Bibliographic Data in Astronomy: Experience with the IBVS Reference List Revision

摘要

Literature has to be both visible and accessible. What is not on the web is almost non-existent. Let's turn this adage around: are our present bibliographies complete? Where are the blind spots? Are there resources missing from the web, or not readily accessible? The author shares his experience gained during the extensive revision of old reference lists from the Information Bulletin on Variable Stars (IBVS). ADS contains about twenty-five thousand references from IBVS issues between 1961 and 2013. There are some more references in journals, unidentifiable by ADS. Some are incomplete or inaccurate, and the rest is mostly old and obscure. But however old or obscure it is, it must contain important information, because it is cited. Old observatory publications, and aged gray literature in general, is just in the process of being cleared off from library shelves. It is not only the literature of the past we need to discuss - there are challenges for the present and the future: these include new forms of publications that are hard to render into bibcodes, data and data products, and items that are not strictly data or literature, like VOEvents and nanopublications.