Specialised search engines (earth and
planetary science data bases).
Although primarily intended for professional scientists, these
data bases can also be of value to the highschool teacher and
student. Those referenced here are all accessible to you.
If you are interested in really professional information (which will
require subscription and payment) then have a look at
SERIOUS DATABASES.
500 Natural sciences
520 Astronomy
- Astro
Web - (maintained by The AstroWeb Consortium who also maintain
the Astronomy and Astrophysics pages in the WWW Virtual-Library at
CERN ) - extremely reliable and well monitored searchable database
of Internet resources on astronomy and astrophysics.
- Expanding
Universe ( Wayne Daniels, Jeanne Enright, Patrick Gliddon and
Mita Sen-Roy) - This is a Dewey classified catalogue of amateur
astronomy (see GEO. 520). The
pages here provide a word search of terms taken from the
headings.
550 Earth sciences
- GLIS- USGS
Global Land Information System. Very large and powerful collection
of databases covering all fields of earth and planetary
science which provides abstracts, descriptions and
searches for each data set. Easy ordering is possible and in
some cases downloading of products. Although the database is very
complete, the search facility is not very well developed as yet
(jan. 1997).
- GLIS(2)-non-frames
version of GLIS
- Going crazy over the number of institutions under the NASA
umbrella? (Not to mention all the abbreviations!)
This search engine could help you to sort them out and understand
who does what.
Search Earth
Pages- This search engine is part of the Earth Core System
(ECS) which was implemented by NASA to make it easier for
scientists to find information connected with global change
from the many data archives which are connected with the Earth
Observation System Data Information System (EOSDIS). Before you
start searching, you might want to have a look at where the
various data
archives are, what they call themselves and what kind of
information they have. Although intended mainly for working
scientists, this search facility can help the highschool teacher
and student to wade through the jungle of information available on
earth observations from space.
- NASA
Master Directory- multi-disciplanary data base of NASA
resources. This one requires a bit of thinking and effort, but can
produce really useful and practical information for the highschool
user. The NASA Master Directory provides brief, overview
information about available data sets of interest, mainly in the
space sciences. As an example: you can search for information
on what missions have measured geomagnetic properties and find
summaries of the results.
- NSSDC
(National Space Science Data Center) - NASA data base with
good help, enables you to search for documents, articles, or image
captions. If you are not sure about the content of this data base,
have a look at their
FAQ
first.
- Volcano
World Search (Univ. of N Dakota with NASA). If you are looking
for volcanic-related stuff, this is probably one of the quickest
ways to find it. Good instructions.
- Why? files
search form (NISE/NSF, USA) - this is the search form for the
Why? files site which treats science very much from the
popular viewpoint. Included here because it is usually very
topical. Turns up an amazing range of items.
These pages maintained by Dr Georg R Douglas,
Hamrahlíð College, 105 Reykjavík,
Iceland