Observatory bibliographies: not just for statistics anymore

Creating and maintaining an observatory bibliography is labor intensive, but the results can be used for more than accounting purposes. The information gathered during the curating process can be used by data discovery and research tools as well; the key is to collect sufficient metadata during the publication classification phase. The Chandra X-ray Center has taken this approach from the inception of its bibliography and we now have an interconnected web of links which lead researchers to the Chandra Data Archive from many sources. We provide links between datasets and astronomical publications to the Astrophysics Data System (ADS) so users of the ADS can directly access Chandra data associated with a publication. Those same links are used by WebChaser, the Chandra data access tool, so users can directly access articles associated with the data they are reviewing. We are expanding our exchange with the ADS to include details about the observations, proposals and bibliographic classifications related to the data in publications. This information will be used by the ADS to provide new semantic literature search capabilities. These interactions with the ADS and WebChaser have improved scientists’ ability to discover Chandra data in meaningful ways. In this paper we will cover how the Chandra bibliography has grown over the years and the many ways we have used our bibliography metadata for statistics, user services, and data discovery aids.