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The Catalyst: The Swain Library Newsletter

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January 1999

Contents

1. Swain Hours: Exceptions to Regular Schedule
2. Database Training Schedule
3. Revised Electronic Journals Page for the Stanford University Libraries
4. Results from User Survey of Stanford's Science and Engineering Libraries
5. Videotapes for 1998 William S. Johnson Symposium Available
6. Combined Chemical Dictionary-Organic, Inorganic & Organometallic, Natural Compounds Plus Analytical Reagents & Pharmacological Agents
7. Google: New Web Search Engine That You Should Check Out
8. PatentMiner-Contains Free PDF Images of U.S. Patents
9. Chronology of Chemical Information Science: 1778-1998
10. Beilstein Data Entry Lags
11. SciSearch Search Tips
12. Web Sites on Taxes

Swain Hours: Exceptions to Regular Hours

Mon, Jan 18	1-11pm	Martin Luther King Day
Sat, Feb 6	Closed	Electrical Shutdown for Org Chem Bldg
Mon, Feb 15	1-11pm	Presidents' Day

Database Training Schedule

In January, the following workshops will be taught:

CAS Online Introduction	Thursday, January 21	2-4pm
CAS Online Introduction for ESL Users	Wednesday, January 20	9am-1pm
Structure Searching with STN Express	Monday, January 25	10am-noon
Searching CASREACT with STN Express	Tuesday, January 26	10am-noon
Beilstein/Gmelin Crossfire	Friday, January 22	1-3:30pm
SciSearch Introduction	Thursday, January 28	2-4pm

Please see consult handout at Swain or see this URL for a description of the workshops and for registration information.

http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/caswrksh.html

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

Revised Electronic Journals Page for the Stanford University Libraries

In addition to the alphabetical list of what electronic journals are available on campus, there are now lists grouped by subject category (e.g. chemistry and chemical engineering).

See: http://www.tdnet.com/stanford

Please send comments about this page as well as other pages by clicking on the “Tell Us” button in the menu bar.

Results from User Survey of Stanford's Science and Engineering Libraries

During spring quarter 1998 the Science and Engineering Resource Group surveyed its user communities. A total of 835 responses were received. The results have now been tabulated and analyzed, and are available for viewing at http://elib.stanford.edu/htdocs/survey/scilib.html. The information gathered provides valuable feedback on current library resources and services, along with a wealth of information for future planning of library services and space for the seven SERG libraries: Falconer Biology, Swain Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Branner Earth Sciences and Map Collections, Engineering, Miller Marine Biology, Mathematical and Computer Sciences, and Physics.

Videotapes for the 1998 William S. Johnson Symposium Now Available

Videotapes from the 13th Annual William S. Johnson Symposium in Organic Chemistry held October 16-17 1998 that was sponsored by the Department of Chemistry of Stanford University and the Corporate Program of the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering are now available.

Here's a brief description of the contents for each of the 7 videotapes:

1. Welcome and introduction / Barry M. Trost. Pericyclic reactions: from femtosecond dynamics to antibody catalysis / K. N. Houk
2. Mechanistic studies in photochemistry enzyme photoactivation: Fishing for proteases / Ned A. Porter
3. Design of chiral ligands for asymmetric catalysis / Andreas Pfaltz
4. Transition metal catalyzed olefin polymerizations and copolymerizations / Maurice Brookhart
5. New directions in marine natural products chemistry / William Fenical
6. A new approach to antibiotics agains drug-resistant organisms / Sidney Altman
7. Terpine biosynthesis revisited / Duilio Arigoni. Symposium summary, Paul A. Wender

To borrow any of these videotapes, please request at Swain Circulation Desk. They are on reserve.

COMBINED CHEMICAL DICTIONARY-Organic, Inorganic & Organometallic, Natural Compounds Plus Analytical Reagents & Pharmacological Agents

The CCD is now available on networked PCs in the computer room of the Swain Library. Containing over 380,000 chemical compounds, this resource is the equivalent of the Dictionary of Natural Products, Dictionary of Organic Compounds, Dictionary of Inorganic and Inorganometallic Compounds, Dictionary of Analytical Reagents, and PharmaSource (Dictionary of Pharmacological Agents). Published by Chapman and Hall, it is possible to search by a variety of ways that include name, formula, property and structure.

