ABSTRACT The Arctic Bibliography is comprehensive guide to the literature of the Arctic region from the earliest writings through 1975. The Bibliography includes publications on the history, languages, peoples, archaeology, anthropology, industry, settlements, exploration expeditions, geology, mining and minerals, paleontology, climate, and geography of the region. Among the publications cited are original sources, the chronicles, diaries and accounts of the people who lived there. All the sources were seen by the compilers of the Bibliography and it includes abstracts and the names of the libraries where the documents can be consulted. In short, the Bibliography is an important tool for Arctic research. Presently, sets of the Arctic Bibliography can be consulted in only a few libraries, and it is in danger of being forgotten in current research. This project is to produce an electronic version of the Arctic Bibliography. By this means, the contents of the Bibliography will be preserved intact, and can be incorporated into CDs containing other data on the Arctic, and also be made searchable over the Internet. Permanent access to the Bibliography will be assured. The database would be available in a simplified version of the UNISIST Reference Manual format, a tag-data format without headers, which is well-suited to processing on today's microcomputers. It would also be available in the MARC format, which is the format used in the majority of the online library catalogs in the United States, and widely used in other countries. As is common with conversions of a print bibliography to a database, the resulting file would be easier to use and afford more access points than the print original. All words in the abstracts and titles would be searchable in the database. Depending on the search software involved, all words anywhere in the data could be made searchable, and searching using statistical methods to determine relevancy could be employed.
