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We can anticipate a future in which information appears on the desktop computer screen, arrives in greater quantity, and becomes more important to the chemist than it is today undertaken by Co
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Chemical Abstracts Service ( Bellcore, and the Online Computer brary Center (OCLC) to make che ical journals available on the desk Both image and text formats for journal articles are provided. C1 rently about 200,000 pages are avai able in this system, representing t
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he hype over the Internet and the information superhighway in the past year has also generated considerable interest in electronic transmission of chemical information and technical journals. Scientists have become excited about bulletin boards, Mosaic pages (a hypertext system including contributions from all over the world), and other instantaneous methods of exchanging information. At the same time, they have become aware of the potential dangers of unreviewed and unedited electronic distribution methods, which can overwhelm users and rapidly spread material not worth reading or writing. If the quality of the papers available electronically can be maintained, bench chemists should find that they have quick access to reference data, new procedures, and discussions of techniquesadvantages that might permit them to improve the quality of their work. If infor-
Michael E. Lesk Bellcore 0003-2700/94/0366-747A/$04.50/0 0 1994 American Chemical Society
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mation quality is not maintained, however, we may find reference to the literature substituting for analytical experiments that would have been more valuable. In this A/C Interface we will examine how electronics can be used effectively to disseminate chemical information. We will also discuss the relative value of electronic journals to users as well as the importance of different formats for providing information. Building electronic information systems
Electronic information can be provided in two basic formats: image and ASCII. Recent interest in electronic journals has focused on page images in research projects such as Tulip (1)for materials science, Stellar for astrophysics, and Red Sage for medicine (2). In addition, commercial products such as the IEEE journals sold by University Microfilms and the biomedical journals in the Adonis system involve CD-ROM distribution of page images. ASCII text is also available online through STN International for ACS journals and for journals of several other publishers. Many full-text publications in disciplines outside science are also sold. The best known is probably the Lexis/ Nexis system of Mead Data Central, which provides access to the text of legal decisions and newspapers, among other files. In general, these systems do not provide access to any illustrations included in the original publications. Currently ACS, CAS, Bellcore, Cornel1 University, and OCLC are collaborating in an experimental project called CORE (Chemical Online Retrieval Experiment). We are interested in several questions: How can one build systems that display information for chemists in a way that is efficient to create and easy to implement in typical environments? How effective are the various forms of electronic information, compared with each other and with paper? How do chemists actually use online information? In this project we have been develop ing a system for electronic access to ACS journals. We have access to the original text as stored from the primary journal creation and for the Chemical Abstracts indexing, as well as paper copies of the same journals. These paper copies have 748 A
been scanned to provide image representations of the pages. We assemble the online file used in our experiments from all this material. We have both ASCII and image formats for ACS journals. We analyze scanned pages, look for the illustrations, and extract them; readers can thus read either the full pages in the image format or the ASCII material with accompanying graphics. This can be accomplished using three different interfaces, each of which differs in its emphasis on image versus ASCII display. One issue we confronted is which standard formats to use in representing the information. Although ACS uses a standard format in its primary journal file, this format was defined some years ago before the now-favored standard general markup language (SGML) was adopted.
We therefore convert the material, attempting to put it into a format that will be as useful as possible for the future. Figure 1shows samples of the input and output for the beginning of one article. The input is a displayed form of the record structure used by ACS; the output is encoded in SGML. SGML, of course, is only a syntactic standard. It can be used only with an accompanying document type definition that specifies the codes and meanings used. In our case, we have adopted a variant of the American Association of Publishers (AAP) Electronic Manuscript Standard (EMS). Readers may well ask why we need a variant, and this is an' instructive example of the problems that arise in this type of electronic experiment. Chemicaljournals contain a great deal of information that AAP did not anticipate when it first defined its manuscript stan-
Excerpt of original records segment 1165: this record 148 bytes total so far 301136 rieid 01256 mode 3 len 9 value AC field 01413 mode 3 len 117 value Observation of Elemental Anomalies at the Surface of Palladium after Electrochemical Loading of Deuterium or Hydrogen field 01562 mode 6 len 4 value 7 fieid 00089 mode 3 len 14 value Rolison, D. R. field 00089 mode 3 len 14 value OGrady, W. E. field00615mode9len16GOKO4O1 1 4 0 0 1 2 4 0 0 3 3 4 4 0 3 field 01243 mode 3 len 25 value Debra R. Rolison##fnt#*## field 01243 mode 3 len 18 value William E. O'Grady field 01256 mode 3 len 9 value AC900886X field 01562 mode 6 len 4 value 7 field 01806 mode 3 len 93 value Surface Chemistry Branch, Code 6170, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. 20375-5000 segment 1172: this record 1356 bytes total so far 303324 s work, the results from surface-sensitive an light water and heavy water.
