LONDON Germany's leading organisation for basic research, the Max Planck Society, is setting up a Centre for Information Management (CIM) that aims to find ways of helping its 10,000 research staff access data more efficiently and disseminate their findings with greater speed and ease and at lower cost than is currently possible. Based at its Munich headquarters the six staff in this new research unit will initially look for ways of co-ordinating the 85 libraries spread throughout its vast organisation and establish a pre-print server that will unify the digital publishing efforts currently dissipated through the Society's 81 separate institutes.
"We are currently advertising for a Director of the Centre, and we hope that all of the staff will be in post by August," explains Ralf Schimmer, who is responsible for library information services within the Max Planck Society.
To give the project a head start, the Society has turned ...
