ESIS (European Space Information System) aims at providing the user with a set of tools to access, exchange, and handle information from a great variety of sources including space mission archives, databases of scientific results, bibliographical references, white and yellow page directories (also see §7.2.), etc. The ESIS bibliographic service (ESISBIB) allows abstracts from the NASA RECON collection to be retrieved. Different from the ADS abstract servive (see §3.4.1.), ESISBIB uses abstracts from a wider range of other astronomy-related topics (e.g. geophysics, computer sciences, theoretical mathematics, etc.) with altogether about 500,000 abstracts. ESISBIB makes use of the SIMBAD references and automatically links any SIMBAD reference with its abstract, if available in the system. Access to all information on ESIS is possible through a homogeneous query and data managing-language based on a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Version 2.0 was released in February 1994 and client software is available for VAX/VMS and SUN/UNIX machines and is installed at about 40 sites. Access to ESIS is via telnet to esis.esrin.esa.it (192.106.252.127 or 192.106.252.100) or SET HOST ESIS (29617). Login as astronomy with password evalme. The user will be required to register on first login, and identify him/herself in subsequent sessions. ESIS is also available on the WWW via the URL http://mesis.esrin.esa.it/html/esis.html. Send queries to ESIS::ISDHELP or isdhelp@mail.esrin.esa.it.
ESIS NEWS is a newsletter to which one may subscribe (send requests to ESIS::ISDHELP). It is available also via anonymous FTP as a color Postscript file (mesis.esrin.esa.it:pub/esis/newsletter/esisnews.ps). [References: Albrecht (1991, 1992), Giommi (1994), Giommi and Ansari (1994).]