Processed version
n> AC063:1697Ro AC American Chemical al Society, 91
of Pons and Fleisc as detected by X-ray photoelectro Figure 1. Translation of ACS record structure to SGML format.
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dard. For example, CAS has several different types of indexing elements, including not only the basic name and subject terms but also pre- and postmodifying elements. Creators of the AAP format simply did not anticipate this kind of complex indexing, which the typical book does not contain. Within the text of the article, there are many special characters (e.g., the different kinds of filled and half-filled boxes and triangles used to indicate different lines in a plot). Each of these needs some kind of code definition and/or instruction for printing. We have defined special codes for many commonly used symbols, but to avoid the need for further definition of a great many characters that combine accent marks with ordinary letters, we have been forced to classify some of these special characters as overprints. There are
also fields of information, such as tables of definitions of abbreviations, that were not anticipated. To avoid losing information, we have defined extra codes rather than reduce some of these special cases to simple printing instructions. Perhaps the most frustrating need to extend the AAP EMS arose from the citation of references. In AAP style, the same names that are used in the main text are used to define titles, authors, or publishers’names within references. The expectation is that the software that interprets the article will rely on context (the enclosing tab for bibliographic reference) to interpret names such as for article title differently. Unfortunately, we encountered software that couldn’t do that, so we were forced to produce a unique set of names for fields within a bibliographic citation. In the end what we have is infor-
Figure 2. Sample column showing detection of figure.
mation that is more portable than if we had never heard of SGML, but it cannot be fed directly into formatting programs that know only AAP EMS. Once there is a standard format for storing the article text, we then have to ask whether we can display it on the users’ terminals. In our case, we simplify this problem by requiring a fairly high-quality user workstation, expecting that what is now high quality will, in the future, become standard. We use X-windows as the display protocol, so the workstation must run X, and we need a bitmap area larger than 640 x 480 for the interfaces that display full-page images. Nevertheless, we still run into considerable difficulty with the fonts available on the workstations. There is no standard set of fonts across X-terminals, the Macintosh X emulators, and the various workstations that run X. There is not even standardization across different software systems on the same workstation. Thus we find ourselves defining new fonts, and that requires learning yet another set of procedures because different window systems have different processes for font definition. In short, it is still difficult to take any user’s modern workstation and install software that can display complex documents without some degree of systems administration support. In our experiment, a complete file of images is also prepared. The images are scanned at 300 dpi, one bit per pixel, and stored in TIFF with Group IV compression. (TIFF is the Tag Image File Format, and Group IV is the new facsimile encoding standard; both are common image representation formats.) Despite slight differences among some image processing programs and minor difficulties with machines that have different byte orders within a word, TIFF conversion has generally gone smoothly, and it has been easy to code around machine differences. Our major problem with the image file is its size; the typical page is about 100 KI3 after compression, so at the moment we require about 25 GB of storage. These images are stored on a write once, read multiply (WORM) “jukebox.” This device is a multiplatter optical disk system that selects platters like its 1950s namesake. To accelerate retrieval of the images, we also maintain a file of lower resolution images,
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many of which we store on a magnetic Winchester disk. These images are stored at 100 dpi, with 2 bits per pixel, so that some anti-aliasing can be done. This step removes some of the jagged edges inherent in binary images, which significantly improves readability for users with color or gray-scale displays. The next important step in preparing the file is to provide the graphic illustrations to go with the ASCII version of the text. There are four kinds of illustrative material: figures, tables, equations, and everything else, which we call schemes. The tables and the equations are included in the tapes available from the primary journal creation. However, to avoid the problems described earlier in setting complex material and fonts, we have resorted to two expedients. We format the tables as the material is processed, then send it to the user as monospaced material, in which all characters are of equal width. This avoids the need to know the width tables of the unspecified fonts on the user’s machine. For equations, we also format the material as it is converted, this time going all the way to bitmaps. The bitmaps are