IAU Working Group on Libraries

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Overview:

The IAU Commission 5 Working Group on Libraries aims to moderate between astronomers and librarians. The publication paradigm continues to shift from printed material to electronic formats for scientific literature, leading to an evolved concept of library services and information access. Librarians are taking on new and diversified roles. While demands for traditional services continue, the importance of accessibility and archiving of older materials is widely recognized. Long-term solutions, developed cooperatively by publishers, scientists and librarians, are needed in order to guarantee future access to today's knowledge.

The WG on Libraries was officially recognized for the first time in the Transactions of the IAU XXI A (Reports on Astronomy 1990), but librarians were involved in Commission 5 activities already before that (largely due to the efforts of George A. Wilkins, President of the Commission from 1982-1988) (see Transactions of the IAU XX A, Reports on Astronomy 1987). Wayne Warren (Goddard Space Flight Center, USA) and Helen Knudsen (Califormia Institute of Technology) were the group's first chairpersons, Brenda Corbin (U.S. Naval Observatory) became Helen Knudsen's successor in 1990. Since 1996, Fionn Murtagh (School of Computer Science, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland) and Uta Grothkopf (European Southern Observatory, Germany) have been co-chairs.

Some projects of interest to both librarians and astronomers (though not developed under the auspices of this group) are the International Astronomy Meetings List, a database of Reports of Observatories, listings of IAU colloquia and astronomical newsletters, the Directory of Astronomy Librarians and Libraries, a book reviews database, digitization projects of historical documents, maintenance of core lists of astronomy books and astronomy and physics journals and the mailing lists Astrolib and EGAL. The IAU funded the first LISA (Library and Information Services in Astronomy) conference, held in 1988 in Washington, DC (IAU Colloquium 110) and supported the second (IAU Technical Workshop, Garching, Germany, 1995). Since then, "LISA" has developed into a series of conferences which are held at regular intervals. The IAU Thesaurus, compiled by R.M. and R.R. Shobbrook under the auspices of the IAU, may prove to be of use as a tool for automated information retrieval, provided that necessary updates can be implemented.

For the near future, a close cooperation with the IAU Working Group on Publications is planned.

Last update: September 7, 2005