CHEMICAL INFORMATION ISSUES IN ACADEME:
AN OVERVIEW FOR THE NEXT GENERATION.
G. D. Wiggins, Indiana University Chemistry
Library, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 and Carol A. Drum,
University of Florida Marston Science Library, Gainesville,
Florida 32611
Presented at the SYMPOSIUM ON CHEMICAL INFORMATION AND ACADEMIA
National Chemical Information Symposium
June 22, 1994
Burlington, Vermont
INTRODUCTION
The academic chemistry librarian has a significant role to
play in providing the tools and skills needed by academic chemists
and students in their research, teaching, and learning.
That role should be clearly linked to the skills needed to iden-
tify, locate, and successfully use chemical information sources.
In this session, we will present an overview of the administra-
tive environment in which academic chemistry librarians must
operate, the challenge of electronic information services, our
physical environment, library acquisitions issues, our responsi-
bilities as teachers, and the exciting new frontier of the Inter-
net.
THE ADMINISTRATIVE ENVIRONMENT
More often than not the chemistry and other science
librarians in academic institutions lack formal degrees in the
subject areas being served. In fact, a recent survey of 142
University of California and California State University science
librarians found that nearly 60 percent of the respondents do not
believe that a scientific degree is needed by science or technol-
ogy librarians in academia. Attracted by the higher salaries in
industry, the few library school graduates each year who do have
scientific degrees typically choose to work in industrial special
libraries. Even without formal training in the disciplines
served, academic science librarians as a whole are dedicated to
providing high-quality service. However, they must often func-
tion in environments which require them to perform a much broader
range of functions in more complex work situations than their
counterparts in industry.
For many academic librarians, promotion, tenure, and salary
decisions are based on the same or similar criteria as for the
teaching faculty at their institutions. Over 2/3 of the higher
education institutions in the U.S. today grant full faculty
status to academic librarians, and another 7 percent of the
academic librarians have so-called academic status, which has
similar requirements. To succeed, they must show strong evidence
of professional activities and service leading to a regional or
national reputation, in addition to being judged on the quality
of the work performed as chemistry librarians. Unlike their
teaching faculty counterparts, the vast majority of the academic
librarians are on 12-month, not academic-year, appointments. The
service role, both in the local institution and in the profes-
sion, may take a considerable amount of a librarian's time.
Within the library, chemistry librarians function as manag-
ers, reference librarians, and increasingly as teachers of infor-
mation resources. Our role in the overall functioning of the
library system requires a lot of time and effort on behind-the-
scenes administrative tasks. We must also justify and manage the
acquisitions budget which now has demands placed on it for pur-
poses other than the traditional purchase of books and journals.
Teaching takes an increasing amount of the librarian's time in
the academic setting, an activity to be explored in more depth in
the second talk this morning.
Another major factor to contend with in the academic setting
is the academic computing center, which usually has control of
elements crucial to the success of library automation efforts,
such as networking and computer support services. Libraries have
generally had to carve their own computer staff out of the exist-
ing staff budget and place additional computer responsibilities
on other staff. Some of the issues involving the computer envi-
ronment in academic libraries will be dealt with in the final
paper this morning.
Often the chemistry library is physically located in the
chemistry building. This provides a great opportunity for the
chemistry librarian to get to know the clientele, but can result
in isolation from librarian colleagues in similar disciplines and
isolation from administrators who reside in a main library build-
ing across campus. If physically housed in a separate science
library, the situation is reversed. Getting to know and main-
taining contact with the clientele is much more difficult in that
situation, and the chance to develop customized services aimed at
the chemistry clientele is diminished. Being located in the
chemistry building has other advantages, among them, the possi-
bility of support from the chemistry department. This might take
the form of supplements to the student work force for special
projects or services, an allocation for supplies and expenses,
better computer equipment and support, and the opportunity for
closer involvement in teaching about chemical information re-
sources.
As more and more computer-based tools and services were
introduced into academic science libraries in the last two dec-
ades, the level of technostress has risen dramatically. In the
sciences, where the tools tend to be more complex and intellectu-
ally demanding, this is particularly true. Carol Drum will
present an overview of the issues involved in electronic informa-
tion services in academic libraries.
