Harvey Chinn, co-developer of the on-line LTER All-Site Bibliography, will be completing his work with LTER in May. His contribution is much appreciated and widely used. The bibliography project, completed at University of California, Davis under the direction of LTER Research Coordinator Caroline Bledsoe and with the cooperation of the LTER site data managers, was supported by a subcontract to the LTER Network Office grant.
The LTER Bibliography provides a comprehensive compilation of citations on research conducted across the LTER sites, including work completed at a site before it joined the Network. For the initial version, completed in mid-1993, Harvey developed a filter which converted individual site bibliographies into a common format, enabling search functionality and on-line display. The current version contains over 12,000 citations for 19 LTER sites, including the North Inlet site. Harvey recently made the bibliography available in World Wide Web format, and it is now linked through the LTER Network Office home page at http://www.lternet.edu/bibliography/
Harvey reports that the success of this project shows that the integration of site data is not impossibly difficult, and that future efforts to integrate other types of data should probably aim for distributed implementation. In a distributed system, each site’s portion of a type of information resides at that site and is maintained by its staff mechanisms of such a system would allow users to conduct Network-wide queries of site-based data in a single, integrated operation, with all the returned information presented in the same formatting style, regardless of how it is stored by the local site. During his three years with LTER, Harvey also developed and maintained a web site for the Information Center for the Environment at UC Davis. He will be seeking web work on political campaigns for the rest of this election year.