Re: paleo titles & abstracts

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Putting on my PaleoNet manager's hat for a moment, PaleoNet would be willing to make a directory in its ftp site 
and/or a gopher hole available for collecting and providing access to text files listing titles and abstracts of papers 
published in any paleontological journal.  Since PaleoNet is not affiliated with any professional society, using 
PaleoNet for this task would avoid any potential inter-society conflicts.  I also agree that placing extesive and (in 
all likelihood) high-use text listings this on the web is probably not a good idea owing to access times.  I can 
download items much more quickly using gopher right now than using a web browser.  At the same time, placing 
these files in a gopher hole would allow for direct online access (via a web browser) for those who want that 
option.  What PaleoNet is not prepared to do is to get involved with lots of time-consuming fussing with files.  
There is more than enough behind-the scenes work that goes into PaleoNet to keep several normal humans busy 
without getting itself involved in the pro bono supply of services to journals that charge an oftentimes substantial 
fee to cover their overhead costs.  Of course, if a society or a journal would like to compensate PaleoNet 
personnel and/or negotiate with the NHM for the supply of such services, that is another question.

I invite any society officers or journal editors to explore these possibilities with me offline.


Norm MacLeod








On Mon, 12 Jun 95 09:39:15 +0200 Heinz Hilbrecht wrote:

> From: Heinz Hilbrecht <Hilbrecht@erdw.ethz.ch>
> Date: Mon, 12 Jun 95 09:39:15 +0200
> Subject: paleo titles & abstracts
> To: PaleoNet@nhm.ac.uk
> 
> Stefan Bengtson writes:
> >What Doug and Heinz are aiming at is perhaps something more concentrated,
> >like a palaeontological Current Contents on Paleonet. Sounds like a great
> >idea, but someone presumably has to manage it in order to make it really
> >useful.
> 
> No! Not that big. Just titles and (hopefully) abstracts on an informal
> basis. This service is (or could be) made available via several WWW
> homepages, each for a single journal. However, then I can go down to the
> library. It takes time to download the WWW pages from several sources when
> the Internet is heavily loaded. The reason why I suggest the Paleonet
> listserver to distribute this information is: I do not have to remember, I
> get it automatically. Ideally publishers should regard this as
> advertisement appreciated by their current and future readers and send
> their journal contents directly. I do not want to load a mediator with this
> work. Direct information from the publishers would be faster indeed and,
> therefore, more appreciated.
> 
> 
> Heinz Hilbrecht
> 
> Address:
> Geological Institute
> ETH Zentrum
> Sonneggstrasse 5
> CH-8092 Zuerich
> Switzerland
> 
> Tel.: ++41-1-63 23676
> Fax: ++41-1-63 21080
> Internet: Hilbrecht@erdw.ethz.ch
> 
> 
>