Dear Colleagues,

I hope that this announcement is appropriate for this list.

Sometime this fall I will make a available a database for group theory
which is based on citations and which will contain links to their
reviews in Math Reviews, Zentralblatt, and the Jahrbuch ueber die
Fortschritte der Mathematik.

This will be a long-term and ongoing project as there are expected to
be in excess of 50,000 primary entries in group theory with each
having on the order of 20 references. It will start out rather small,
but I expect it to grow fairly quickly.

In addition I plan to offer digitized versions of papers, books,
theses and sets of lecture notes which are out of copyright or for
which I can obtain permission.

These will be available in both pdf and djvu formats. As
circumstances permit, searchable versions will be made available. At
the moment I can only do that reliably for djvu where the text is in
English.

I would greatly appreciate your help in a number of ways and in
particular these:

1. I must prioritize my efforts and would appreciate suggestions for
what to digitize first. A number of obvious ones have already
been done. For example

Blichfeldt, Finite collineation groups, 1917
Burnside, The theory of groups, editions of 1897 & 1911.
de Séguier, Groupes abstrait, 1904
de Séguier, Groupes de substitutions, 1912
Dickson, Linear Groups, 1901.
Galois, 1897 edition.
Klein, Lectures on the Icosahedron, 1888.

as well as several others.

2. For more modern books, I will digitize all those in group theory
for which I can obtain permission. If you are the author of such
a book or know of a book which might be available, please contact
me.

For some publishers standard contracts of a few years ago returned the
copyright to the author if the book went out of print. You may wish to
check to see if in fact you now hold the copyright for your out of
print book. It would be extremely useful for me to obtain copies of
such contracts for various publishers should you be able to make
them available to me.

3. I will also digitize those theses for which I can obtain the author's
permission, as well as a copy.

4. And I will do the same for sets of lecture notes if I can obtain
permission and a copy.

This will be done to the extent that I am able, and of course it will be
necessary to prioritize. But please contact me if you are the author of
a work in group theory that you would like to make available this way.

Finally, in order to add the references for each paper it is necessary
examine each paper. If you could send me reprints of your own papers,
or copies of others that you no longer need, that would be most helpful.

At the moment, the search mechanism and web interfaces are under
development with the major work expected to be completed by the end of
this month. The system will be made public after testing and the
inclusion of enough data to be useful. I will send another
announcement when it is available.

Best regards,

Keith

R. Keith Dennis
Mathematics Department
Malott Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-4201

607-255-4013 (secretary)
607-255-4027 (office)
607-255-7149 (fax)
dennis@rkd.math.cornell.edu