1999A Proposals Received and Processed!

For NOAO users, September 30 is the day for completing and submitting proposals. For SCOPE staff, October 1 is the day for processing the proposals that arrived the night before. This year we were especially busy processing not only KPNO proposals but CTIO proposals as well. By the midnight deadline we had received 409 proposals: 179 for CTIO and 230 for KPNO--75% arrived on the last day! As in the previous semester, all proposals arrived in electronic form. Seventy-one percent of proposals included figures; we processed over 500 figure files. We received 77 graduate thesis proposals. With diligent effort, all proposals were processed by Friday, 2 October.

Once the proposals were received, they were printed, checked, and entered into our proposal database. Most proposals flew through the system without intervention, and we are grateful to our users taking care to submit accurate information in their proposals. Some 30% of proposals, however, required manual intervention of some form:

• About 9% of proposals required some correction of the information on the front page: an investigator status was missing or wrong, more than one investigator was included on a line, the lunar age was missing, the acceptable or optimal date ranges were entered incorrectly (or not at all), or long-term status information was given in the table of observing runs rather than on the long-term status line.

• About 5% of proposals had figure problems, usually because the subject line was typed incorrectly when a figure was submitted.

• The remaining problems included lines added before a proposal submitted by e-mail ("Hi - Here's my proposal..."), mailers that wrap long comment lines, and incorrectly edited target tables. Occasionally, someone forgot a "ïn front of a % sign.

Our users seemed to appreciate the new "Proposal Queue Status Page" on the Web to confirm receipt of proposals and figures and to follow the status of their proposal. By 15 October, this page had received 1859 hits, and several investigators alerted us to possible figure problems by checking the web page.

The NOAO Proposal Team