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The Catalyst: The Swain Library Newsletter

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February 1999

Contents

1. Swain Hours: Exceptions to Regular Hours
2. Database Training Schedule
3. SciSearch via LANL-Moves to New Server, Links to Ejournal Articles
4. ACS Journals via the Web: Downtime, Off-campus Access & Use Stats
5. Why isn’t the Web Version of Angewandte Chemie Available at Stanford? Here’s why …
6. New Version of Crossfire Software for Searching Beilstein and Gmelin is Now Available
7. Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources Home Page Updated
8. Universal Webpage Design
9. ACS Chemical Information Programs at Anaheim
10. Gordon and Breach Lawsuit-Latest News
11. Searching Journals in Socrates II: Search Tips
12. Using SciFinder Scholar in the Swain Library
13. Internal CD-ROM Stolen from Swain Workstation :o(
14. International Young Chemistry Writer of the Year Award 1999

Swain Hours: Exceptions to Regular Hours

Date	Hours	Reason
Sat., Feb. 6	Closed	Electrical Shutdown for Org. Chem. Bldg.
Mon., Feb. 15	1-11pm	Presidents' Day

The Organic Chemistry Building will have no elecricity from 7am–7pm on Feb. 6th.

Database Training Schedule

Please consult handout at Swain .

Please note: On Thursday, February 25, a workshop on using EndNote will be held. Please register early for this session.

SciSearch via LANL-Moves to New Server, Links to Ejournal Articles

Last weekend SciSearch at LANL moved to a new faster server. The new server has a new URL:
http://scisearch2.lanl.gov/stanford/sci.html

Work is underway to add links to the articles indexed in SciSearch. A retangular icon will appear just to the left of citations that have links to full-text in the database.

FYI, the only other database that has links to selected e-journals on campus is the latest version of SciFinder Scholar. To copy SFS, go to: Swain Library’s SciFinder Scholar page

ACS Journals via the Web: Downtime, Off-campus Access & Use Stats

Murphy’s Law applies to ACS journal access at Stanford. If something can go wrong, it will. Just before Christmas, some elves in the ACS server disabled our access for a couple of days. This month when ACS moved its journals to a new server, some snafu occurred and we lost access for about a day. The moral of this story is that electronic access is still somewhat fragile and subject to downtime. I appreciate your notes to let me know when this happens and your patience in waiting until they come back up online again.

Off-campus access for the ACS journals because of an incompatibility problem. When ACS displays results, it uses absolute URLs. These are URLs that have meaningful names that are an alias for the name of the server the articles are stored on. Unfortunately, our off-campus proxy authentication system has conflicts with absolute URLs. So, unfortunately, unless ACS changes the way it displays items or we adopt a new method to authenticate off-campus users, access to the ACS journals is limited to on-campus use. For more about using restricted resources from off-campus, please see this URL:
http://library.stanford.edu/ezproxy/

Despite various snafus, web access to the ACS journals is very popular. Our subscription for web access was activated April 22, 1998. Here’s use data from April 22–December 31, 1998 for the web versions of ACS and ACS-distributed journals:

	Abstracts	Full Abstracts		Searches Performed	Total
		HTML	PDF
Analytical Chemistry	52	132	384	19	587
Acc. Chemical Research	4	63	616	11	694
Bioconjugate Chemistry	10	22	142	0	174
Biochemistry	498	405	1782	130	2815
Biotechnology Progress	37	36	18	18	109
Chemical Reviews	7	143	847	24	1021
Chemical Res.Toxicol.	4	5	19	0	28
Chemistry & Materials	20	22	567	2	611
Energy & Fuels	2	4	10	0	16
Environ.Sci.Technol.	93	69	257	23	442
Ind.Eng.Chem.Res.	2	18	50	0	70
Inorg.Chem.	129	48	797	26	1000
J.Agric.FoodChem.	4	4	8	0	16
J.Am.Chem.Soc.	887	727	4427	240	6281
J.Chem.Eng.Data	0	1	5	4	10
J.Chem.Inf.Comput.Sci.	8	3	9	0	20
J.Med.Chem.	16	39	226	0	281
J.Nat.Prod.	15	73	80	0	168
J.Org.Chem.	129	209	890	14	1242
J.Pharm.Sci.	6	17	12	0	35
J.Phys.Chem.	284	212	943	69	1508
Langmuir	85	72	460	20	637
Macromolecules	101	67	460	27	655
Org.ProcessRes.Dev.	2	3	11	0	16
Organometallics	78	45	280	9	412
TOTAL	2743	2439	13300	636	18848

