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The Catalyst: The Swain Library Newsletter
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April 1998
Contents
- Help Set the Course of the Future: Survey by the Science and Engineering Libraries Coming in April
- Swain Bills for Overdue Books
- MultiLingual Dictionary on the Web
- CAS Online Versus SciSearch: How They Stack Up
Help Set the Course of the Future: Survey by the Science and Engineering Libraries Coming in April
Stanford's Science and Engineering Libraries (SERG) need your help in
determining future library space and service needs. Important decisions
will be made over the next few years that will greatly influence the
shape and scope of future library services in support of your department.
With that in mind, we have developed a user survey to help us plan for
these needs over the next 20 years. Your input will benefit this planning
process enormously.
In the next few weeks, the SERG Library staff will be distributing the
survey to students, faculty and research staff in the Departments of
Applied Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics, as well
as in the Schools of Engineering and Earth Sciences. The survey will
be made available both in print and on the web. Stay tuned and many
thanks in advance for your support!
Swain Bills for Overdue Books
Many thanks to those of you who have come in to return old overdues.
Once we learned how to get rid of the replacement charges, it all
went pretty smoothly. We appreciate your patience with the transition.
From now on, you should be receiving notification when something is
overdue. (If you don't, please let me know.) As long as you renew
or return the material within two weeks, you shouldn't see any
more bills coming your way.
We had a real flurry of activity the first few days and now the
activity level is nil. So, if you are among the unfortunate
seven people who haven't located your materials yet, here are
some approaches which have dug up other missing items over the
years:
- Who in your group is interested in the same subject?
- Could you have loaned it to someone?
- If kept on desk or around the lab, who else had access?
- Did your professor borrow it from you?
- Did you take items home or to another lab/office area?
- Did you check under the seats of cars?
- Have you ever given someone else your ID to use?
If you have checked all the logical and illogical places it could
be and still have had no luck, please stop by and talk to me.
Thanks,
Carol
MultiLingual Dictionary on the Web
Inter Active Terminology for Europe (http://iate.europa.eu/iatediff/):
A translater’s best friend on the web. [formerly EuroDic Autom]
Created by the European Union, translates between 10 European
languages (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian,
Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Finnish). A user indicates
the source language, target language, requests if they want
additional information such as definition to be displayed,
and can also indicate a subject area. It is possible to
search terms as a partial match, all words, or “as is.”
CAS Online Versus SciSearch: How They Stack Up
CAS Online
- electronic version of Chemical Abstracts
- CA File (bibliogaphic part) updated every 2 weeks
- Registry File (chemical structure and dictionary) is updated weekly
- lag time of 8-10 weeks between when an item is published and when it
appears in the CA File
- comprehensive coverage of chemistry literature containing 15 million
citations and 17 million compounds
- 8,000 journals plus patents, conferences, books, dissertations,
and technical reports included
- only articles are included in the database, e.g. news and abstracts
from the ACS meetings are excluded
- first 10 authors indexed
- only the address of first author included in CA file
- can search for chemical compounds by structures/substructures,
names, formulas, sequences, and CAS Registry numbers
- abstracts available from mid-1970 to the present
- keywords and index terms included in CA from 1967-present
- CAPlus File (enhanced version of CA file) is only available at
commercial rates 24 hrs/day does have cover-to-cover indexing
for 1300 core journal titles.
- must use commands to search
- lots of display format options available
- can display or email search results
- only available in evenings and weekends
- training required before use
- alerting service available
SciSearch
- electronic version of Science Citation Index and Current Contents
- updated weekly
- lag time of 1-3 weeks between when an item is published and
when it appears in SCI
- includes only core journals in science, engineering and medicine
(coverage is strong for chemistry, physics, and life sciences)
- SCI has cover-to-cover indexing of all 5,200 journals in file
(all items from every page in an issue, excl. advertising, are
included in the database)
- can do citation searching (i.e. see who has written a more recent
article that has included an earlier one you know about in their
bibliography)
- indexes all authors
- includes addresses of all authors
- search chemical substances using names
- abstracts available from 1991 to present (when an author has written one)
- keywords added beginning 1991 to present
- user-friendly web interface
- limited display format options available (has most compact brief display format)
- can display or email search results
- have a site license access that allows an unlimited number of
users to search SCI 24 hours a day
- alerting service available
Grace Baysinger
Head Librarian & Bibliographer, Swain Library of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering
URL: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/index.html
Head, Science and Engineering Libraries Resource Group
