The Library is the central information unit of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Its task is to assist research by providing literature, reference and modern information services in any form. This includes the acquisition and delivery of traditional printed sources like books or journals, microfiche and microfilms, bibliographic reference files, and extends to electronic documentation and electronic archives. Along with electronic documentation, the Library supplies not only reference information and sources in history of science, but also the appropriate tools to search and handle the wealth of electronic information available in-house and worldwide.
In late 1995 the Library moved to its new quarters. An official opening took place on January 18, 1996, with a ceremony in the presence of the President of the Max Planck Gesellschaft and a speech by Lorraine Daston on "Die Naturwissenschaften als eine neue, andere Kultur."
The book and journal collections are presented for open access and arranged systematically according to the Dewey Decimal Classification to meet user requirements for browsing. The Library offers a reading area with Intranet and Internet connections as well as a casual reading corner for newspapers. These areas can be configured for discussion groups and receptions. Local and Internet electronic resources are made available through the Library's homepage. The Library is permanently accessible for members of the Institute, including evening hours and weekends.
The development of the collections was continued and concentrated on reference works, major source works, and critical standard editions along with a selection of secondary literature. The Library benefitted from the acquisition of the private library of Robert P. Multhauf with valuable items in history of science, chemistry, and technology. The collection of printed books - current holdings of over 20,000 volumes - is arranged in the following divisions:
As a further information resource, 120 current journals belonging to the core literature in the research areas of the Institute are available. These include a selection of current newsletters of the major learned societies and institutions in our field.
The Library's microform collection (e.g., Landmarks of Science, Newton's Manuscripts and Papers and Einstein's Collected Works) was further expanded and now holds some 10,000 historical works and manuscripts. Microfilm readers, reader-printers and reader-scanners are provided to take full advantage of this strategic resource for research at the Institute (see Project "Computer-Aided Source Collection in History of Science" p. 245) .
The Inter Library Loan (ILL), another service priority to support research at the Institute, has been expanded to the third research group and has gained a high level of acceptance. It provides bibliographic reference and document delivery from the major research libraries in Berlin, Germany and abroad. ILL also provides copies of journal articles as well as microfilms of books and other documents. Provisions are made for receiving remote documents in digitized form. Catalogs of the lending libraries can be consulted on microfiche, electronic files, and through the Internet as a part of the Library's reference service.
The Library's electronic resources include references like the catalog of holdings, bibliographic reference and full-text databases, encyclopedias, and electronic library catalogs. Catalog information on all the Library's collections and holdings is provided via an internal Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) available through the Intranet. Databases on CD-ROM can be searched on individual workstations.
A selection of remote bibliographic databases are made available for direct searches. These include table of contents files (Current Contents, Online Contents, Uncover) as well as subject databases (History of Science and Technology, Medline, Biosis, Inspec). For mediated searches in a wide range of other databases (e.g. Science Citation Index, Philosopher's Index, Historical Abstracts or Dissertation Abstracts) the Library has access to the networks of Dialog, STN, Questel, and to the German Library Service Center (DBI, Berlin).
All local and remote electronic services are integrated in the Library's World Wide Web homepage providing a unified access to the various electronic resources. This page lists links to the Institute's library resources (catalog of holdings, new acquisitions lists, current journals), as well as to major library catalogs in Germany and abroad, to bibliographic information, to text archives, or to relevant sites in the history of science field.
Besides continuous support in library, archive, and bibliography matters, the Library periodically offers structured introductions to the collections and services. Special courses are taught for the use of remote bibliographic databases, library catalogs on the Internet, and for the use of personal bibliography makers (EndNote). Support is also provided for problems with reformatting various bibliographic software.
Hand in hand with the expansion of the services in 1996 and 1997, permanent library staff was raised to six, including one systems librarian. This team is currently supported by auxiliary staff.
Staff development was accompanied by training schedules covering systems administration, search techniques in bibliographic databases, Internet training, and language courses. Staff members were also delegates at conferences and exhibitions; one member joined a four weeks' visiting program at the Médiathèque Histoire des Sciences, La Villette, Paris, arranged by the German Library Service Center (DBI, Berlin).
Since the institute is not endowed with an old library of gradually expanded holdings, many of the historical sources had to be acquired in the form of microfilm. To date, these microfilm archives store over 10,000 works and manuscripts. To offer state-of-the-art access to this resource, a digital library was conceived. This digital library includes tools for the management and access of electronic facsimile documents, as well as a digitization unit with paper and large-scale microfilm scanners. The Computer-Aided Source Collection in History of Science is a joint project of members of the research groups, the Computing service unit, and of the Library.
So far a pilot of the document server has been developed, making some 60 documents available. Care was taken to use widely available standard software for access and browsing (Web browser), both to immunize against dedicated and platform-dependent software solutions and to guarantee flexibility for future developments.
The digitization unit consists of a heavy-duty paper scanner for documents on paper and a recently installed SunRise microfilm scanner. It is planned to scan the core documents of the microfilm archive to make them available on the Intranet. The films will be digitized to gray-scale images in order to give the most detailed reproduction of the original possible. Production will be supported by assistant staff.
Particular attention was paid to the integration of the Library's concepts and developments into professional networks. Besides participating in national and international conferences, the head of the Library regularly attended the librarians' meetings of the Max Planck Society to discuss policy and technical issues. The Library has become a member of Pica, one of Germany's major library networks with extensive activities in electronic text management. Urs Schoepflin discussed developments in this area with members of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities while visiting the Rutgers and Princeton University Libraries. Legal and technical issues related to the digitization of Landmarks of Science microfilms were raised at the University of Oklahoma, Norman (Department of History of Science, host site of the original Landmarks of Science Library Collection).