In a world that is becoming increasingly dependent on
computerization and as more information resources become
available in electronic formats, how can faculty and students
of chemistry develop the skills necessary to identify,
locate, and access information sources successfully? How can
we better define what competencies faculty, undergraduates,
and graduate students should have to enhance their information
gathering skills? In this talk we will present an overview of
issues in teaching and training, journal acquisitions and
access, electronic resources acquisitions and access, and the
physical environment. Within these broad areas we will
discuss the role of the academic chemistry/science librarian
in teaching information gathering skills; the impact
electronic publishing is having on access, space
considerations, and budgets; and the complexities of academic
library collection development/management. Furthermore, we
will explore the impact of faculty status on chemistry/science
librarians, the role of the chemistry/science librarian within
the library system, and the respective roles of the library
and the computer center. We will conclude with a projection
of future trends based on current patterns.
Academic chemistry librarians are not merely
caretakers of a collection of research and teaching materials.
They take a very active role in shaping the collection of on-site
materials, including electronic resources, and in training the
users of both print and electronic resources. In so doing,
academic chemistry librarians help shape the values and
expectations of service formed by students who will become
tomorrow's industrial chemists, chemical educators, and
researchers in academic and government institutions. To carry
out that role, a set of competencies must be defined by the
librarians. It is those skills which we strive to impart in both
students and faculty. However, some of our goals, such as end-
user searching, may be in conflict with the expectations of
industrial chemistry librarians.
Academic Chemistry collections have traditionally been
very print-oriented. Rising journal prices and an explosion of
electronic resources have forced all academic libraries to
evaluate their collections and move toward a special libraries
model of collection management and development. This model is
geared toward supporting the current research and teaching efforts
of the institution, rather than developing comprehensive
collections in all relevant areas. Decisions about what to
duplicate in paper and electronically must be made, as well as
how to cope with space issues for the materials and equipment.
Cooperative ventures are being proposed, both among academic
libraries and between academic and industrial libraries, to
share the cost and expertise required to maintain adequate
collections and services in today's rapidly changing
environment. Especially important are developments in the
document delivery area. An overview of the resources recommended
by the American Chemical Society's Committee on Professional
Training will be included in the presentation.
Academic librarians operate in an environment which is
considerably different than is typically found in government or
industry. While their libraries often are physically located in
an academic chemistry or science building, their budgets,
promotion and tenure requirements, and other factors affecting
their job performance are almost always controlled by a central
library administration. This presents challenges and
opportunities that can sometimes compete with the time needed to
provide services to their primary clientele. Further
complicating the environment is the assignment of computing
functions in academic institutions. Typically, a central
computing center has control of elements crucial to the
success of library services, such as networking. Academic
chemistry librarians must weigh all of the competing
environmental factors and develop the political skills to
effect the right balance of support from each quarter.
The development of the Internet is a crucial factor that
is revolutionizing the way information is accessed, organized,
and presented for effective retrieval. Librarians have an
important role to play in teaching about, organizing, and utilizing
the resources on the Internet. Nevertheless, there are other
factors in the computer area that have to be dealt with in
academic libraries. The rapid development of multimedia
resources for teaching chemistry is sure to compete for already
scarce resources. Incorporating new technology, while
struggling with the transformation from print to electronic
resources, presents interesting challenges for all academic
librarians, but especially academic chemistry librarians._
ELECTRONIC INFORMATION SERVICES
Thinking about Chemical Information in the next generation and trying to predict where this enormous period of change is taking us brought to mind what happens when someone tries to predict the future. One famous prognosticator said "I think there is a world market for about five computers." That was the opinion held in 1943 by Thomas J. Watson who was then Chairman of IBM. Another predictor of the future said that, "There is no reason for any person to have a computer in their home. " That is a 1972 quote by Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation. I doubt that I am any more adept than these CEO's in predicting the future. However, I want to outline some of the issues regarding electronic information services that libraries and information centers are wrestling with as the 21st Century approaches.
Before we talk about where we are headed, I would
like to step briefly
back to see where we have been. Twenty years ago
in 1974, access to the
libraries books and journals was through a card catalog.
If there were
more than one library on campus, the patrons might
have to go to multiple
locations to see if a particular item was owned by
the libraries.
At
of tymnet and telenet that telecommunication costs
were made more
attractive. Moreover, few chemists, at least those
at UF, were
interested in paying to search the limited number
of years since most
libraries charged for this 'new' type of service.
And the libraries
themselves were just beginning to see the issues
that would be theirs to
deal with in the 80's and 90's.
