Access to the astrophysics data system: what, how, who, and where

Abstract

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the search system of choice for Astronomers world-wide. The searchable database contains over 2.6 million bibliographic records. In addition the ADS has over 2 million scanned article pages from about 280,000 articles, dating back as far as 1829. There are currently more than 10,000 regular users (more than 10 queries/month). ADS users issue almost 1 million queries per month and receive 40 million records and 1.2 million scanned article pages per month. One important aspect of the ADS is the system of links to other data providers. We have currently more than 3 million links to other on-line resources. The ADS is accessed from almost 100 countries with a wide range of the number of queries per country. In order to improve access from different parts of the world, we maintain 9 mirror sites of the ADS in Brazil, Chile, China, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Russia. Automatic procedures facilitate keeping these mirror sites up-to-date over the network. The ADS is funded by NASA Grant NCC5-189. The ADS is available at: http://ads.harvard.edu© (2002) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.