displayed as if they were any other images. Unfortunately, the figures and schemes are not on the ACS tapes and must be obtained from the scanned page images. This involves segmenting the pages, so that we know which parts of each page are graphical. Figure 2 shows a sample column, and to the left of it are two plots. The function shown immediately to the left of the column is the bit density per horizontal scan line, which can be thought of as an ordinary plot rotated 90”. This column was produced, in essence, simply by removing all the white bits from each line and leaving as many black bits a s were present. Note the regular sequence of peaks corresponding to the text lines and the irregularities where there is a graphic. Each line peak is doubled, as a result of the many letters such as o and d that have holes. Text is detected by looking for regularities in the bit density function; the leftmost column shows an autocorrelation of the density function at an offset of the line spacing (which is found by looking for the peak of the autocorrelation function). This function separates text from graphics.
When we encounter a graphic, we must identify it by using the following heuristic rules. Tables contain at least three fullwidth horizontal lines. Equations are wide but short and combine a centered main text with an optional equation number at the right margin. Figures contain the word “Figure” at the beginning of the caption,
which is simply matched as a bitmap in the appropriate font for each journal. Whatever graphics are left after these rules have been applied are classified as schemes. When a page is classified, the extracted graphics are shrunk to 150 dpi for display convenience and matched up with the article (so that clicking on the ref-
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Figure 3. Data flow in the CORE project.
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erence to Figure N will produce the correct image). Unfortunately, this matching process now depends on counting the figures through the article, and thus even a small error rate in basic figure detection is likely to throw off a large number of figure correspondences, even if most of the actual figures are right. On average, each journal page contains a figure or a scheme that takes about 2 0 4 5 %of the page. The overall processing flow is shown in Figure 3. At the end, there are two complete files, one in ASCII and one in image format. All searching is done on the ASCII file; the user can then display results from either file.
native use of Pixlook is to perform a search and then use the list of retrieved articles in the same way that one uses the table of contents. This use is illustrated in Figure 5, in which the search was done on the name “Corey.” An article beginning on p. 442 of TheJournal of Organic Chemistry has been selected for display. In this interface, users can perform four operations. First, they can move from page to page within one article, using the scrollbar shown at the top of each fullpage display. This scrollbar also tells the user how long each article is. Second, they can move from article to article, either within a table of contents or within a list of hits. Third, they can search on a word or group of words and find a list of articles. There is no way to locate the words found this way within an article, although the articles are usually short enough that this is not too much of a problem. Finally, they can view any number of articles at once, within the limits of the screen size. The searching system for this interface is provided by the Newton software written by OCLC, and the standard Boolean primitives (and, or, not) are available. An important property of this interface is that the figures dominate the user’s first glimpse of the article. The page appears first at the 100 dpi resolution, in which the
Electronic interfaces
We have done experiments comparing the ability of chemists to do simple tasks using the paper journals and both electronic formats. In these experiments, the two electronic formats used were “Pixlook’ (image display) and “SuperBook’ (text display). Pixlook is a simple image system that uses the ASCII file to search and to provide tables of contents. It has two modes: browsing and searching. In the browsing interface, the user selects a journal and a specific issue and gets a list of titles in that issue. The full-pagebitmap for any page then can be called up by clicking on the specific article title. The image appears first in the 100 dpi resolution so that a full page almost fits on a Sun-type screen. Selecting an “edarge” button provides the 300 dpi bitmap. When we had Sparc-1machines, we pre-fetched and decoded the high-resolution bitmap while the user was considering the low-resolution bitmap. Now that the high-resolution image may be on a jukebox, this concurrent step is not necessary. The full-resolution images are easy to read but can show only a small part of any page. Figure 4 shows the process of browsing in the image system. In this case, an issue from AnaZyticaZ Chemistry has been selected, and the user has looked through the table of contents and chosen the article starting on p. 2329. Another window has been opened to show an enlarged part of the full page. Note that the enlarged image is clear but small; the fullpage image is barely readable. The alter-