In the past twenty years, a lot has changed, sometimes it seems like the change is taking place hourly. (For example, the Powerbook that I am using to show slides is one year old and already outdated.) Electronic sources are proliferating and most academic libraries either have or are automating their holdings and providing an online-public-access-catalog (OPAC). Chemical Abstracts has 20 plus years searchable online and there are many search features available electronically, like substructure and reaction searching, that are very difficult if not impossible in print.
Today there are many options for electronic delivery
of information. The
oldest of these are the online database vendors such
as Dialog, STN, and
Orbit. There are tape loads into the OPAC. There
are electronic sources
available in CD-ROM format and these can be used
on stand-alone
workstations or accessible through a local area network
(LAN). Then
there are the utilities such as OCLC and RLG that
have gotten into the
game of providing access to information through
their computer systems.
Although all of them are searchable using boolean
logic, they all have a
different command language which means that the library
staff and patrons
alike are constantly learning how to use these new
products.
At the University of Florida, we have all of these
options available to
he patrons. We perform mediated searches, primarily
on STN. In the near
future,we are going to make the Dialog Classroom
Instruction Program
available through our LAN. We have an OPAC which
has a number of
indexes/abstracts and some full-text information
(for example, the
Florida Statutes) available through it. You can also
get to Carl Uncover
and the RLG Eureka databases through the UF OPAC.
Currently we do not
have First Search available to the public, although
we do use it as an
Interlibrary Loan. Finally, we have single-use workstations
for CD-ROM's
and two (soon to be three) library LAN's. One at
the medical center, one
at the legal information center and one in the main
libraries system.
The LAN's client/server is Novell but the main libraries
LAN software is
CBIS and the medical library's is SCSI Express making
ease of information
exchange between the two science libraries more challenging.
Much of the
All of these products have their advantages
and disadvantages.
CD-ROM advantages
CD-ROM disadvantages
What is the future of CD-ROM's? In my opinion they
are an interim
technology for some kinds of information sources.
However some
applications work well on them. Namely, small databases
which cover a
long run of years on one disc--Analytical Abstracts
and Water Resources
Abstracts are examples of this type of databases.
Analytical Abstracts
covers 1980 to date and WRA 1967 to date. Interestingly
enough, AA in
CD-ROM is very popular whereas, using the scientific
dust test, the paper
version was seldom, if ever, used.
Will Chemical Abstracts ever have a CD-ROM equivalent
of its online
database? Do we really want a CD-ROM product that
is equivalent to the
online version? Had I given this talk a year ago,
I would have given a
resounding yes to this question. Today, I am not
so sure. After our
experiences with Biological Abstracts, another large
database, I am less
enthralled with the idea of having CAS fully searchable
on CD's. We have
BA from 1985 to date on CD and it is equivalent to
their online product.
To date there are 14 discs to search and they are
adding two discs per
year. All fourteen discs cannot be searched at the
same time, although
you can search them sequentially using the same search
statement. To put
this on a LAN it would cost around $10,000 for the
disc drives alone and
around $1500 a year for additional drives for this
one product. I would
expect CA on CD to be at least as large as BA, if
not larger.
Online Databases advantages
Online Databases disadvantages
This Spring the major emphasis of the chemistry literature
class was
searching electronic sources. The students were taught
search strategies
and search commands. Primary emphasis was given to
Chemical Abstracts,
Biological Abstracts, Science Citation Index, Analytical
Abstracts, and
CASSIS (for patents). The students had access to
CD-ROM and online
databases. The learning curve for the online products
was definitely
longer than for the CD-ROM's because, of course,
the CD's are menu driven.
Locally mounted databases are most cost effective
in places where there
is heavy undergraduate use. While they are easier
to search than their
print counterparts, they may not have as strong a
search engine or as
many years of coverage as their online counterparts.
The utilities, RLG and OCLC, that are now providing
electronic access to
indexes and abstracts have some of the same advantages
as CD-ROM's; i.e.,
they are user friendly and menu driven and they have
fixed costs. The
major disadvantage is that they cover fewer years
than the commercial
online vendors.
For chemists who rely heavily on Chemical Abstracts,
searching CA through
one of the commercial vendors is the only viable
electronic option. The
CD access routes are limited in nature and the tapes
have not been loaded
into either OPAC's or by the utilities. I am sure
this is due to the
size and complexity of the product.
