Past Initiatives
From its inception, AISTI has focused on staying a step ahead of trends in the field of information science. The organization’s mission has always been to find the best way to provide scientific and technical information to the researchers of its members’ primary communities. AISTI’s distinguished record of information science innovation began in January 1992, at a time when it was becoming clear that the Internet would radically influence the field of information science. A group of forward-thinking librarians joined together under the name Library Services Alliance of New Mexico to tackle the problem of local loading and shared data access with efficient online tools. In 1999, the organization changed its name to Alliance for Innovation in Science and Technology Information to reflect the broadening geographic and philosophical scope of its membership. In 2007, in response to rapidly shifting trends in information science, the group fine-tuned its name to Alliance for Information Science and Technology Innovation.
AISTI has spearheaded numerous pioneering projects that have furthered the development of information science and research technology:
2004 AISTI funded two projects investigating research questions related to digitization. Funds went toward supporting a LANL representative for the MPEG standards project and furthering the development of a Digital Repository of Cave and Karst Scanning Electron Micrograph project.
2003 AISTI created the Emerging Research Summit as a way of furthering is mission and vision. Results from these efforts included a funded Mellon grant investigating the release of open source software to expose gray literature via Apache servers.
2002 AISTI funded a pilot E-print server project providing an electronic repository for E-prints for all AISTI member institutions.
2001 AISTI approved EPSCOR Science Information Group as a special affiliate member in order to assist the group in obtaining a license agreement with Kluwer. The goal was to foster the expansion of science and technology research in NSF underserved states.
2000 AISTI inaugurated its first annual mini-conference focusing on innovation in the science and technology information field.
1999 The Alliance for Library Services changed its name to Alliance for Information Science and Technology Information to reflect its expanded vision as an innovative leader in cyber SCI/TECH information, producing new models of scholarly information. The Alliance had successfully negotiated contracts allowing members to access citation databases such as SciSearch at LANL, Social SciSearch at LANL, Biosis at LANL, INSPEC at LANL, and Engineering Index at LANL, as well as the full text of journal articles from publishers linked to these citation databases, such as Elsevier, Kluwer, and Academic Press.
1998 The Alliance achieved its goal of giving all six original members access to SciSearch at LANL. INSPEC, Academic Press, Elsevier, and IEE/IEEE publications available via SciSearch were also made available.
1997 The Alliance negotiated an agreement with the LANL Research Library to provide SciSearch infrastructure support. This agreement allowed LANL to provide additional services such as alerts and linking local holdings information to the SciSearch database. Using alerts in place of similar commercial services resulted in substantial cost reduction for all member libraries.
1996 The Alliance negotiated a contract with the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) to purchase the SciSearch database. LANL Research Library provided access to members who were able to purchase the database through ISI. This was one of the first known cases of a research library performing “local loading.” The Alliance negotiated a contract with Academic Press for electronic access to the total set of their journals for all Alliance members. The full-text journal article was available on the Internet and delivered directly to the users desktop, where complete abstracts or complete articles could be viewed, printed, and downloaded.
1995 The Alliance launched a collaborative project to provide access to the Science Citation Index database for all Alliance members, with LANL Research Library staff providing project management. The SciSearch database resided on a server at LANL and allowed authorized users access via the Internet. An innovative application called Explorer permitted searches of SciSearch and integrated textual and graphical information with search and retrieval capabilities. Explorer also provided a toolbar for users, including help screens with examples.
1994 The Alliance created easier access to the online catalogs of member libraries using Mosaic and Gopher, as well as links to other databases, images and electronic information, and hyper text links to new documents.
1993 In its second year, the Alliance created access to online catalogs of member libraries and completed a test of electronic transmission of documents between LANL and University of New Mexico's Centennial Science and Engineering Library.
1992 The Library Service Alliance was formed with the intent of collaboratively creating access to member library resources, develop rapid delivery of information products, and maximize the ownership of resources of the collective group. Members designed and launched the Passport Program, a reciprocal borrowing program between all Alliance libraries, and created a website for the purpose of making catalogs and other databases accessible online.