Google: New Web Search Engine That You Should Check Out

Google (http://www.google.com/). A Stanford grad student project that aims to solve the problem of information overload, Google looks at the way Web sites link to one another and then orders matches based on their “importance” – that is, how frequently they are pointed to by other “important” Web sites. Google's method is called PageRank. It's named after Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford who created it with Sergey Brin, another Stanford grad student.

Google offers a couple of unique features. The record display for each hit links both to the page itself as well as to a cached version from Google. This cached version includes a header with the date it was indexed, last modification date, Web server, and size. The other unique option is the “I'm Feeling Lucky” button. Choose this rather than the regular “Google Search” button, and Google will take you directly to the first and ideally the most relevant hit.

The Google database is smaller than most of the major Web search engines with about 25 million pages indexed. It purposely includes very few non-U.S. pages to help conserve international Internet bandwidth. A Boolean AND is the default operator, but full Boolean searching is not supported.

To learn more about using web search engines, see Search Engine Showdown (http://imt.net/~notess/search/) a web site created by Greg Notess, an expert in searching web search engines. Links to other search engines as well as other information on using web search engines is also available at this url: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/help/subjectguides/internet/index.html

PatentMiner-Contains Free PDF Images of U.S. Patents

PatentMiner (https://www.patentminer.com/patentminer/LIVE/cgi-bin/pm.cgi) offers a number of services for searching and displaying US Patents. One of the most useful features is PDF images of patents published 1970-present at no charge to users.

Free services at PatentMiner include:

1. Submitting any bibliographic filter search.
2. Viewing the ranked results of any search (results include rank, patent number, title, assignee, US class, and relevance score; bibliographic searches return all matches sorted by date; concept searches return the top 100 matches sorted by relevance).
3. Viewing the full text of any patent in PatentMiner.
4. Downloading a PDF of the full text of any patent in PatentMiner.
5. Integrated viewing of any image from the IBM Patent Server.
6. Downloading a PDF of the top 100 results for any search.
7. Doing CiteSortTM interactive filtering on the top 100 results from a concept search.

Chronology of Chemical Information Science: 1778-1998

A chronology of chemical information science covering 1778-1998 was created in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Chemical Information Division of the American Chemical Society. Compiled by Robert V. Williams and Mary Ellen Bowden, this chronology can be viewed by either by subject or by date. About 20 copies of the poster version of the chronology are available at the Swain Library. Please e-mail Grace Baysinger (graceb@stanford.edu) if you are interested in getting a copy of the poster. The chronology is also available on the web at this URL: http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/chemnet/chchron.htm

Beilstein Data Entry Lags

While Beilstein via Crossfire is a treasure trove of information from the late 1700s to the present, the producer is behind in adding current citations. Here's a brief summary by publication year:

Year	# Items
1995	36,749
1996	36,165
1997	27,119
1998	1,824

What do these numbers mean? For the 130 journals indexed for Beilstein, only 1,824 articles published in 1998 were added to Crossfire. To monitor the situation yourself, go into the Fact Editor of Crossfire and enter PY in the field name box and 1995 in the field value. Next, click on the list values icon (right below Options menu bar) in order to see values stored in the PY field.

Gmelin is essentially a closed file at this point. While it too contains many valuable references, no recent citations have been entered into the file. Here's the number of items added for the latest four publication years in the file:

Year	# Items
1992	20,932
1993	20,212
1994	7,798
1995	57

SciSearch Search Tip

Please note that left-hand truncation, the ability to add a wild card character to the left side of a term, is supported in SciSearch via LANL. For example, if you were to search *cataly* you would retrieve items that were published on biocatalysis, electrocatalysis, catalyzed, etc.

Web Sites on Taxes

Below are a couple of web sites to help make tax-time a little easier...

NetTax '9X (http://www.nettax.com/welcome.html) is a free WWW program that calculates your federal income taxes in real time. NetTax can help you prepare your federal 1040 tax return. You can download IRS forms directly and calculate ‘what if’ scenarios. NetTax claims to be fast, powerful, secure, and free.

• California Tax Forms for Individuals
  http://www.ftb.ca.gov/geninfo/ind/forms.htm
  • Tax Assistance – Individuals
    http://www.ftb.ca.gov/geninfo/ind/faq/index.htm
• Yahoo: Government: U.S. Government: Taxes
  http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/U_S__Government/Taxes/Online_Tax_Forms/
  Contains links to U.S. federal and state tax forms.

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