ACQUISITIONS ISSUES
Twenty years ago academic chemistry and science librarians
were first facing the issue of inadequate budgets with which to
purchase books and journals. In the academic library world
several trends have emerged that had a significant impact on the
acquisitions issues in libraries. Those are:
1. Collection Management
In the early 1970s, academic library serials budgets were
most likely found in a single pot of money. However, the first
round of budget crises which occurred about that time forced a
radical change in the budgeting process. Individual funds were
established for all subjects and area studies, and the relevant
librarians were required to "manage" the funds. In the sciences
that usually meant attempting to control the rising costs of
serials. By canceling journals periodically, chemistry librar-
ians attempted to stem the rate of increase in the overall seri-
als costs. Duplicate copies of the most important journals were
among the early victims of that approach, as were foreign-lan-
guage journals (especially Eastern European and Far Eastern
language titles and their translations). Even with such
measures, many chemistry librarians find themselves today with
all of their acquisitions funds committed to serials and increas-
ing pressure from administrators to free up some money for book
purchases or other purposes by canceling additional serial
titles.
Table 1. Indiana University Chemistry Library Serials Cancella-
tions.
The result of two decades of successive rounds of cancella-
tion is a homogeneity of collecting profiles in most academic
science libraries. Last year, David B. Walch, Dean of Libraries
at California Polytechnic State University reported, "Five years
ago the library subscribed to 3,313 journals and paid $426,000;
today it subscribes to 2,983 journals and pays nearly $700,000,
an increase in cost of 82%. [C&RL News v. 54 no. 3 (March
1993):125] Only the most important and usually only English-lan-
guage journals are being purchased in academic science libraries
today. We have moved to a special libraries model of collection
building wherein materials are bought only to support the current
research and teaching activities. Some refer to this as the
"just-in-time' approach as opposed to the "just-in-case compre-
hensive acquisition patterns of the past.
2. Networking and Cooperation Among Libraries
One of the great success stories of 20th-century
librarianship is the development of shared cataloging systems and
the services that have grown out of them. Utilizing such re-
sources as OCLC (The Online Computer Library Center) and RLIN
(the Research Libraries Information Network), academic and other
libraries are able to minimize the costs of acquiring and
cataloging library materials by using a central source of biblio-
graphic information which is accessible to all libraries via the
computer. Not only are librarians able to share the expense of
cataloging books, journals, and other materials, they can also
see which other libraries own those materials. One of the early
requirements of OCLC and other cooperative cataloging systems was
that libraries put a marker in the database to indicate ownership
of the material, creating what in library jargon is known as a
"union list of holdings."
An outgrowth of the union list concept is the automation of
interlibrary lending and borrowing. With a centralized database
of holdings it became possible to easily identify other libraries
from which a book or photocopy of an article could be obtained.
Reciprocal borrowing agreements have proliferated among consortia
of libraries, and those libraries outside the consortia often
find it necessary to pay substantial fees for utilizing the
interlibrary loan option.
3. Library Automation Efforts and the Internet
Coincidental with the crisis in the serials budget, and some
would maintain one of the root causes for that crisis, was the
rapid development of academic library automation efforts: such
things as online public-access catalogs (OPACs), automated circu-
lation systems, automated ordering systems, and so forth. It is
obvious that the library automation efforts have competed and
continue to compete with acquisitions budgets for scarce finan-
cial resources in the overall academic budget. Nevertheless, the
development of the OPAC has placed a powerful tool in the hands
of all academic researchers and students, albeit a tool not uni-
versally applauded. An April 4, 1994 article in The New Yorker
precipitated an avalanche of commentary and debate in library
electronic discussion lists. The author decries the development
of online catalogs and mourns the subsequent demise of the tradi-
tional card catalog. While the effort to create a catalog in any
format is laudable, few librarians today would support his con-
tention that "...the real reason to keep card catalogues is
simply that they hold the irreplaceable intelligence of the
librarians who worked on them." [p. 86] The vastly increased
utility of today's OPACs makes the continued maintenance of a
card catalog unthinkable, given a modicum of faith in the perma-
nence of its electronic counterpart.
Twenty years ago, a chemist at Indiana University would have
had difficulty learning whether a needed item not held by the
Chemistry Library was in one of the other science libraries on
campus. Now the OPAC at Indiana University not only tells wheth-
er the book is in the Biology Library or other collections at
Bloomington. It also tells whether the book is charged out, on
reserve, missing, or held by a library at one of the other seven
IU campuses throughout the state.
