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ACTIVITIES OF THE LITERATURE GROUP IN A CHEMICAL LIBRARY' MARGARET W. IMBRIE E. I. d u Pont d e Nemours & Company, Gibbstown, New Jersey
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chemical library spoken of in the title of this paper is the library of the Eastern Laboratory of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, located at Gibbstown, New Jersey. This laboratory, one of two research laboratories of the company's explosives department, is one of the oldest industrial research laboratories in the country. It was established in 1902 and named for the Eastern Dynamite Company, a holding company which operated du Pont's Repauno dynamite plant located on adjoining property. The laboratory's research efforts in the beginning were exclusively related to the commercial explosives industry-investigations into the composition, manufacture, and applications of commercial explosives, and into possible new developments in that field. Over the years, however, Eastern Laboratory's research interests have broadened, and its work now is in the wide field of chemistry, particularly fundamental and exploratory research in organic chemistry. Its library, started in 1910, has always reflected the interests of the laboratory. Today it has most of the standard references and bound sets of periodicals. The library functions as an integral part of Eastern Laboratory's intelligence section, which may be considered a technical information gathering and distributing unit. There are within it three groups of workers: the library group, with a staff of seven-the librarian and six clerical workers; the patent group with a staff of four women chemists; and the literature group, with a staff of five women chemists. The head of the section is a patent attorney who also has a science degree. Members of the library group administer the laboratory's book, periodical, and patent collections, as well as its technical reports and notebooks. They handle all the ordering and stenographic work of the section. Members of the patent group abstract and index new patents, make prior art searches for information and patentability, submit memoranda for use in the preparation of patent applications by the company's patent division, and provide technical comments on the United States Patent Office actions. From' the patent abstract cards, a patent bulletin is compiled and issued weekly. The work of these chemists is not exclusively related to patents, however, for they also have some
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Presented before the Division of Chemical Literature at the 128th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Minneapolis, September, 1955.
literature service activities. For instance, they share with the literature group the job of reviewing the periodicals received at the laboratoty. The ones they scan are chiefly the engineering and trade journals, 66 in number. I n addition, they edit reports written by laboratory personnel, give bibliographical assistance to laboratory authors who submit papers for publication, and make translations. ACTIVITIES OF THE LITERATURE GROUP
The many activities of the literature group may be classified as: abstracting and indexing, preparing literature searches, and making translations chiefly from German and French. The specific activities involved in abstracting and indexing will be described in some detail. First of all, members review regularly about 60 per cent of the 150 technical journals received by the library, and they mark pertinent articles to be forwarded to individual research chemists or engineers at the laboratory. Specific journals are not always reviewed by the same literature chemist; instead the journals are picked up, one or two together, from the receiving desk in the group's office by any one of the literature chemists as she has time to look them over. While scanning the periodical literature, the group members watch for articles which should be included in the continuous bibliographies on selected subjects which are maintained by the group. The list of 25 subjects is revised from time to time as the interests of the laboratory dictate. Certain of these subjects are assigned t o each literature chemist, and appropriate articles are directed to her for abstracting. The abstracts are typed on 4- X 6-inch cards by the library group. From these cards, which are not immediately filed, the senior literature chemist compiles a literature bulletin. This contains usually from 25 to 30 abstracts and is about six pages long. The bulletin is issued once or twice a month and is circulated t o the laboratory technical personnel and to a few explosives department members in other locations. The literature chemists also abstract and assign subject headings to the 50 or 60 technical reports received by the library each month. These include research reports written by laboratory personnel and reports received from other departments of the company and from outside agencies. The abstracts are dupli-
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cated on cards for the library's index t o reports, and they appear on a list of new reports issued monthly by the library group. Literature chemists assist the library indexers by assigning subject headings for technical articles received as reprints, films, photocopies, or pamphlets. These articles are referred t o them by the library group as soon as they have been circulated to the persons for whom they were obtained, and, as in the case of the new journals, the literature chemists review them when time permits. INDEXING CORRESPONDENCE
