Dear Moderator - I shall appreciate if you would kindly post in lis.forum the following message which would be of considerable interest to librarians in general, especially special librarians/information scientists. Thanking you Yours sincerely, M N Seetharaman Former Head, Information Centre for Aeronautics, NAL, Bangalore ======================================================================================================= Dear Fellow library colleagues and professionals As most of you are aware, international conferences organized by scholarly societies and professional associations are considered as major sources of information on cutting edge research and development, particularly in the fields of science, engineering and technology. It is only at these conferences that a research breakthrough is made public or current issues are debated for the first time. If the research undertaken by a scientist or engineer has uncovered new material, led to a fundamentally new approach to familiar material, or posed a valuable new connection or juxtaposition, it is only at important national and international conferences that he or she considers disseminating his/her scholarship in the form of a conference paper. It is for these reasons that published conference proceedings are considered as valuable sources of information, covering research findings, innovations, best practices or new methodology. It is only much later that such information finds its way to official journal publication. According to a survey conducted by INSDOC some time ago,the Indian Institute of Science Library has the largest collection of conference proceedings in the country. NAL Library came second. As we all know, it is rather difficult to source and procure conference proceedings that fall into the category of grey literature. However, the following acquisition tools may be useful for librarians in identifying, selecting and ordering of conference proceedings: 1. www.proceedings.com (Web Site of Curran Associates Inc., Red Hook, New York, USA,who are specialists in this field). 2. British Library, Boston Spa, UK. - Records of conference holdings are available through its Integrated Catalogue and British Library Inside or in the monthly and annual print publication - Index of Conference Proceedings - ICP. Yours sincerely, M.N. Seetharaman Formerly, Head, Information Centre for Aeronautics, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.