Observatory Bibliographies as Research Tools
Abstract
Traditionally, observatory bibliographies were maintained to provide insight in how successful a observatory is as measured by its prominence in the (refereed) literature. When we set up the bibliographic database for the Chandra X-ray Observatory (http://cxc.harvard.edu/cgi-gen/cda/bibliography) as part of the Chandra Data Archive ((http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/), very early in the mission, our objective was to make it primarily a useful tool for our user community. To achieve this we are: (1) casting a very wide net in collecting Chandra-related publications; (2) including for each literature reference in the database a wealth of metadata that is useful for the users; and (3) providing specific links between the articles and the datasets in the archive that they use. As a result our users are able to browse the literature and the data archive simultaneously. As an added bonus, the rich metadata content and data links have also allowed us to assemble more meaningful statistics about the scientific efficacy of the observatory. In all this we collaborate closely with the Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Among the plans for future enhancement are the inclusion of press releases and the Chandra image gallery, linking with ADS semantic searching tools, full-text metadata mining, and linking with other observatories' bibliographies. This work is supported by NASA contract NAS8-03060 (CXC) and depends critically on the services provided by the ADS.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #221
- Pub Date:
- January 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22115603R