We were very pleased at how smoothly the proposal submission process went for the February-July 1998 observing proposal period. We received a total of 402 proposals, 230 for Kitt Peak and 172 for CTIO. All proposals, except four CTIO proposals, were submitted electronically. 62% of all proposals included figures (we received 431 figures!) and 24% of proposals made use of the new target table feature. 16% of proposals were requests for thesis observations. Only 2% of investigators, or eight proposals, were unable to obtain the new LaTeX form and submitted an earlier version of the template. The accompanying figure shows the cumulative number of proposals received as a function of time through September.
The transition to the centralized email addresses, to the new LaTeX form, and to the Web-based form went very smoothly for NOAO and apparently for our users.
About 20% of the investigators used the new Web-based proposal form with sixty-six proposals being submitted via the Web. Others used the Web form to generate their proposals and then submitted the proposal by email, for one reason or another. Most of the investigators who used the Web form were pleased with it and plan to use it again for the next proposal period. We will try to add a few enhancements to the Web form to entice additional users for the next round. The one thing that we can not do anything about is the slow network---in some cases this made the form impossible to use, but we had investigators from South America and from Europe use the form successfully and apparently without much delay. We can only hope that the network gets better before it gets worse.
We had the usual small percentages of problems with proposals but nothing stood out in particular, and we want to thank all investigators who took the time to respond to our questionnaire distributed in October. At this time we do not see any major changes in the procedures or in the LaTeX form for the next observing proposal period. We will summarize any changes in the next Newsletter.
Caty Pilachowski for the NOAO Proposal Team