Why isn't the Web Version of Angewandte Chemie Available at Stanford? Here's why…

The Stanford Libraries are negotiating currently with Wiley to see if we can reach an agreement for access to the electronic version of their journals. As readers of their journals, having you provide feedback to Wiley about their access and pricing policies might help them move a bit faster into the electronic information age.

Wiley has a Basic License to the web version of their journals that allows only one concurrent user per subscribed title at a time. In a research university of this size, this bottleneck is too small. Wiley's Basic License also requires user to register before using titles. The Libraries have resisted signing any agreements that require individual user registration because of privacy and marketing issues that stem from providers compiling this data. Wiley has recently introduced an Expanded Access agreement that includes IP authentication and a surcharge. Because Wiley had an 18% average price increase for 1999, I think additional surcharges for electronic access are unwarranted.

Despite feedback from librarians and their own Advisory Board, Wiley has been very slow in modifying their policies and price rates for their electronic journals. So, in addition to hearing from librarians, I think that you should contact them. Here's a url that has a feedback form for the Wiley Interscience Journals on the web (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/form_access_inquiries.html)

Many thanks in advance for your support and comments!
Grace Baysinger

New Version of Crossfire Software for Searching Beilstein and Gmelin is Now Available

Go to: Download Crossfire 2000

During the setup process, you will need to enter the following values:

Host	beilstein.library.wisc.edu
Client name	[optional; recommend leaving this blank]
Group Name	Stanford

You will be prompted for this information when you login:

User Name	stanford [must be lower case letters]
Password	[contact graceb@stanford.edu]

AutoNom 2000:

AutoNom 2000, an IUPAC naming program, is included in Crossfire 2000. Because AutoNom 2000 is an upgrade to AutoNom Version 4.0, you must install AutoNom 4.0 first in order to upgrade to AutoNom 2000.

Please note: while it is possible to download the Crossfire 2000 from the Beilstein web site, it is bundled with AutoNom 2.0 which does not include stereochemistry.

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources Home Page Updated

Beginning next week, an updated version of the SUL/AIR home page will be available. The URL will remain the same:

http://library.stanford.edu/

As part of the continuing effort to improve our Web presentation, the update provides some fine tuning of the current design. In particular, the Quick Links function has been moved to the top of the page for better accessibility. The revised Quick Links choices provide direct access to selected key pages. It includes a few links that formerly appeared elsewhere on the home page. The Web Advisory Committee (wacy@forsythe.stanford.edu) welcomes comments and suggestions (for both corrections to existing pages and ideas on future redesigns and improved functionality). You can also send comments to Grace Baysinger (graceb@stanford.edu) as she is a member of WAC.

Universal Webpage Design

It should be our intention to design web pages that are accessible as possible for the greatest number of users. More than 20% of all U.S. citizens have some type of disability and nearly 10% or all Internet users have a disability.

Here's the litmus test to see if your pages can be used by people with some type of disability. First, turn off graphics and clear your cache. Then view your page. Is everything still there? If not, then here's a document you can consult to help make your pages more user-friendly and in compliance with Title II of the American with Disabilities Act.

http://rits.stanford.edu/atss/atp/drc/accessweb/

For further assistance and information, contact Darren J. Luvaas (luvaas@stanford.edu, 650-725-4673). Darren is an Academic Technology Specialist, at the Disability Resource Center, Stanford University.

