Obituaries Moved to Bulletin of the AAS

The AAS and its Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) have imported obituaries of nearly all AAS members who have died since 1991 into the relaunched online Bulletin of the AAS (BAAS). Powered by PubPub, an open-source platform launched in 2017, the BAAS website offers better integration of the obituaries into the modern world of scholarly publishing, moving beyond traditional, static articles and turning them into more "real" academic publications.

HAD was tasked to be in charge of obituaries by the AAS Council (now Board of Trustees) in 1990, and the AAS/HAD Obituary Committee has been responsible for commissioning and compiling obituaries for deceased members of the Society ever since. The obituaries previously appeared on the main AAS website as a tribute and for the benefit of future historians of science.

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) included only a fraction of the information published in the obituaries on the AAS website, omitting photos and links. Peter Williams, AAS Innovation Scientist and Director of the WorldWide Telescope project, put a lot of effort into indexing the obituaries, checking for missing records, and cleaning up the presentations. Now we have a high-quality database of all 654 obituaries published over the past 30 years, with bibliographic information and author credits, in a format that allows us to improve and expand the database as needed. We strongly believe that gathering and organizing all of this information into the BAAS makes the obituaries more citable and increases the value of the obituary collection.

PubPub supports dozens of peer-reviewed scholarly journals and books from MIT Press and other not-for-profit university and society-based publishers, and nearly 1,000 other publications created and maintained by individual scholars and academic departments. PubPub socializes the process of knowledge creation by integrating conversation, annotation, and versioning into short and long-form digital publication. Using PubPub enables us to mint digital object identifiers (DOIs), make sure that our URLs are long-term persistent, automate exports to ADS (in progress) including the references, and mirror content to "dark archives" like CLOCKSS for long-term preservation (in progress).

Visit the New AAS/HAD Obituary Web Page 

We are grateful for the lively partnership between the AAS and the PubPub team, which developed several new features that we needed in order to import and organize the obituary collection.

Most obituaries are about 800 words, but longer ones are allowable. The Obituary Committee depends entirely on our astronomical colleagues, including astronomy-department and observatory administrators, who knew the deceased, for help writing obituaries. Currently there are a number of recently and not-so-recently deceased AAS members for whom we lack written obituaries. Please take a moment to review the list of names, and contact the HAD Vice-Chair if you’d be willing to write an obituary for a former colleague and member.