a geographical disposition has been applied. Another choice 
to classify organizations might be according to the type of 
organization, but this could lead to some difficulties in inter- 
pretation of the type. 
Under the title Other Remote Sensing Information' currently 
the following eight items can be found: 
e Satellite Data 
e Societies 
e Conferences 
e Documents and Journals 
e News Groups and Mailing List Archives 
e Other Remote Sensing Lists and Resources 
e GIS and Other Related Fields 
e Related Fields in Virtual Library. 
This pragmatic grouping has proved to be very practical. The 
title 'Satellite Data! may sound somewhat too promising but 
anyway, there are several useful sites where to get information 
about the availability of satellite data. The item 'Documents 
and Journals' is reserved for official and common documents 
and electronic publications only, not for technical papers. In 
the remote sensing community there are several other quite 
comprehensive and useful lists of links. These resources have 
been collected under the title 'Other Remote Sensing Lists 
and Resources'. The outline of remote sensing topics is not 
always straightforward because of many related fields, the 
GIS technology being one of the most important. This kind 
of fields are collected under the titles 'GIS and Other Related 
Fields’ and 'Related Fields in Virtual Library’. 
4 MAINTENANCE OF THE INDEX 
The original edition of the index has been collected exploiting 
WWW search engines, such as Lycos. The Remote Sensing 
Virtual Library provides benefits to the community only if it 
is maintained up-to-date. Therefore the maintainer of the list 
wishes welcome all the contributions. The Remote Sensing 
index is moderated. This means that every suggestion to add 
a new resource will be checked for the acceptance. The delay 
of this consideration is less than one week. Additionally, some 
remote sensing related Newsgroups where new home pages 
are announced to have been added, are followed constantly by 
the maintainer. The Virtual Library pages, as almost all other 
pages throughout the whole Internet are under continuous 
construction. In that way the remote sensing community gets 
the latest up-to-date information, and they do have found it 
useful. During the first ten months of operation the main 
page of the Remote Sensing Virtual Library has been accessed 
on an average from about two hundred client computers each 
day. This proves a wide acceptance and profitability of the 
index among the international remote sensing community. 
5 FUTURE DEVELOPMENT 
The actual revision of the Remote Sensing Virtual Library files 
has been written following the HTML 2.0 specification which 
has to be considered as de facto standard so far. New HTML 
specifications will not be applied until supporting client soft- 
ware is widely in use. This principle assures a wide compati- 
bility with the most popular web browsers. 
The Remote Sensing index comprises already about four hun- 
dred unique sites. This sometimes may lead to troublesome 
navigating through long lists of the catalogue. This inconve- 
nience can be avoided either by breaking the lists into separate 
files or by adding a search capability to the server. A simple 
search mechanism would only give hits based on complete 
company names, but using complex search-mechanisms the 
user might in the future get the answer to a question such 
as: show all the private companies working on environmen- 
tal monitoring in northern Africa using Landsat TM data. 
The feasibility of both of these eventual improvements will 
be tested thoroughly before an eventual installation in the 
future. 
The Remote Sensing Virtual Library has already reached an 
excellent acceptance in the professional community. The 
Earth Observation Guide and Directory Service (GDS) of the 
European Space Agency (ESA) and the European-Wide Ser- 
vice Exchange (EWSE) of the Centre for Earth Observation 
of the European Communities (CEO) have added pointers 
to the Virtual Library catalogue. In the future, closer inte- 
gration and coordination of this resource with institutional 
information systems might be desirable and result in users' 
benefit. 
6 APPENDICES 
Appendix A: Home Page of the Remote Sensing Virtual 
Library 
Appendix B: Sample Page: What's New 
Appendix C: Sample Page: Other Remote Sensing Infor- 
mation 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B6. Vienna 1996 
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