The Internet, providing a fast and cheap communications link
among libraries, has tremendously broadened the scope of re-
sources available. A library user's search for a needed item is
no longer restricted to the local library's online catalog of
holdings. The Internet has brought us direct access to the
catalogs of the finest chemistry collections in the world.
Recent developments are geared toward simultaneous searches of
multiple catalogs. An extension of the Interlibrary Loan func-
tion is user-initiated borrowing of materials from remote li-
braries, with the materials being delivered directly to the
requester. In addition, the Internet provides access to a grow-
ing body of specialized databases of interest to chemists, for
example, the Buckyball Database.
4. The Spread of Online Searching of Remote Databases
Chemistry was one of the first disciplines to benefit from
the development of online bibliographic databases. Since the
early days of the 1970s, it has been possible to search Chemical
Abstracts interactively through vendors of database services such
as DIALOG and ORBIT, and later, Questel, BRS, and STN Interna-
tional. Initially, academic libraries attempted to bill such
searches to the holders of research grants, and many still do so.
However, as more and more databases became available in the
humanities and social sciences, a dilemma arose. Many of the
potential users of database services in those areas had no ready
source of money to pay the online searching bills. This led
academic libraries to re-think the funding mechanism for online
searching and move toward subsidies for the search costs. The
only ready source of money was the acquisitions budget, even
though tapping into this source further diluted the funds avail-
able to buy books and journals.
Online searching of databases through remote vendors had
several advantages and one distinct and troubling disadvantage.
As time progressed, the amount of information available in data-
bases such as Chemical Abstracts grew tremendously. The number
of more specialized scientific databases, e.g., Analytical Ab-
stracts, also grew in number, and vendors competed to provide a
battery of databases most suited to their clientele. They also
introduced special search features designed to lure clients to
their systems and keep them there. The online search vendors
flourished and eventually sought ways to entice the end-user into
their client group.
The troubling feature of online database searching is, of
course, the open-ended nature of its costs. Academic chemistry
librarians have often had to struggle to convince wary adminis-
trators that the huge cost of maintaining a full print subscrip-
tion to Chemical Abstracts was justified. But that struggle
seems like a pillow fight compared to the combat required to gain
a blank check for unlimited searching of the CA database. Even
with the incentive of an 80 or 90 percent discount on search
costs as found in the STN International CAS ONLINE Academic
Program, online costs can escalate far more rapidly than the
inflation rate of journals. A comparison of the print costs of
CA and the costs of searching the CA databases by end-users and
library staff at Indiana University illustrates the point.
Table 2. Costs of Printed Chemical Abstracts (Full Subscription)
and Online Searching of the STN International CAS ONLINE Academic
Program at Indiana University (Bloomington)
5. On-site Electronic Products
Faced with the uncertainty of online searching cost in-
creases, academic librarians sought database search options with
fixed costs. In the early 1990s, the most popular options in
academic libraries are networking of CD-ROM products and in-house
mounting of databases.
CD-ROM versions of bibliographic and numeric databases
appeared in ever-increasing numbers in the sciences since their
introduction in the mid-1980s. Eventually licenses were de-
veloped to allow mounting the products on networks and to permit
multiple simultaneous searching of the databases. Note the word
"license" because in most instances libraries lease CD-ROM
products. The publishers do not sell them to libraries.
It was not always clear that the cost of the hardware and
software and of the personnel necessary to make such a system
function smoothly was factored into the comparisons when such
decisions were made in academic libraries. Nevertheless, CD-ROMs
are major components of the information products found in most
academic libraries today. Although searching of the CD-ROM
products is much slower than online access through traditional
vendors, is restricted to one or a few sites, and often is not as
up-to-date as the vendors' online offerings, those faults are
viewed as acceptable given the unknown cost of online searching.
Also deemed acceptable for the sake of cost control is the need
to cope with the various search languages utilized by different
producers of the CD-ROM products and the requirement in some CD-
ROM products to repeat the search strategy again and again when
the information need spans several years. For example, each
search of the Science Citation Index CD-ROM which covers more
than one year requires the user to re-run the search in each
successive year.