text may be hard to read, but the figures are usually clear. The text-oriented alternative, shown in Figure 6, is SuperBook. The screen is split into a table of contents area, organized by subject and shown on the left, and the current page, shown on the right. Footnotes, tables, and graphics appear as icons in the right margin of the text page. A search window is tucked away at the bottom left. In this example, the user searched for “hollow cathode” and found that term highlighted in the text. In the right margin of the text a graphic is iadicated by the thumbnail picture. By clicking on the small picture, the user has added the enlarged picture to the screen along with scrollbars because it does not fit. The table of contents is hierarchically divided, and the user can expand or contract any part of it by clicking on that line. The number of hits on any search is shown next to the line in question, thus giving the user a clear picture of where in the text relevant material appears. Clicking on a line in the table of contents brings the text page to that point. The text page can also be moved by clicking on the o p tions for the next or previous hit on the search term($. The text is more clearly shown on the screen in SuperBook than in Pixlook, and
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Figure 4. Browsing the Pixlook image system.
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motion across article boundaries is easier because the complete text is always shown in the table of contents. As shown in the example, highlighting is used to locate the exact appearance of particular words. However, users do not find the display familiar because it emphasizes the text, and people often browse through articles by looking first at the graphics. We also have another interface called Scepter, written by OCLC, which combines access to text, figures, and page images. Scepter, which is being used at Cornell, was not used in the experiments described below. It provides access to all text, graphics, and page images, and the user is given menus of everything within an article. An example of Scepter is shown in Figure 7. Note the use of thumbnails to list the figures in the article-all can be seen at once in this example, unlike SuperBook where the figure icons are distributed through the text. similarly, the reader may call up the list of references, tables, or any other part of an article. The ease of use of all the electronic systems could still be improved. Even those with 1000 x 1000 screens cannot see an eotire page at an easily readable resolution. Our strategy of using 2 bits of gray scale helps considerably, and with this technique the entire printed part of the page fits on a large screen and can be read with some effort. However, we felt it necessary to provide the ability to zoom in aed discovered that this feature is regularly used. When users zoom in, the readability is excellent but the screen is too small; they must constantly move around the screen. In addition, zooming may cause a delay of perhaps 15 s because the large images are on an optical jukebox. As mentioned before, we are pushing the limits of X-windows compatibility as well as the security features in the various operating systems and window managers. For many new users some workstation reconfiguration is needed, if only to install the fonts with the special characters needed for chemical journals. Network bandwidth (10 MB/s) is also inadequate. An uncompressed full-page image is 1MB, and this will take several seconds on a typical Ethernet, especially if the destipation machine is slow. We coyld send compressed images, but that requires installing additional software on the user work752 A
stations, some of which don’t have much CPU power and many of which require unusual programming environments. Comparisons of electronic journal interfaces and paper
Our experiments were run by Dennis Egan with 36 Cornell students as subjects. The students ranged from undergraduates to graduate students and were divided into three groups. One-third of them used the journals on paper; one-third used the images, and one-third used SuperBook (the electronic approaches used earlier versions of the systems shown in the figures). The students had five types of tasks to perform. These ranged from relatively easy (find a particular fact in a given article) to quite hard (find a synthetic pathway whose starting and ending compounds are analogous to but not identical to those in a pathway given somewhere in the collection of articles). In these experiments we used a 1000-article sample taken from issues 1-12 of the Journal of the American Chemical Society published in 1988. The tasks were designed by two chemistry professors in an effort to simulate what chemists do in a library. The easiest task was the “citation” search, a simple request for a fact in an article whose complete citation was given. Such a query
Analytical Chemistry, Vol. 66,No. 14, July 15, 1994
