ALEXANDRIA, VA. -- Sharon Tahirkheli became Acting Director of AGI's GeoRef database March 1, succeeding former director John Mulvihill after he retired. Tahirkheli takes charge of a database that contains 2.1 million bibliographic references to journals, books, maps, and other geoscience publications in 40 different languages. She joined GeoRef in 1975 as an indexer when, she says, GeoRef indexers entered an average of 30,000 items into the database a year. Now they enter about 80,000 a year, she says.

Tahirkheli became senior editor in 1978, five years after the database first became accessible on-line. She trained GeoRef users to navigate the on-line database during a time when connecting a computer to a phone outlet seemed absurd to most people. In 1987, she became chief editor, a position she held until March. Filling her former position are former editors/indexers Ellen Hissong and Jim Mehl, who are now associate editors.

Tahirkheli says her main goals will be to maintain the present quality of GeoRef and to exploit new opportunities on the Internet. GeoRef is available on the Web through on-line database suppliers. "Right now it's a self-contained database," Tahirkheli says. "It could be turned into something more dynamic." For example, a user could link from a GeoRef reference to the full text of the article or to the publisher's web site. She also wants to add more abstracts to the database.

Tahirkheli earned her bachelor's degree in Spanish in 1975 from Mary Washington College in Virginia. In 1989, she earned her master's degree in library and information science from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she focused on database design.