Mounting of databases locally was thought to be an attrac-
tive option as hardware costs declined dramatically in recent
years. Once again the prime inducement was the fixed cost of the
tape lease offered by some database producers. Many academic
libraries opted to mount databases for searching with the same
search engine used for their online catalogs. This eliminated a
major drawback to CD-ROM networks--the problem of different
search software for different databases. However, many of the
sophisticated search techniques of the online vendors, painstak-
ingly developed through years of thorough analysis of database
structure and responses to user needs, were unavailable to
searchers. Here again, it is doubtful that ongoing costs of
local personnel and computer equipment were fully understood in
the implementation of local online searching systems.
Thus, we find ourselves in mid-1994 with no fully satisfac-
tory way to provide users of machine-readable databases a good
fixed-cost alternative to the open-ended cost of online searching
on remote vendors' systems.
6. Access vs. Ownership: Document Delivery
CD-ROM databases, online remote databases, linked library
catalogs--all have combined to provide the library user with
access to the bibliographic records of the world's chemical
literature. The real flaw in the information cycle has been and
continues to be document delivery: obtaining the primary source
document in a timely manner, utilizing whatever source provides
the best service. In this context, "best" is relative and very
dependent on whether the item is urgently needed or a delay in
delivery is tolerable.
A lot of experimentation with commercial document delivery
services has taken place in academic libraries in the past five
years. There seems to be a growing consensus that commercial
document delivery services are no more reliable for the less-
easily obtained material than is traditional interlibrary loan.
Telefacsimile has figured heavily in academic libraries'
assessments of document delivery as an alternative to ownership
of material. For many scientific articles, today's Group III FAX
simply does not provide the resolution needed by scientists. An
alternative to FAX is the Ariel software developed by the Re-
search Libraries Group. While Ariel does produce a copy superior
to FAX, the technology has not been widely embraced by academic
libraries. On a recent trip to the University of Minnesota
Biomedical Library, a very major supplier of journal copies for a
large region of the country, it was learned that only about 4
Ariel requests are filled each month.
Something new is needed in the realm of document delivery,
something which can divorce us from the copy machine, but not wed
us to a collection of documents limited to a single publisher's
or document vendor's holdings. Academic library directors con-
tinue to dream of the great virtual library in the sky, the
seamless collection without bounds, accessible to all of the in-
group in their particular consortium of libraries at minimal
cost. Unfortunately, the technology is simply not available
today to make access an acceptable alternative to ownership for
the core journals in chemistry. Perhaps the confusion over the
copyright in an electronic age will be clarified with the impend-
ing re-write of the 1978 U.S. Copyright Law. Until that time, we
are likely to continue our futile attempts at maintenance of the
status quo in the collection development arena.
TEACHING
More and more of the academic chemistry librarian's time and
efforts are going toward teaching and training both students and
faculty. While the question of whether every chemist should know
how to search databases may have no definitive answer, the
general consensus seems to be that chemists should at least learn
the basics necessary for "quick and dirty" searching of the major
resources. This degree of competency does not conflict with the
expectations of industrial information specialists who prefer
that complex searching be left to the highly skilled database
searchers in the information units. Thus, the librarian must
learn an increasing number of sophisticated electronic products
and develop or adopt teaching materials for those tools. With
the advent of the Internet, the task is ever more complex as the
world's information resources begin to open up.
There are two approaches generally taken in academic chemis-
try departments for the teaching of chemical information
resources. One is to integrate the instruction and use of appro-
priate tools into relevant classes. The second approach is to
have formal instruction in a separate course devoted to informa-
tion sources in chemistry. Either method is acceptable to the
American Chemical Society Committee on Professional Training
(CPT) which sanctions undergraduate instructional programs in
chemistry departments.
The CPT has published a list of journals which are evaluated
during the certification process. The 1992 guidelines require
the institution to hold 20 or more refereed journals and to
submit a list if there are less than 31 such subscriptions. For
the first time in 1983 there was a separate section in the CPT
guidelines on "Chemical Literature and Information Retrieval."
However, the committee has not gone so far as to specify in
detail the secondary information tools with which it expects
undergraduate chemistry majors to have come into contact in the
course of their studies.
Whatever the setting of chemical information instruction, it
is probably best to form a partnership between teaching faculty
and librarians to develop the desired student interactions with
the appropriate tools. In doing so, the educational background
and skills of the librarian should be closely matched to the
skills needed by the target group. Tough decisions must be made
about whether to include print materials in the instruction, and
if so, to what degree. Increasingly, there is a need for good
computer teaching facilities and equipment for both demonstra-
tions and hands-on training.
