Sharing Knowledge: Scientific Communication - SSOAR

132 Olaf Ninnemann, Bernd Wegner
ture in Mathematics - Enhanced Services“. The project fits into the horizontal
programme „Improving human research potential and the socio-economic
knowledge base“ of the FP5, providing and improving access to research infrastructures.
The duration of the project is from April 2000 to March 2004.
The partners of the LIMES-project are: FIZ - Fachinformationszentrum
Karlsruhe (Germany), UJF - Cellule de Coordination Documentaire Nationale
pour les Mathématiques (France), Eidetica (The Netherlands), SIBA - University
of Lecce (Italy), DTV - Technical Knowledge Centre & Library of Denmark
(Denmark), USDC - University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), HMS - Hellenic
Mathematical Society (Greece), TUB - Technical University of Berlin
(Germany), and, as the supervising society, the EMS. The project co-ordinator is
FIZ. The contracts for the funding of the individual projects were signed in
March 2000. The work started on time on April 1, 2000.
The reviewing service Zentralblatt MATH provided the first reference database
for mathematics, starting in 1978, as part of a network called STN. When
mathematicians became more and more attracted by the Internet for their mutual
communication and information, Zentralblatt also installed a web-based service.
This service has been enhanced permanently by links to other electronic offers
and facilities to use it for integrating information from Zentralblatt in primary
publications. In principle, mathematicians and other researchers can access
directly from their desktops everything needed from mathematics for their daily
works. To improve the access facilities, even classical mathematical literature,
which initially had only been printed and which remains of permanent interest
in mathematics, has been digitised gradually through projects like ERAM (see
[1] or [3]) and other digitisation projects like JSTOR and NUMDAM and made
accessible on-line.
1 The database Zentralblatt MATH
The web-based service of Zentralblatt MATH is available via EMIS (see the
URL http://www.emis.de/ZMATH). The major enhancement provided by this
service consists in the indexing and the reports on the mathematical literature
written by a large group of international experts. All reviewers work for Zentralblatt
MATH more or less as volunteers. Further important aspects of quality are:
comprehensiveness, precision of data, easy search menus, convenient linking
with full texts and document delivery systems, etc. Mathematics as a science,
where the truths detected by mathematicians do not lose their validity with the
passage of time needs such precision in order to maintain accurate records the
achievements in the past and to obtain reliable information on what is new.
EMIS provides one link to the WWW-access, and, for the worldwide distribution,
additional access has been arranged through 11 mirrors of Zentralblatt