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The Catalyst: The Swain Library Newsletter

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September 1998

Contents

1. ACD's Interactive Web Laboratory
2. CASREACT Access Now Available Through Folio
3. SciFinder Scholar Version 2.0 Beta Test
4. Socrates II Improvements
5. Billing Fees
6. Is your e-mail address in the library circulation system?
7. Hazardous Substances Data Bank Now Available
8. PhysChemComm – New E-Journal

ACD's Interactive Web Laboratory

ACD/ILab is a new universal Web-based gateway to various chemical information resources, property prediction programs, and chemical databases. Available through ILab:

• Chemical Naming: CAS Index Name and IUPAC Name
• Predicted Values: HNMR Spectrum, 13CNMR Spectrum, pKa, LogP, BP, molar refractivity/volume/refractive index, density, polarizability, VP, enthalpy of vaporization, aqueous solubility, bioconcentration factor, adsorption coefficient, parachor, surface tension, dielectric constant, and LogD.

Especially cool is the HNMR Spectrum prediction. Draw your structure and a predicted spectral diagram is displayed along with companion NMR shift tables. You can even zoom in for more details.

Here's the URL for a cheatsheet devised for using ACD's ILAB:
http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/services/courses/chem130/acdilab.html

Chemsketch 3.5, the structure drawing package used by ACD to interface to their NMR and physical property prediction software is now available for free. See http://www.acdlabs.com/products/draw/chemsket.html for details and capabilities for the package.

The FREE Chemsketch 3.5 software includes:

• a 3D viewer: http://www.acdlabs.com/products/draw/3d_view.html
• a Tautomer identifier: http://www.acdlabs.com/products/draw/tautom.html

Download your copy today by going to http://www.acdlabs.com/download/

CASREACT Access Now Available Through Folio

CASREACT is now available through the same account as CAS Online. Please type SEL CAS ONLINE in Folio and then after you are logged on to CAS, choose FIL CASREACT. CASREACT is available evenings and weekends to current Stanford students, faculty, and academic staff.

Please do not search CASREACT until you've received training. The workshop schedule for the current quarter is located at this URL: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/caswrksh.html

Help for searching CASREACT by CAS Registry Number and by Functional Group Name/Class is available at: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/collections/databases/cas/casreact/index.html

Note that limited CASREACT searching is also possible in SciFinder Scholar, a user friendly software package for searching Chemical Abstracts Online and CASREACT. To search CASREACT via SciFinder Scholar (SFS), draw a structure and then press the Search Reactions button. SFS is available evenings and weekends to current Stanford students, faculty, and all staff. No training is required to use SFS. Please consult this URL for more information: http://library.stanford.edu/depts/swain/collections/databases/cas/scifi/index.html

SciFinder Scholar Version 2.0 Beta Test

Please contact Grace Baysinger (graceb@stanford.edu) if you would like to be a beta tester for the new version of SciFinder Scholar. New features include:

• Links to full-text articles for items published by the American Chemical Society, Springer-Verlag, the Institute of Physics, and Science Magazine
• Ability to refine a reaction search by specifying the structures of both the reactant and the product
• More choices for refining subject searches
• Web awareness-link to Intranet and Internet

Testing will last through the end of September. Feedback from testers will either be through phone interviews or a written survey. Version 2.0 is scheduled for release later this year.

Socrates II Improvements

The latest version of Socrates II (Stanford's Web-based catalog) includes the following improvements:

• Full Record has become Keyword. This index searches most of the record except the call number. Note: The old Keyword has been eliminated.
• You may choose to sort results up to a limit of 500. Note: The default is None (no sorting).
• Conferences have been included in the Author (au) index.

Billing Fees

One of the features (or bugs) of the library's circulation system, depending on your point of view, is a $5.00 billing fee in addition to the replacement cost of overdue items. Anytime you are charged a replacement fee, you can bet that you have accrued a $5.00 billing fee as well.

So, if you are a person who travels, please check due dates in the back of your books before you leave and return or renew those which will come due while you are gone.

Is your e-mail address in the library circulation system?

It looks like a decision is coming up which will require accurate addresses in the library computer system at all times. Later this month, any mail returned to the libraries (both U.S. or e-mail) will result in your being unable to check books out of the Stanford University Libraries.

Even though you may use e-mail everyday, it doesn't necessarily mean that the libraries have your e-mail address. If you haven't been receiving overdue notices, please check at Swain and we can let you know what address is in your record. If the address is incorrect or incomplete, you will need to update it in AXESS or Prism. Visiting Scholars can add e-mail addresses to the library computers by sending your e-mail address to priv@sulmail.

Will keep you posted on this one, but the last meeting led me to believe that this will kick in very soon.

Submitted by Carol Bickler (cbickler@stanford).

Hazardous Substances Data Bank Now Available

The Hazardous Substances Data Bank is available for free via TOXNET. The URL is: http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/

Produced by the National Library of Medicine, the HSDB contains a wealth of information of the toxicology and the environmental effects of more that 4,500 chemicals. It covers emergency handling procedures, physical properties, environmental impacts, detection methods, manufacturing information, and regulatory requirements. Sources include standard texts and monographs, government documents, technical reports, and journals. All information is peer reviewed so the quality of the information is very high.

PhysChemComm -- New E-Journal

In October, the Royal Society of Chemistry will be launching a new electronic-only journal called PhysChemComm. It will cover physical chemistry and its borders with biology, physics, and materials science. Access is free through 1998. The URL is: http://www.rsc.org/physcc

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