STELAR: an Experiment in the Electronic Distribution of Astronomical Literature

\STELAR\ is a pilot project designed to study the technical and practical aspects of making the refereed scientific literature available on line. Machine readable abstractions, supplied by the NASA STI program, of articles from eight journals of interest to astronomers have been indexed and made available using WAIS as the query and retrieval mechanism for the publically-available prototype. The complete system will include the ability to retrieve scanned images of the pages of selected articles. Enhancements of the search and retrieval system, the user interface and additions to the current holdings are anticipated.