A Brief Description of the Information Sources in the Electronic Chemistry Library

This was written with students at Imperial College in mind, and we assumed that appropriate application programs are available using a Macintosh computer. Most of these programs have a Windows 3.1 or Windows-95 equivalent. More explicit instructions for specific searches were also made available to students.

Programs Assumed Resident on Client Computer

These programs are integrated into the World-Wide Web browser using chemical MIME, either via the Netscape helper configuration or automatically via the plug-in mode.
Claris Works Report Generation. You will have to prepare a report of what you find. By opening Claris Works and cutting/pasting various graphic images, you can prepare a professional looking report "on-the-fly" as you acquire information. To copy any image present in a Netscape WWW browser, point the mouse cursor over the image and hold the mouse button down until a menu appears. Select copy to "copy this image", then move to the Claris window and paste the image using the item in the edit window. Text can be similarly captured. DO NOT attempt to start Claris on Unix workstation. Other Word processors can be substituted for Claris if installed on your system.
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World-Wide Web Pointers The World-Wide Web ("Web") is a global information system created by Tim Berners-Lee. It enables access to text, images, animations, sounds, "hyperactive" molecules, and databases. This experiment is itself choreographed using the Web mechanism. Click on the WWW icon in this section to visit some of the sources of chemical information on the Web.
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BIDS The Bath Information Delivery System is an on line version of the science citation index, in which all primary papers published in essentially all the important chemical journals are indexed by subject, author, date and several other fields. By default, the search will start in the current year, e.g 1996, and currently goes back to 1981. Please note that the BIDS system is available only to UK users.
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CAS The CAS-ONLINE system. This is available either via a simple telnet session, or via custom interfaces such as STN Express or SciFinder. Only the Telnet interface is available here.
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Silver Platter gives on-line access via the World-Wide Web to "samplers" of a number of more medically orientated databases.
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Libertas Libertas: Most institutes have an on-line search system for their Library catalogues, a so called OPAC. The one hyperlinked here is the Imperial College system, using a Telnet interface.
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Fisher Fisher Scientific: Health and Safety Information Before starting experiments, it is normally necessary to identify commercial sources of any reagents you may be using. The Fisher Scientific on-line catalogue enables you to do this easily. Furthermore, for each compound identified, you can also acquire the relevant health and safety information.
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Daylight The World Drug Index. Some chemical information companies make available on-line sub-sets of some of their databases. Daylight Information systems has pioneered innovative interfaces to such information. Here you can search the World Drug Index (WDI) for any information on penicillin. The results of this search are used to generate a so-called SMILES descriptor of any hits, which can in turn be used to search a current literature database called Savant. This can be used to generate synthetic methods for preparing compounds identical with, or similar to your search query.
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CCDC The Cambridge Chemical Database Centre. Whilst keywords based on the title of a paper or its authors may provide some useful information, this will not necessarily produce information about an individual chemical compound. Here the search must be defined by actually drawing the compound of interest, or even merely a "sub-structure" and then performing a systematic search based on this criterion rather than one based on text. This particular search uses the Cambridge crystal structure database, and a custom program which requires an "X-Windows" interface.
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CambridgeSoft Substructure Searching using Chemfinder. This illustrates how one can avoid using a custom program, and use the metaphor of the World-Wide Web itself to define sub-structure searches or other forms of search.
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MDLI ISIS Chemical Reaction Accessing using ISIS/Base Sometimes even information about a specific compound is too general to be useful. Much of chemistry is about the chemical transformation of one compound into another, whether it can be done at all or in good yield, what the reagents and conditions are etc. Such a search implies a quite subtle relationship between two or more compounds. Again, specialised software is needed for this task. You will be using a system called ISIS/Base. Here the end results of a search is not so much a file containing information about one compound, but one or more pages of information relating to the chemical transformation, including the literature citation. Please note that this information service as implemented here is available only for account holders of the Daresbury CDS system.
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CLIC The Vchemlib Project. This is a recent project started at Imperial College to provide not only 3D information about molecules, but other aspects of 3D chemical information such as computed 3D properties of molecules and chemical instrumentation.
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CLIC Electronic Conferences and Journals. This section is included to give an impression of how the electronic library of the future may appear. In 1996, there were only around 5-10 "electronic" chemistry journals, offering only a limited version of the "printed" journal such as graphical abstracts or subject indices. However, this is expected to grow rapidly. Visit the ECHET96 electronic conference, Chemical Communications or Network Science to get a typical impression of these new media.
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