals could easily move to open access if authors were willing to pay more in page charges. He said that so far, no author has offered to pay more in page charges to make their work open to all. AAS is working to bring page charges down for authors. AAS lost $76,000 for 2003/2004 in servicing journal subscriptions for libraries hit by the RoweCom bankruptcy. Milkey said that AAS would have a hard time responding similarly to bankruptcy by yet another subscription agent. Despite the RoweCom losses, 2003 was a reasonably successful year for the AAS journal finances.

Update on CFHT Oral History Project Liz Bryson

Liz Bryson introduced the ongoing project of providing a filmed history of the Can ada French Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii by playing a five minute trailer. The project began with LISA IV in Prague when Liz realized that the history of the CFHT was in danger of being lost. Liz noted that another strong motivation came from the loss of the Mt. Stromlo Observatory in January 2003. Liz researched how to do oral history by talking to experts at the University of Hawaii, by taking a film class, and through trial and error. The project focuses on the years 1974-1989, the first 15 years of the telescope. Liz was able to interview all of the directors of CHFT during that time period. She also documented the impact of the telescope on the Waimea community. The film will not only document the history of the telescope but can serve as an outreach tool. There are currently two transcribed interviews that are available as PDFs at http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Reference/Library/oralhist.html. There is also an MPEG of what it is like to go up in the dome crane cab. Liz also worked with an undergraduate student who did their senior thesis on CFHT instrumentation. Liz was able to pay for the student's college credits for time the student is working on the project. Liz would also like to create a database of the operational log, which includes the operator of the telescope, the time, and what they were viewing.

The Transit of Venus 1874 and 2004

Brenda Corbin reported that 15 PAM division observers viewed the transit of Venus from the grounds of the Gaylord Opryland at the crack of dawn. Brenda then gave the history of the 1874 U.S. Naval Observatory's eight expeditions that were sent out to view the transit from different parts of the Earth in order to measure more accurately the distance from the Earth to the sun. The transits occur in pairs separated by eight years; the last transit pair began in 1874. There is a Smithsonian exhibit called "Chasing Venus" that shows slides and has a telescope from the USNO. The website for the Smithsonian exhibit is at http://www.sil.si.edu/exhibitions/chasing-venus/. The observations of the 1874 expeditions were documented in a 564 page book, dated 1881, that was never published. The USNO had the proof copy and has put it online through ADS. Plates made in 1874 and 1882 were discarded and only 11 survive. An image of the transit that has been published in news articles recently is from one of the surviving plates and is on the USNO website.

LISA V: Library and information services in astronomy

Brenda reported that LISA V will be held June 19-21 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Donna Coletti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics will be the host. The goal is to meet every four years. The theme of the 2006 meeting will be Common challenges/Uncommon solutions. The meeting will be held in the Harvard Science Center. The preliminary organizing committee is Ellen Bouton, Brenda Corbin, Marlene Cummins, Uta Grothkopf, Sarah Stevens-Rayburn. The planners are looking for ideas for topics for LISA V. The Friends of LISA will once again work to support librarians from developing countries so that they can attend the conference. The LISA Manual, How to Organize Library and Information Services in Astronomy is accessible at http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/libraries/lisamanual/. This is an online, dynamic document.

The session ended at 3:15 pm

Roundtable Two

The session began at 3:45 pm

Mt. Stromlo Observatory and its Library

Jeanette Regan showed images of the fire damage at Mt. Stromlo Observatory, many destroyed publications, which occurred in January 2003. The fire front was 35 km long made up of two fires that converged on Mt. Stromlo. Regan described a planning process for the library that asks, "what library services are required to make this a cutting edge library in 20 years?"

The Australian National University plans to continue to have the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) at Mt. Stromlo and six months after the fire activity was underway to enable research to resume. Phase 1 of the rebuilding is underway with $7.3 million allocated. Phase 2 will involve refurbishing the Administrative block, which is an historical building. RSAA received many serials and monographs from the astronomy and astrophysics community. Regan read a letter of thanks to the PAM division from librarian Paul McNamara, Australian National University. Regan said that publishers donated approximately 12 shelves of books. The books are being accessioned and the library is holding the last five years of journal runs. Some of the ideas for the new Mt. Stromlo library include having huge screens that can display large amounts of data, high resolution printers, work tables for large documents to fulfill different needs than one can meet at a desktop computer. Right now 16TB of memory is needed and the question is what should the library be providing. Regan asked the audience what libraries were doing to allow manipulation of large amounts of data. No response from the audience to this question.

Astrophysics Data System Update

Donna Thompson gave an update on ADS. Coverage of many new physics journals is being completed which will increase the number of records in the physics database. Another new service to ADS is myADS that allows users to customize a search so that weekly results will be e-mailed to the user. Not all of the records retrieved in the weekly searches will be to new articles as the ADS adds older materials regularly.

Optical character recognition has been performed on the scanned pages in ADS so that full-text searching is now available. The Journal/Volume/Page query option now allows a reference string of partial citations to be used.

Scanning of microfiche of MNRAS is continuing and it is expected that the full run will be completed by the end of the summer. Three library students are inserting page information in the scanned observatory publications. If librarians are discarding astronomy journals, Thompson asks that they consider donating the journals to ADS for scanning. Gaps in runs are listed on the ADS site. A question was asked about the time it will take to paginate all of the scanned observatory publications. Thompson replied that they are still scanning microfilm of observatory publications so it is an ongoing effort.

Open Discussion

Jane Holmquist distributed a list of the most circulated books from 16 different astronomy libraries or collections. The list was supplemented with information about 30 titles that Michael Kurtz retrieved of the most highly cited books in ADS. A discussion about the value of books in the astronomy collection ensued. The information will be made available on the Web. Donna Thompson noted that citations in ADS are to the level of the book and not to the individual articles within a book. Ruth Kneale said that at Gemini she had to buy several copies of Allen's Astrophysical Quanities, which was the most highly cited book in the ADS.

Book agents
A discussion of book vendors identified Yankee Book Peddler as a commonly used vendor. Liz Bryson recommended Opamp, a technical book vendor for both electronic and print ordering. Brenda Corbin recommended AOBC, American Overseas Books. Another plug was made for Amazon.com using a corporate credit card. Powells.com was recommended for out of print books and for new books at great prices. Some libraries use Powells as a way to sell weeded or gift books. Powells will pay shipping and then pay a commission to the library. Others brought up sending unwanted volumes to overseas libraries using NSF grant funds to cover postage. Print volumes are still desired by countries with poor internet access.

Training Users
There were not many responses to the question about instruction requests from users. Ruth Kneale said that the engineers in her organization were interested in search engines, the newest software. Kneale talked about a search engine called grokker.com, a search engine application that groups hits in circles that visually displays how the hits relate to each other. Another audience member mentioned the netwatch column in Science as a good source for new Websites.

Scholarly communication/journal affordability/open access
It was noted that open access is not as critical an issue in preprint cultures such as astronomy/astrophysics as in the life sciences.

Liz Bryson noted outreach is becoming important to observatories and libra ries. One observatory had a librarian position cut to half-time and saw a buildup of that observatory's outreach staff. Jeanette Regan said that records management functions are being combined with organization libraries, or that library services are being contracted out. A question was asked about libraries being folded into IT departments. UC Santa Cruz computers are all being folded into the IT group, however the library administration will remain separate. Libraries are taking on other community services such as hosting talks.

The session ended at 5 pm.