  The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an open access digital library
portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant, successfully serving the
professional science community for two decades. Currently there are about
55,000 frequent users (100+ queries per year), and up to 10 million infrequent
users per year. Access by the general public now accounts for about half of all
ADS use, demonstrating the vast reach of the content in our databases. The
visibility and use of content in the ADS can be measured by the fact that there
are over 17,000 links from Wikipedia pages to ADS content, a figure comparable
to the number of links that Wikipedia has to OCLCs WorldCat catalog. The ADS,
through its holdings and innovative techniques available in ADS Labs
(http://adslabs.org), offers an environment for information discovery that is
unlike any other service currently available to the astrophysics community.
Literature discovery and review are important components of science education,
aiding the process of preparing for a class, project, or presentation. The ADS
has been recognized as a rich source of information for the science education
community in astronomy, thanks to its collaborations within the astronomy
community, publishers and projects like Com- PADRE. One element that makes the
ADS uniquely relevant for the science education community is the availability
of powerful tools to explore aspects of the astronomy literature as well as the
relationship between topics, people, observations and scientific papers. The
other element is the extensive repository of scanned literature, a significant
fraction of which consists of historical literature.
