List of changes to the bibliography collection in reverse chronological order. This list is not exhaustive and lists only major changes. Updates of bibliographies or new additions to the bibliography collection are not reported here.
Many internal changes, the most important are:
The server moved to new hardware/software platform (so it is much faster now). An additional method for detection of duplicates was applied, so that all records that share the same title and author last names are grouped. When a list of search results is displayed, then only first entry in such group is shown. All other entries are available through the link visible on the right of the displayed citation. Beware, that these duplicates may contain additional information about the publication you are looking for (abstracts, URL's, other versions). Do not miss it!
Sorry, the master site for the bibliography collection was not reachable for the last few days because
In that order.
Everything is fixed now and should be in working order.
After nearly 10 years of creating and maintaining the bibliography collection I will soon retire as the maintainer and will hand the job over to somebody new who can devote his whole time and energy to the task of expanding both the coverage and the functionality of the bibliography collection.
There is a new, still experimental and very powerful search inferface available at the master site for this collection. Test it and let me know about any problems.
Now there is a new mirror site for the bibliography collection that features a search interface with the most important pages translated to Spanish.
After a power failure on the 26th of December, 1999, the bibliography collection had been down until the 12th of January. I am sorry for the inconvenience.
The number of entries in the bibliography collection has now surpassed 1 Million!
According to AltaVista there exist at least 6000 links to the Computer Science Bibliography Collection!
The simple search interface for the bibliography collection now allows you to search for more matches to your query by providing a pointer to the next set of matches.
The total number of matches is still limited, though. This limit, however, has been raised significantly, thus allowing users to scan larger result sets.
The Institute for Informatics for Engineering and Science has dedicated one of their fastest machines solely for the bibliography collection! Please give 'em a hand (or send them a postcard!).
The new machine speeds up searches by a factor of 3 to 7 and should help to avoid long response times that users have experienced in the past.
Adjusted the HTMl code in pages and search results to handle Netscape 4.* pecularities concerning table rendering.
Just for your information I would like to show you some statistics regarding the number of hypertext links in the bibliography collection:
| Hyperlinks | Unique URLs | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| number | % | number | % | |
| Local | 9020 | 65.30 | 1977 | 47.54 |
| Remote | 4793 | 34.70 | 2182 | 52.46 |
| Totals | 13813 | 100.00 | 4159 | 30.11 |
As you can see in the table there are more than 2000 links in the bibliography collection that point to other sites offering bibliographical information and the whole weblet of the computer science bibliography collection consists of almost 14.000 hyperlinks.
Note that the numbers above do not relate to the the bibliographical data in the collection, but the metabibliographical data contained in the many HTML files. For some statistics about the bibliographical data see here.
The appearance of the computer science bibliography collection has been changed (improved, I hope).
Also, a new WWW server has been installed in order to speed up accesses.
I thought I'd throw in some numbers about this bibliography collection:
The Computer Science Bibliography Collection
The search interfaces
You can now create your own subject area by searching for whole bibliographies and search only the bibliographies you select.
The advanced search interface now offers an easy way to search for all publications of a certain author by turning author names into hyperlinks in search results.
The server at the home site is now running on a faster machine and has more disk space. That should speed up searches by a factor of 2 or 3.
The HTML pages for the bibliographies have been redesigned a tiny bit. In particular, they now have better navigation links to higher levels of the collection.
The reference count reached a whopping 500,000 entries! However, note that 125,000 are duplicate entries.
You can now also submit individual references to the Computer Science Bibliography Collection instead of whole bibliographies.
The section on software engineering has been extended to include a number of bibliographies on formal methods.
The section for the bibliographies of the Bibnet project have been moved to the miscellaneous section.
I have added graphical information about the distribution of publication dates to the pages of individual bibliographies. This is to help users assess the scope and comprehensiveness of a bibliography before retrieving or searching it. This is especially helpful with the bibliographies for journals, since it becomes clear which years are covered by the respective bibliography.
The native search interface now searches on a database with expanded crossreferences. This improves search results for queries that include years or conference names and also gets rid of the additional indirection in the search results.
In November 1995 I gave a talk at Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik in Berlin on the Computer Science Bibliography Collection. The slides I used in that talk are available as a gzipped postscript file (sorry, German language only).
I will continue to maintain the bibliography collection until the end of 1995. After that date maintenance will be continued, but less intensely.
I am looking for sponsor(s) who would be willing to donate funds towards the continued maintenance of the bibliography collection in exchange for having their logos prominently displayed on the pages of the bibliography collection. Potential sponsors can have a look at the access statistics to find out about how many clients use this service.
A very powerful alternative search interface has been installed at the home site of the bibliography collection. It is based on freeWAIS-sf and allows field-based search with a full set of boolean operators. It is still in beta testing, though.
I will be leaving the University of Karlsruhe and somebody else will continue to maintain the bibliography collection. However, we have to reduce the maintenance effort for the bibliography collection and therefore some changes will take effect soon:
I stopped recording additions to the bibliography collection. Log records have shown that this page was read by only very few users and I did not really keep this log up-to-date lately anyway.