What a terrific Web site. Accessible via the World Wide Web, NSF Computational Science Highlights is a growing collection of more than 130 technical papers, complete with images, animations, and sounds.
Users can browse the repository's hyperlinks or search the database by keyword.
Of the 130 articles online, close to 100 are from NCSA, according to NCSA Multimedia Technology Associate Cordelia Geiken, who with UIUC undergraduate programmer Doug Fein helped transfer the contents of NCSA's Digital Information System to the repository. Geiken and Fein were part of the MetaCenter team that developed the repository concept, database searching, Web publishing software, and download protocols. Much of the project's coordination was carried out via the MetaCenter's videoteleconferencing facilities. Although visitors to the repository can access papers from any of the five centers from a unified interface, each center maintains its collection with its own look and feel. On the other hand, each article needs to contain a set of key elements for the software to search.