Dear friends, This article (freely available) is of great interest to mathematics librarians: Jackson, Allyn. "The Digital Mathematics Library". Notices of the AMS 50(8):918-23. September 2003 http://www.ams.org/notices/200308/comm-jackson.pdf This describes the digitisation efforts in mathematics and lists all the digitised mathematics literature which are freely available. With best wishes, Girija Srinivasan -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raman Research Institute Library, Tel: +91 80 361 0122 C V Raman Avenue, Sadashivanagar, Fax: +91 80 361 0492 Bangalore 560 080, India. Email: library@rri.res.in ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 15:56:53 -0700 From: george@library.caltech.edu To: SLAPAM-L@lists.yale.edu, STS-L@listserv.utk.edu Subject: Free digital archives of math material Jackson, Allyn. "The Digital Mathematics Library". Notices of the AMS 50(8):918-23. September 2003 http://www.ams.org/notices/200308/comm-jackson.pdf Access to this article may require a subscription, but the wealth of material described is freely distributed on the web. Gottinger Digitalisierungszentrum (GDZ) http://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/en/index.html is one of the highlighted collections of archival math books and journals. A group of Caltech librarians (Hema Ramachandran, John McDonald, Kathy Johnson, and myself) are actively mining this treasure trove -- adding links in the online catalog to print runs, cataloging online runs for which we do not have print holdings, updating our local OpenURL resolver's knowledgebase, and documenting in Caltech's Online Journal Database (OJDB) http://ojdb.caltech.edu. Recently Steve Rockey http://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0309&L=pamnet&F=&S=&P=5115 provided links for downloading MARC records for the Cornell Digital Math Books Collection and the University of Michigan Historical Mathematics Collection. These collections, too, are cited in Jackson's article. In an age when so many electronic resources cost an arm and a leg, it is a blessing to receive a bounty of hundreds of shelf feet of math journals (read more than a thousand volumes) and similar quantities of math monographs, all specifically selected for their relevance to modern mathematicians. All that is required to benefit from the tremendous efforts going on around us is to spend the effort to make these materials visible to our user communities. In times of budgetary exigency, what better proof is there of the value of librarians than the ability to dramatically upgrade a collection through devotion of a small amount of staff time to a worthy project? George S. Porter Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science Caltech, 1-43 Pasadena, CA 91125-4300 Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681