Scientists on Line: Expanding Access to Scholarly Resources

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Easy access to scholarly resources is at once a frustration and a challenge. Both archivists and scholars in the history of science have become increasingly aware of the opportunities afforded by the use of electronic media. The possibility of integrating productivity-enhancing tools with the resources themselves holds great promise for more efficient, and more thorough, archive use. By its close, Scientists on Disk, will have processed more than 20,000 pages from the J. Robert Oppenheimer archives at the Library of Congress. Under a previous grant, Dr. Kargon has assessed and tested several delivery media, including CD-ROM and digital tape. Yet an important consequence of their investigations has been to realize the current and future significance of network-based information. They have concluded that the existing research network, Internet, is the best way to allow world-wide scholarly access to electronic media archives. Existing communications software can be adapted to facilitate Internet access to the Oppenheimer archives already converted to digital form. Doing so would make possible the near-instantaneous use of these resources by scholars and students world-wide. Under this grant, Dr. Kargon and his collaborator Jeremy Kargon are: 1) extending an existing network protocol (WAIS) to accommodate electronic resources such as images and multiple-type documents so that electronic archives might more accurately represent scholarly documents; 2) making a prototype and disseminating a model information client to handle better such extensions, as well as a wider range of data types (including compressed images and bibliographic information); 3) implementing and maintaining an information server integrating these changes, using the previously scanned Oppenheimer documents. Properly equipped users around the world will be able to access this and other archives in a single, integrated fashion. Together with other fast-developing network tools, these efforts should encourage the proliferation of network-based, multi-media resources.