ACS Chemical Information Programs at Anaheim

There are some excellent symposia being offered by the Chemical Information Division at the ACS National Meeting in Anaheim. Symposia topics include:

• Alternative Careers in Chemistry
• Chemical Information Sources on the WWW
• Data Mining Chemical Information Databases
• Digital Libraries
• Economics of Chemical Information Resources
• Information at the cutting edge in catalysis, petroleum, and polymer chemistry
• Modeling and Analysis through the Internet
• Techniques & Pharmacophore Development

For more details, see:

• Summary Schedule (http://www.acs.org/meetings/anaheim/symposia/cinf.htm
• Abstracts (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~atbrooks/CINF/abstracts_217.html

In addition, a workshop on Teaching Chemical Information will be held on Sunday, March 1st, from 1-5pm. This workshop is valuable to instructors using chemical information sources in their courses. See this url for more details and registration information:
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~atbrooks/CINF/workshop_217.html

To see the types of topics covered in previous workshops, see:
http://www.library.upenn.edu/~carr/workshop/cont.html

Gordon and Breach Lawsuit-Latest News

Stanford and Yale have added the text of the recent United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit confirming Judge Leonard Sand's decision in favor of Henry Barschall, the American Institute of Physics, and the American Physical Society to their web sites documenting the cases brought by Gordon and Breach “in an aggressive corporate practice of challenging any adverse commentary upon its journals, primarily through threatened (and actual) litigation.” See: http://barschall.stanford.edu

You should also check out this article published in The Scientist: “Decade-Long Legal Battle Focused On Journal Cost, Impact” at http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1998/jan/opin_980119.html

Searching Journals in Socrates II: Search Tips

Socrates II, the web version of our online library catalog, lists all of the journals cataloged for the Stanford Libraries. Instead of having to remember commands like you do when you search Socrates I, you can simply fill in the box.

Here's some search tips and tricks:

• Limit your search to the Serials File to only search journals and then type in words you want to search
• Enter full words for journal title (except filler terms like of, and, etc.)
• Do not use the wildcard character ($) if you also select “phrase search”
• Display full record to see if items are checked out to the bindery
• Electronic versions of journals are cataloged in Socrates II
  • After you discover we have an electronic subscription for a journal title, you can click on the hypertext link right in the catalog and then use it
• If a journal title is shelved in the Stanford Auxiliary Library, our on-campus storage unit, you can click on the hypertext link next to the SAL Library location and request that the needed volume be sent from SAL to Green. There are plans in the near future to deliver items from SAL directly to the branches.

Using SciFinder Scholar in the Swain Library

SciFinder Scholar (SFS) is loaded on the Macintosh computers in the back alcove of the Swain Library. In order to use SFS, you must log out of the Guest mode and sign in under SciFinder. Go to the shield in the upper right corner to change modes. The password for SciFinder is [contact graceb@stanford.edu]. Please change the mode back to the Guest mode when you are finished searching as visitors to the campus are not allowed to search SFS.

Internal CD-ROM Stolen from Swain Workstation :o(

I was very disappointed to discover that someone stole the internal CD-ROM drive from the PC in the book reading area. They replaced it with an old CD-ROM drive to hide their crime. Unfortunately, because Swain's funds are tight it is unlikely that we'll be able to replace it in the near future. Everyone loses when stuff like this happens because things like the new molecular modeling software that I planned to load today on this machine can't be done.

International Young Chemistry Writer of the Year Award 1999

ChemWeb (http://chemweb.com) just announced the launch of the International Young Chemistry Writer of the Year Award 1999. This year's award is generously sponsored by Pharmacia & Upjohn (http://www.pnu.com/) and the prize is $1,000 in cash and an expenses paid trip to the ACS Fall National Meeting in New Orleans in August 1999 where the winner will collect their prize. The winning article will also be published in The Alchemist. The competition requires entrants to write a feature style article and is open to anyone aged 16-30. The closing date is the 30th June 1999. Full details and a copy of the rules are available at:
http://chemweb.com/home/youngwriter.html

ChemWeb is owned by Elsevier. Elsevier is investing $6 million dollar in the development of this site which includes job information, virtual lectures, databases, full-text journals, directory of web resources, a shopping mall, and the Alchemist, an electronic magazine.

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