IEEE-OES Digital Archive

Accessing the Contents

The technical content and indexes can be accessed in two ways:

Using Indexes

In this case, you can access all the indexes and the technical content starting with the file start.htm in the root directory of ANY CD-ROM containing the content. This will bypass the ASTAware search engine. Since all the indexes (authors, subjects, tables of contents, minipapers) are replicated on every CD-ROM (containing the content), you can navigate through all the index files from any CD-ROM.

When you try to access an article DjVu file that is not part of the current CD-ROM, you will be prompted to change the CD-ROM. Please follow the platform-specific instructions for changing the CD-ROM.

Note for Sparc Solaris users: On Sparc Solaris platforms, when you insert a CD-ROM, a specific directory by the name OES will be created under the directory /cdrom. Under this directory, you will find the OES files from the CD-ROM in the drive. You will also find a default directory called cdrom0 under the directory /cdrom. The directory cdrom0 is a softlink to the OES directory and thus gives access to the contents of the current CD-ROM in the drive. It is essential that you use the pathname /cdrom/cdrom0 to access the start.htm in the top-level directory of the CD-ROM. This path will remain the same even when you change the CD-ROM thus providing a smooth transition to another CD-ROM.

Using Indexes and the ASTAware Search Engine

In this case, you have to start with the CD-ROM that includes the ASTAware installation software and you must follow the platform-specific instructions for a one-time installation of the ASTAware search engine and the search index. Once you install the ASTAware search engine and search index, you can run the search engine from your hard drive and access it from any CD-ROM containing the content to conduct full-text or fielded searches. For more details, please refer to the Section on installing and activating ASTAware search engine.

Please refer to the Section on Searching the Content using ASTAware Search Engine tips for using the ASTAware search engine.

User-Interface

The interface is fairly intuitive: the left hand frame of the browser window contains Subject, Author and Publications indexes. These indexes are global and give you access to the entire content. You will also find a text-box for typing queries to the ASTAware search engine. Below the text-box, you will find a link to the Advanced Search.

Clicking on an author name will bring you a list of papers published by the author in the Digital Archive. Clicking on the date (such as "May 1976") will bring you the table of contents for the issue. Clicking on the title will bring you the minipaper, which gives a summary of the paper together with bookmarks. The minipaper contains a link to the full paper in DjVu format. The bookmark file contains pointers to various in-links and out-links corresponding to the title. The bookmarks will stay in the left frame until you bring up another title. The minipaper consists of two browser frames. Hence, when you change both the frames, you need to click the Back button of your browser twice to get back to the minipaper.

Although the DjVu files are partitioned among the CD-ROMs, minipapers of all articles appear on all CD-ROMs. Thus, one may need to switch the CD-ROMs only in the event that one may wish to access the full paper in DjVu format.

DjVu Files

DjVu files are not individually searchable. However, the full-text of the DjVu files is indexed by the ASTAware search engine.

One can export DjVu files to a bit map format such as bmp and the resulting image can then be manipulated by other applications such as Photoshop. To export the DjVu image to an image file format, open the DjVu file in the browser and right click the mouse to select the option Export to File and save the file.