The call is often heard in library circles for "information
literacy." As defined by the American Library Association,
"To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize
when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evalu-
ate, and use effectively the needed information. Producing such
a citizenry will require that schools and colleges appreciate and
integrate the concept of information literacy into their learning
programs and that they play a leadership role in equipping indi-
viduals and institutions to take advantage of the opportunities
inherent with the information society. Ultimately, information
literate people are those who have learned how to learn. They
know how to learn because they know how knowledge is organized,
how to find information, and how to use information in such a way
that others can learn from them." (ALA, January 1989)
Chemistry is ahead of most disciplines in its attempts to
impart information literacy to its practioners, but consderable
work remains to be done before we have universal chemical infor-
mation literacy.
THE FUTURE
Changes in academic chemistry librarianship in the next five
years are likely to move us toward a model in which the physical
location of a needed resource is far less important than it is
today. Research and developments in bioinformatics point the way
for the future of chemical information. With impetus from the
Human Genome Project, the bioinformatics approach is to develop a
consensus knowledge base of peer-reviewed information created in
an electronic environment and to follow principles of knowledge
management to best utilize the database. In that context the
electronic resources are mounted throughout the world and li-
braries serve as conduits to and facilitators of the use of those
resources. The Clearinghouse for Chemical Information Instruc-
tional Material provides a starting point at which chemistry
librarians could examine the existing instructional material and
collaboratively "publish" a collection of recommended materials
for various levels of instruction. Another application for chem-
ists might be a collaborative electronic review serial with
automatic links to the original documents under review.
With the development of Mosaic and other tools for navigat-
ing the Internet, we are poised on the threshold of an unprece-
dented new stage of scientific scholarly communication. The
world is becoming our library, and chemistry librarians must
embrace these new tools as extensions of resources we have dealt
with for years. The popularity of such finding tools as the
Clearinghouse of Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Directories
shows the need for more involvement by librarians in bringing
some order to the chaos of riches currently available on the
Internet.
Something must change soon in the financial structure of
academic library collection building. Brian L. Hawkins, Vice
President of Academic Planning and Administration at Brown Uni-
versity, recently noted that "If current trends continue, then by
the year 2026, the acquisitions budgets of our finest libraries
will have only 20 percent of the buying power they had forty-five
years earlier." ["Planning for the National Electronic Library,"
Educom Review v. 29 no. 3 (May/June 1994): 19-29; p. 22] The
author states that the collective acquisitions budgets of U.S.
college and university libraries is somewhere in excess of $1
billion annually. He suggests that each school should donate
1/10 of its acquisitions budget to provide institutional access
to Internet resources, thus avoiding complex charging algorithms
and the need for passwords. By working with publishers to devel-
op models for national and international site licenses, Hawkins
feels that nearly universal access moves into the realm of possi-
bility.
What may happen in the future is the formation of alliances
between primary publishers and secondary information services
(abstracting and indexing services) to provide access to elec-
tronic resources. Publishers of primary scientific journals are
very leery of the Internet and extremely reluctant to make the
texts of their journals accessible in forms that allow the text
to be easily manipulated by a computer. They would prefer to
maintain the control and access to such data.
The code necessary to create a link between abstracting and
indexing records and the full-texts of journal articles already
exists. It is the SICI, the Serials Item and Contribution Iden-
tifier (ANSI/NISO Z39.56-1991). Since December 1993, all arti-
cles entered into the UnCover database carry SICI codes. One can
easily envision a client/server application wherein the primary
journal publisher contracts with the A&I services to provide a
gateway (and possibly a billing service) for their products. The
searcher who decides to retrieve the full text of an article
would simply pass the SICI for the item to one of the major
online vendors which handles the publication. Once the request
is made, the item is sent direct to the end-user over the Inter-
net. There could also be an option to deposit the item in the
user's home library storage facility as well. In this manner, a
futuristic version of the collection development function would
evolve that puts the ordering function in the hands of the ulti-
mate user and provides for a distributed archive of knowledge.
Clearly the ball has been dropped by online search vendors
and database producers when they stubbornly clung to the per-
transaction cost basis for online searching. Academic libraries
are unwilling and unable to fund computer-based searching which
has no cap on the costs. As we move toward the 21st century, we
must find a pricing model which allows an equitable profit margin
for all the players involved while satisfying academic budget
concerns.