Related to the above activities is the group's job of indexing the laboratory's correspondence files, or more specifically, indexing those letters containing significant technical information. This information includes accounts of specific, short-term investigations which, because of their limited scope, were never incorporated into formal reports. Correspondence received by, and sent from, the laboratory is filed chronologically in folders numbered in accordance with a broad subject classification. Because much valuable technical information not available elsewhere is contained in the letter files, new chemists and engineers at the laboratory always were required t o become acquainted with the correspondence in pertinent subject classes as a background for their work. Consultation of the liles frequently became necessary, also, when carrying out assigned projects. Location of the desired information in the correspondence files was not difficult in the past when the laboratory's activities were more limited in scope, when the correspondence files were not too bulky, and when the majority of employees had long experience and were thoroughly familiar with the files. During the years of World War I1 there were extensive changes in personnel a t the laboratory in a short period of time, and later, when the explosives department decided to set up separate laboratories adjacent t o their manufacturing plants to take over the industrial research work formerly handled by Eastern Laboratory, a further loss of experienced men was foreseen. Newer employees made inquiries about work described in the correspondence. Because the clerical section, which is in charge of the files, could not give adequate assistance, the remaining long-service technical employees and the library chemists found it a tedious and time-consuming task to leaf through the files t o locate special information. Therefore about two years ago the intelligence section was authorized to establish an index to the technical correspondence files. The literature group studied the problem of how to set up a useful index quickly and simply and decided that only four points were essential for the identification of any letter: the file number, date, author, and title. These could be typed on a standard card, with space left across the top for adding a filing caption, i. e . , the author's name or a
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subject heading. There would be room below these lines for an abstract, if required. A stencil could be cut for each standard card, and the required number of copies could be duplicated. The literature group's indexing procedure is to have one of its members read over the letters in several folders in a new category to be indexed, marking as she goes along those letters which contain important technical information. Next she compiles a tentative list of appropriate subject headings. Finally she reviews the selected letters, indicates the subject headings for each, and prepares an abstract when the letter's title is not sufficiently indicative of its contents. Usually one literature chemist does all the indexing in a single subject category; but if there are many subsections, these may he divided among the members of the group. The number of years covered in each subject field varies. Ten or 15 years of an active file may be indexed, while only five or six of a less active one are covered. Some newer subjects of current interest may be indexed in their entirety. The card index to correspondence, incomplete though it is, has already proved its worth. Frequently questions have been answered by its use which could not have been answered by consulting any other indexes. Recently a representative from another department was sent to the laboratory to review a subject on which there were extensive files of reports and letters. Instead of going pageby-page through ten years' correspondence, he began with a review of the index cards for the five years in this particular category already indexed and quickly found the information he needed for this period. There remained only five years' letters to be examined. The index, of course, will become more useful as more subject fields are covered. . ASSISTANCE TO MARKET DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH
One of the most interesting and important jobs of the literature group is t o give assistance to the market development section a t the laboratory in building up an end-use file. This file is a collection of information which correlates the properties of chemical compounds with their end uses. The information is recorded on specially designed punched cards of the hand-sort type, 8- X 10-inch size, with four rows of holes around the edges. The cards are of two kinds, one for chemical compounds (or groups of compounds), and the other for end uses. All cards have encoded the chemical strncture and functional groups of a given or required compound (or group of compounds), and the physical properties of the same. I n addition, the chemical compound cards show market data, such as existing outlets, quantity produced per year, manufacturers, and selling prices; and the end-use cards show, for example, materials now employed, the deficiencies thereof, and the size of the market. The literature group's duties in connection with the end-use lile are, briefly, as follows: First, t o scan the literature regularly for pertinent information on de-
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partment products included in the file. (This part is taken care of in the routine review of current periodical literature.) Second, to make literature searches on specific compounds or investigations of certain use fields, at the request of the market development section, and to enter the information thus obtained on appropriate punched cards. Third, to edit material for the file submitted by members of the market d e velopment section and to see that certain portions of these data are encoded. Fourth, to assign a serial number to each chemical compound card, and a category number to each end-use card, and to keep a record of these assignments. Finally, to issue typed cards to holders of copies of the end-use file and to keep the file up to date by entering any newly found additional information. Another responsibility of the literature group is the
issuing from time to time of "Eastern Laboratory Research Product Bulletius" which describe compounds prepared or investigated by the laboratory's research chemists. The group also assists in compiling the data on properties, uses, and toxicology of new compounds which are being made on a semicommercial scale. This information is prepared as a "New Products Bulletin" for the use of the sales division. Finally, we shall mention the assistance given since 1955 by the literature group to the authors of the annual "Unit Process" report on esterification puhlished in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. The literature chemists first helped in locating bibliography references for t,he authors; they now cooperate by referring current articles to the authors for inclusion in future reviews.
