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Editor's Notes, July 2004

Author(s): 
David A. Smith

Welcome, dear reader, to the "new" JOMA, now reborn as an in-house publication at MAA, and with a new and fresh design.  In these brief notes, I will offer a brief guide to navigating the site -- and let the content speak for itself.  The Related Articles at the left of this page highlight "what's new".

You may have found us either by way of the MAA Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (mathdl.org) or by going directly to joma.org.  Either way, notice that there are two MathDL links at the top of every page, the logo at the left and text at the right.  In the center of the header you'll find a logo and link for MAA -- a message from our sponsor.

The primary tools for navigating the site are in the left-hand column -- starting with the search/browse tool.  The category, subject, and keyword searches are always visible.  And there is a link (The link is obsolete and has been removed, ed. 2014.) to the Advanced Search page, where you may also search by author or publication date.  The only requirement for search, whether on the home page or the advanced page, is that you choose something .  You can't literally search for the contents of the entire site.

In time, this search capability will reach all of JOMA -- for now, it includes only the new (Volume 4) content and a little of the archival content.  More on Page 3 about the archives for our first three volumes.

The JOMA categories will be familiar to return visitors: Articles, Modules, Mathlets, Reviews, Developers' Area.  But you won't see the familiar linear Table of Contents with items listed under category headers -- so use a category search if you want to find, say, all the modules.

The subject descriptions come from the first two levels of a Subject Taxonomy, for which there is a link in the list below the Search box on the JOMA home page.  If you're not sure what's included in a given subject description, you may want to consult the Taxonomy page to explore the lower levels.

In the main (and most obvious) part of the JOMA home page you will see our Featured Items, which may change frequently.  At the moment, all of the new content is "featured", in part because we have been working off line for the first half of this year.  In general, the most recent postings will appear at the top of the featured list, but we can feature older items as well -- for example, if they are related in some way to new content.  Features are not necessarily ordered by category, but the brief text descriptions will usually identify their categories.

David A. Smith, "Editor's Notes, July 2004," Convergence (January 2006)