Other foci were new concepts of information provision and service development. Urs Schoepflin investigated advanced concepts of information provision with bibliographic databases at the Research Libraries Group and at Dialog Inc. To this end he also studied the organization of information services at the Stanford University Library, the University Libraries of UC at Berkeley and San Francisco, at the Harvard University Library, and at the Dibner Institute (MIT).
In Europe he extended contacts to the Library of the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, to the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, and to the Médiathèque Histoire des Sciences, La Villette, Paris, to discuss novel information service concepts.
Finally, the Library has become involved with the Institute of Library Science at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where concepts, services, and the organization of the Library are regularly presented at seminars.
In addition to his duties as head of the Library, Urs Schoepflin has also carried out scientometric research in the areas of scientific communication structures and reception processes of scientific literature.
In an ongoing study (in cooperation with Wolfgang Glänzel, Information Science and Informetrics Research Unit at the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) the differences in reception between fields of science were investigated. Previous studies of the project focused on the differences in the aging of journal literature in science and the social sciences. It was shown that bibliometric standard indicators based on journal articles need to be modified for several fields and topics in order to yield valid results. In fields where monographs, books or reports are the central means of scientific information, science communication is not reflected in an adequate manner by journal literature alone. To extend this approach to subjects where the role of non-serial literature is considerable or critical in terms of bibliometric standard methods, the totality of the bibliographic citations indexed in the 1993 annual cumulation of the SCI and SSCI databases have been processed. The analysis is based on three indicators, the percentage of references to serials, the mean references age, and the mean reference rate. Applications of these measures at different levels of aggregation (i.e., to journals in selected science and social science fields) lead to the following conclusions: The percentage of references to serials proved to be a sensitive measure for characterizing typical differences in the communication behavior between the sciences and the social sciences. However, there is an overlap zone which includes fields like mathematics, technologically-oriented science, and social science areas. In certain social science areas, part of the information seems to originate to some extent in non-scientific sources: references to non-serials do not always represent monographs, pre-prints or reports. Consequently, the model of information transfer from scientific literature to scientific (journal) literature assumed by standard bibliometrics requires substantial revision before valid results can be expected through its application to social science areas.
The Computing Service Unit plays an important role within the scientific activities of the Institute. Its main task is to assist research by providing an electronic environment that ranges from standard computer applications like word processing and e-mail, up to highly sophisticated facilities for scanning historical documents, preparing them for Optical Character Recognition, publishing within the World Wide Web, etc. Additional tasks include:
The personnel capacity of the computing service unit is very small, comprising only two members. To keep pace with the expansion of the Institute over the last two years, the unit is currently supported by two part-time student assistants.
In order to preserve a homogeneous and comfortable working environment for the Institute's staff and visitors, Apple Macintosh computers were chosen as the standard equipment for each workplace. However, other machines and operating systems (Windows NT/95 as well as UNIX- based Linux boxes) are needed for special tasks. Besides these, additional workplaces have been equipped with high-end computers suitable for special tasks requiring more powerful computing facilities. Most of these computers are also UNIX based (Linux, Solaris), but due to developments in the computer technology, within the last year a number of Windows NT servers were also installed for such purposes.
The Institute's hardware capabilities again were expanded greatly during the last two years. Different services are distributed among different servers to avoid the "one-point-of-failure" problem. At the moment three database servers are in operation, one server is responsible for the Institute's calendar, and another handles the internal electronic-mail facilities. In addition there is a central backup server, as well as different servers providing external modem connections. Although most of these machines are Apple Macintosh, a Linux machine is used for the Internet connection, and the central server for the Institute's administration unit is SINIX. Finally, a Silicon Graphics Computer with the Irix operating system works as a RIP (Raster Image Processor) between the local network of the Institute and a Xerox color printer-scanner.
Outside the research workplaces, the administrative unit uses normal Windows 3.1 systems to work with the SAP applications.
Like the Institute's central hardware, the network and the workplaces also have expanded greatly over the last two years. At the moment, the Local Area Network covers nearly 200 workplaces at the Institute. As mentioned in the Annual Report 1995, the LAN was designed with a 100-MBit FDDI backbone from the ground floor to the sixth floor. From here the backbone was extended last year to the newly occupied rooms in the west wing of the sixth floor. At strategically planned locations, six routers have been installed to connect the users to the Institute's LAN over 10-MBit Ethernet lines. In the near future, the Computing Service Unit plans to upgrade to a 100-MBit Ethernet, first for the high-end workplaces mentioned above, then subsequently for the rest of the desktop computers at the Institute. Due to security concerns, an additional isolated LAN was installed to separate the administration unit from the research network.
Through a CISCO router the Institute maintains a 64-kBit permanent ISDN link to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, which connects the Institute via a 2-MBit line to the Internet.
The same CISCO router also connects the administration unit with a separate link to the SAP server of the administration unit located at the Fritz Haber Insitute in Berlin-Dahlem.
Like all the other electronic facilities, the World Wide Web capabilities of the Institute also underwent great expansion. An external WWW server, an internal WWW server and an internal document server were installed. (For more on the document server, a collaborative project with the library, see the the library unit's report.) The external WWW server can be visited at http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/.
Despite the small capacity of the Computing Service Unit, it has been able to support Institute research activities such as
In addition, a weekly informal Computer Task Force session was initiated to offer a forum for the Computing Service Unit and the Institute's computer users to discuss computer problems and issues.
The Computing Service Unit also held several training sessions for users, including
Besides these activities, the Computing Service Unit is expanding its competence to take advantage of the new possibilities provided by the growth of the World Wide Web. This includes HTML and Java programming, as well as the programming of client-server applications with CGI and database connection tools. To this end, the staff of the unit has participated in several workshops and exhibitions on the technology and potential of the Web.