Volume 2, July 1996 - EDITORIAL

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Another amusing (at least to us) incident occured just last week. We got a message from someone we thought had subscribed to the service, asking to be taken off the list -- which, considering the quality of the service, we found impossible to believe. Upon further investigation, it turned out that this person had been added to our list, and about 200 other lists, by an irate ex-boyfriend, resulting in a deludge of unwanted email. An example of a creative, if not entirely ethical, use of the Internet. Consequently, we offered to put the ex-boyfriend on our subscriber list --- an offer which, even though declined, did produce some emotional relief for a while.

To check the proper usage of GCNEWS, we are constantly monitoring access of our Web-site, which seems to indicate that indeed the large majority of virtual visitors are interested in astronomy. Many are referred to our site by search engines like DIGITAL's AltaVista which automatically references keywords in all Web-pages. This means that the abstracts which appear in GCNEWS are available to a much wider audience than just the GC community. However, one sometimes wonders if the reason why Angela's article on ``Hot Stars'' is so popular among those coming from AltaVista has anything to do with astronomy at all.

Electronic newsletters for professional astronomers seem to be increasingly popular offsprings of recent developments in the Internet. Besides GCNEWS, there is ``A Peculiar Newsletter'' on Ap and related stars, the ``Magellanic Clouds Newsletter'' (MCNEWS! --- with a beautiful Web-page) and the ``Hot Star Newsletter'' --- with 340 subscribers certainly one of the largest (but with this name they must have a lot of hits from lonely and disappointed AltaVista users). (More astronomical newsletters we found later: Delta Scuti Star Newsletter, Be Star Newsletter, AGB Star Newsletter, and of course the ESO Star Formation Newsletter)

These newsletters cannot and will not replace traditional journals -- however, they can help to avoid new ones. With the exponentially increasing flood of astronomy related publications, the next step would likely be the creation of new, more specialized Journals, e.g. one for each decade in photon energy or each square-degree on the sky. Instead, specialized Newsletters can provide the necessary concentration of papers by topic and provide relief from the herculean task of persuing every journal for relevant papers. This will be even more true once all articles are available electronically and a simple mouse click can establish the link between newsletter or preprint server and the archived journal paper. Given the potential of wider circulation and accessibility, it is surprising that neither publishers nor Astronomical Societies seem to be a driving force in this development.

Our policy is that we are happy to distribute all information related to the Galactic Center to our subcribers. If you are interested in reaching our subscribers all you need to do is email us at gcnews@astro.umd.edu and we will send out your announcement with the next Newsflash and include it in the next Newsletter. In addition our Web-page contains a listing of current subscribers (unless they object) with email and departmental addresses to facilitate personal communication --- similar to the AAS directory. Those email addresses are, however, only available one-by-one and not as a bulk list. By maintaining control over access to our subscriber list we hope to ensure the quality and relevance of the information you receive.