Nuclear Scientists Pack Volumes on Single CD

June 3, 1994

Literature searches have just gotten easier for nuclear scientists, and at a price anyone can afford.

Researchers in the Nuclear Science Division's Isotopes Project and at Lund University in Sweden have developed a CD-ROM that holds the bibliographic data for every important paper published on nuclear structure since 1910. Called Papyrus NSR, the compact disk contains the listings found in Nuclear Structure References, the on-line database for low- to medium-energy physics maintained at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"Papyrus NSR is unique in nuclear physics right now," says LBL physicist Edgardo Browne, who helped spearhead the project. "It is the first bibliographic database of its kind offered on compact disk." Browne worked with Peter Ekström of Lund University to develop the CD-ROM.

Best of all, Papyrus NSR is being distributed free of charge to nuclear scientists through the Isotopes Project, an LBL group that evaluates and disseminates nuclear data to the scientific community.

The new CD-ROM should be particularly valuable to scientists who lack the capability to access the Nuclear Structure References database on-line, such as those working at small universities or at home.

Papyrus NSR will run on most IBM-compatible computers with CD-ROM drives. For efficient performance, Browne recommends users have at least a 386-based system and DOS version 6.2.

The 150 megabytes of data on the Papyrus NSR disk contain more than 130,000 bibliographic references, equivalent to about 10,000 type-written pages. Users can search the references by categories common to most library databases, such as title, author, editor, journal, date and keyword.

To access the reference data, the CD-ROM includes a special version of Papyrus, a bibliographic database program developed by Research Software Design Inc. in Portland, Oregon.

Browne and Ekström plan to offer updates to Papyrus NSR every four months, available over the Internet or on floppy disk. An updated CD-ROM is expected to be released once a year.

For more information about Papyrus NSR, contact Edgardo Browne