From: ShariLee@aol.com
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 1996 15:37:18 -0400
Subject: Best of the Net award
...
In the June issue of Science & Engineering Network News,
we wrote a review of the online efforts of the Physics e-Print Archive at
xxx.lanl.gov.
This site received an exceptionally high score, rating 9.1 out of 10.0!
(the review is attached...)
Shari Worthington and the
editorial team at Science & Engineering Network News
=======================================================
Shari Worthington <sharilee@aol.com>
Editor.............................Science & Engineering Network News
<http://www.senn.com/>
THE Guide to Internet Resources for Scientists & Engineers
=======================================================
F e a t u r e
1996 BEST OF THE NET: SCIENCE & ENGINEERING, PART 2
Best Online Database
The Physics e-Print Archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory is, simply put,
amazing! The de facto repository for tens of thousands of preprints in many
fields of physics, the e-Print Archive sends out thousands of papers every day
to scientists looking to quickly exchange the latest information on physics
advances. The archive is accessible via the Web, http://xxx.lanl.gov/,
anonymous FTP, ftp://xxx.lanl.gov, and e-mail (see below). Since our review
of this site back in February 1995, e-Print has only gotten better. Several
new archives have been added covering Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics,
as well as Plasma Physics. The full list of archives includes:
o Accelerator Physics (acc-phys), 11/94+
o Astrophysics (astro-ph), 4/92+
o Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (atom-ph), 9/95+
o Chemical Physics (chem-ph), 3/94+
o Condensed Matter (cond-mat), 4/92+
o General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc), 7/92+
o High Energy Physics, Experiment (hep-ex), 4/94+
o High Energy Physics, Lattice (hep-lat), 2/92+
o High Energy Physics, Phenomenology (hep-ph), 3/92+
o High Energy Physics, Theory (hep-th), started 8/91
o Materials Theory (mtrl-th), 11/94+
o Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex), 12/94+
o Nuclear Theory (nucl-th), 7/92+
o Plasma Physics (plasm-ph), 9/95+
o Quantum Physics (quant-ph), 12/94+
o Superconductivity (supr-con), 11/94+
The site is well-organized and searchable by title or author. If you just
want to peruse the central archive, you can examine abstracts according to
the date they were submitted. To view the actual paper, though, you'll have
to download either the original source or a postscript file.
To get the most from this site, you'll want to join one or more of the
mailing lists. When you join, you receive new abstracts via e-mail once per
day, on days when new papers have been added to the archive. To obtain the
full text of a paper, you can e-mail a request to the archive or download the
file via the Web. To join the mailing lists, send the e-mail message
subscribe your_full_name to abbrev@xxx.lanl.gov, where "abbrev" is the
abbreviation for the archive of interest (see listing above, e.g. hep-ex).
...
--> Physics e-Print, 9.1
Next up, find out who wins our Best of the Net in the categories Best
E-Publication, Best Government Site, Best Shareware/Freeware Site, and Best
Science & Engineering for Fun Site. SENN
-- Shari Worthington
The Criteria
We at SENN know that you value your time online. Therefore, we created the
1996 Best of the Net: Science & Engineering competition as a way to dig up
some of the premiere technical resources online. We searched high and low for
the top 10 sites that really stand out as the best. It all started with a
list of nominees (see Table 1 for this month's categories and nominees)
submitted by the SENN editors, each of whom is an expert in his/her technical
discipline. Each site was reviewed in detail and evaluated according to the
following criteria:
o Online content
o Organization of the material
o Ease of use
o Types of access
o Links to other sites
o Currency
For a site to really stand out as the best of the best, though, we were also
looking for something different, something compelling that could keep our
interest and keep us coming back to the site for more. Sites with this kind
of magic, are few and far between, but we found a few and will review them in
this multi-part series.
The Competition Categories
In the March 1996 SENN, we covered the first three categories in our
competition:
o Best Educational Site, SciEd: Science & Mathematics Education Resources,
http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/scied/science.html
o Best Commercial Site, Small Company: The MathWorks,
http://www.mathworks.com/, ftp://ftp.mathworks.com
o Best Commercial Site, Large Company: Apple Computer, http://www.apple.com,
ftp://ftp.info.apple.com/
This month we'll cover Best Meta-Site, Best Technical Society Site, and Best
Online Database. Still to come are the categories: Best E-Publication, Best
Government Site, Best Shareware/Freeware Site, and Best Science & Engineering
for Fun Site.