Instant Chemical Protective Material Selection. Instant Reference Sources, Inc., 7605 Rockpoint Drive, Austin, Tex. 78731. 1987. Chemical Permeation and Degradation Database and Selection Guidefor Resistant Protective Materials, list price $200; GlovES, free (public domain). Reviewed by James C. Reaves, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N. C. 27514. Instant Chemical Protective Material Selection is a group of program and text files designed to help any industrial or laboratory health professional make the difficult choices of chemical protective glove assignments. The two most useful parts of the package are the GlovES “expert system” glove selection aid and the reference work, Chemical Permeation and Degradation Database and Selection Guide for Resistant Protective Materials, by Krister Forsberg of the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology. The package also consists of a simple word-processing program, ZenWord, and two basic public domain searching programs that use the DOS utility FIND.EXE to conduct a rather primitive text search of Forsberg’s data. The programs and files are formatted for IBM and compatible computers that use DOS 2.0 or higher with two floppydisk drives; they are not copy-protected. In reviewing this package, I encountered some problems at the outset. The materials accompanying the program state that it contains “a digitized and encoded , . . computerized reference book” (actually ASCII text files) and that the package is “a unique publication [which] is a synergistic hybrid of traditionally printed and electronically formatted material” and “a most sophisticated artificial intelligence system.” The package is neither of these. It is, rather, a very easy-to-use data base system for glove selection and an associated group of text files that are packaged with valuable information concerning glove material permeation rates and material degradation. To qualify as an expert system, a program must be able to make decisions concerning data relationships based on internal rules that essentially are independent of the data in the data base. These 1172 Environ. Sci. Technol., Vol. 21, No. 12, 1987
rules are manipulated by the inference engine of the expert system and are used by the system to make decisions concerning what data in the data base meet the user’s needs. The manual for Instant Chemical Protective Material Selection states, however, that because of data compatibility problems, there are no rules or correlations applied to the GlovES data base; yet it continues to describe GlovES as an expert system. No expert system can exist without an inference engine and internal rules. Thus the user who expects an artificial intelligence system will be disappointed, but the user who does not expect one probably will be pleased with what turns out to be a well-written traditional relational data base system. The user begins the glove selection process by choosing a chemical from an internal program list and specifying requirements of the task to be performed, as well as basic physical characteristics of the glove. These characteristics are glove tactility, aqueous solution suitability, cut and abrasion resistance, frequency of exposure to the chemical, and expected time to complete the task. GlovES then will display, by brand name and model number, a list of gloves that may offer suitable protection, their physical properties, breakthrough and permeation data, and an estimated “safe” time span during which each may be used. The glove manufacturers included in the data base are Ansel, Comasec, Du Pont, Durafab, North, and Pioneer. The user also may make the glove selection process more or less stringent by changing the default chemical attributes assigned to the selected chemical. These attributes are volatility, toxicity, carcinogenicity, skin absorbency, and irritant level. Increasing these values will result in a more stringent glove selection process with fewer choices of gloves being presented to the user. Although all chemical attribute changes made from within the program are temporary to preserve data ihtegrity, I found it relatively easy to modify the data base itself to make permanent changes. The GlovES system contains data for 435 chemicals, but if the specific chemical is unknown to the user or is not on the list, the chemical class may be substituted for the specific chemical. In such a case, for each glove recom-
mended the user is presented with a range of breakthrough times over the entire class, as well as specific glove permeation rates for individual chemicals in the class. The other main section of Znstant Chemical Protective Material Selection is Krister Forsberg’s reference work, Chemical Permeation and Degradation Database and Selection Guide for Resistant Protective Materials. This group of text files contains information on more than 5000 breakthrough and permeation rates of more than 400 compounds. The files are in a text format and therefore are accessible on any word processor. Although the manual gives instructions on how to set up ZenWord to carry out specific searches and to print Forsberg’s data, users who are familiar with another word processor may find it more convenient to use than to learn how to use Zen Word. Forsberg’s work is very thorough. It gives chemical class, chemical name, glove material, glove manufacturer, trade name, model numbers, material thicknesses, and bibliographic references for every entry. I found it useful to print out this work and keep it as a reference in hard copy. Also provided are glove selection guide numbers ranging from zero to five for many combinations of chemicals and gloves; a guide number of zero represents a good choice of glove for a particular chemical. Although the GlovES system uses the same information that is in this reference work, it does not include these useful numbers in its output. Even though it does not live up to its own promotional material, Instant Chemical Protective Material Selection is a very nice set of programs and data files. The manual could use some work (as could almost all manuals), and the GlovES program has the annoying attribute of not completely returning control of the screen to DOS after the user quits. These problems, however, are minor. Both the GlovES program and Forsberg’s data make the difficult job of selecting the proper gloves much easier by offering a list of gloves that may be suitable for a given task and eliminating most that definitely are unsuitable. I recommend this package to any health professional who has responsibility for the selection of chemical protective gloves in manufacturing or research applications.
