AATA/BCHIN

["Mary W. Ballard" <BallardM@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Textile Discussion list readers: 
In the latest issue of AIC News, the lack of AATA abstracts pertaining to nonyl phenol ethoxylates was raised by Joy Gardiner--and the lack of textile conservation articles generally in the database. This left me wondering: why are there so few articles? Who contributes articles to the database? How do they get listed on the BCIN?  What is the difference between BCHIN and AATA?  Here is what I found out, with the help of our information officer:

AATA is the physical book listing articles with abstracts. BCHIN is the database on line. It should be noted that BCIN contains more than just AATA citations and abstracts.  Other contributors add citations that are not AATA citations but are in their collections and relevant to the subject of BCIN.  For more information on the contributors and their services please see: http://www.chin.gc.ca/Resources/Research_Ref/Reference_Info/BCIN/e_hp_bcin.html 
Also AATA only provides the citations, it does not have an offprint/reprint file or a library, whereas the rest of the contributors do have library collections and/or offprint/reprint collections (i.e. they have the citations if they are listed in the Document Location field in BCIN.) If you have no other resource for getting an article,  a BCIN center can mail you a copy of an article that is listed as being in its reference center.

1) Citations are submitted by VOLUNTEERS who send in a copy of the paper and its reference to certain central organizations like AATA, Canadian Conservation Institute, ICCROM, ICOMOS, SCMRE, etc.
2) The article is then written into the system (title, author(s), journal, volume, #, date, pages, keywords, etc.). There will be an abstract if the article comes with one or if the VOLUNTEER writes one. The information staff/database people cannot write an abstract for an article.
3) These citation entries are then "packaged" and sent to BCIN.
4) BCIN then downloads them into the "public" file which is what you can access (by subscription).

A month or two ago, I gave our information officer, Ann B. N'Gadi, a couple of articles to file on ethoxylated surfactants for BCIN. They are not yet in the "public" section of BCIN but should be later this month, so there is a time delay of 2-3 months.

But who is regularly contributing articles?  Is this what is happening? 
Who is abstracting/sending in articles from textile journals and textile science sources? from textile conservation or archaeological journals? Are we relying on accidental or incidental contributions?

1) For AATA: The latest issue of AATA (1999) contains 3 abstractors who are textile conservators--out of 38 contributors to the abstracts. Are we depending upon them to cite all relevant research for us?! Anyone who would like to become a regular contributor to AATA should contact them to get more information - they are always looking for people to cover runs of journals, conference proceedings, etc.  The contributors are always listed in the back of the AATA volumes that they contribute to.  There is a lag time between submission to AATA and when it gets printed and submitted to BCIN....  Though if you do not want to be a regular contributor to AATA you might want to check with one of the other contributors to see if they are interested in doing occasional additions.
2) For BCIN: If you wish to have the reference available and on the BCIN data base, you could send your contribution with a note to one of the BCIN data centers listed above.

Comments/additions/corrections would be appreciated!
Mary Ballard