might be: “In the article ‘Total Synthesis of Ginkgolide B’ by E. J. Corey, M. Kang, M. C. Desai, A. R. Ghosh, and I. N. Houpis (J. Am. Chem. SOC.1988,110,64951), what is reported as a medically important property of ginkgolide?” A similar task was the “search,” which had an equally specific question but left the student the job of finding the right article. An example might be: “What is the calculated P-0 bond distance in hydroxyphosphine?” One of the most interesting tasks was named “browsing.” Here the students were presented with a list of eight topics (e.g., “bridgehead halides”) and one issue of the journal and were asked to check which of the eight topics were mentioned in this one issue. We also made an effort to evaluate serendipity in this task. After the students had finished, the journal was removed (in whatever format) and a new list of eight additional topics was presented. Again, students had to report on what they thought had been mentioned, on the basis of whatever they remembered about the issue. The rewaining tasks were the “essay,” a request to write a couple of paragraphs about a topic (e.g., “phospholipids”), and the “analogous transformation,” which required the students to suggest how you might convert one organic compound into another. Both compounds were shown
as structural diagrams, and neither appeared in exactly that form in the collection of articles. To successfully complete this task, the students had to find a similar transformation and apply it to the given example. We found that either electronic system was much better than paper whenever searching was important. (For more detail on the results, see Reference 3.) Although the students with the paper journals had access to Chemical Abstracts, they were not expert in its use and they could do electronic searches more effectively. For example, in the search task subjects were told they could give up after 15 min. More than half the students with the paper journals gave up; threequarters of the people with electronic searching found the right answer. By contrast, the electronic journals showed no great advantage for tasks that only involved reading. The citation task, for example, specifies which article to read. All the experimental groups could perform this task correctly about threequarters of the time, and all took about 5 min to read the article and report the answer. Various problems (e.g., inadequate emphasis on graphics in the SuperBook system or confusion about which article was being read) caused electronic reading on occasion to be less satisfactory than paper. For example, the organic com-
pound transformation task depends heavily on seeing the right diagram in the journals. SuperBook, which keys to the text display and requires a click to see the image, was less effective for this task. The browsing task resulted in roughly equal scores for all the groups, no matter which format they had. However, the students with paper made different kinds of errors than the students with electronic journals. Those with paper journals tended to miss many relevant documents, whereas those with electronic journals claimed to have found relevant documents that in fact had not been accepted as relevant by the professors who made the lists. That is, the students with paper found far fewer documents they considered relevant than the students with electronics. Part of this may result from general difficulties in formulating searches, but part is the difficulty of searching on paper. Although the students had access to Chemical Abstracts, as mentioned before, they were not familiar with the techniques needed to use this resource with maximal effectiveness. For example, they apparently did not know how to use the Trivial Name Index, so they could not look up substance names. Despite all these problems, we conclude that the typical user can actually accomplish a mix of tasks with electronic journals more successfully than with pa-
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Figure 6. SuperBook screen with table of contents and text.
per journals. The first complaint of the users is that we don’t have enough journals-not that what we have is useless. The image display method is a useful bridge between the traditional format and new electronic systems, provided the user workstations are adequate. Image systems are also relatively free of software that must be specialized to deal with particular journals or subject areas. For example, in our work we have needed a special font to handle the symbols used in ACS journals, and we have considered whether “He,” “In,” “As,” and “I” should be on the stoplist (the list of words not processed by the retrieval system) because they are the chemical symbols for helium, indium, arsenic, and iodine. Image systems are thus easier to code and provide to users, despite the fact that they are more demanding of hardware. Conclusions and predictions
We now have some experience with the users at Cornell, although it is somewhat limited because the file they have seen thus far usually lacks the most recent journals and anything before 1991. What we find is that these users are very visually oriented. Given a choice, they would look first at the illustrations in an article, even before the title. Reading the text is the very last thing the users do; it comes after the figures, the authors, the title and abstract, the tables, and even the references. Browsing is more likely to be done than searching. Many of the readers are not looking for anything in particular; they are just looking to see what is there. Note that while browsing in paper journals, looking at the figures also dominates peoples’ behavior. They flip through issues, looking at the graphics and stopping when they see something interesting. Like many other kinds of science and engineering, chemistry is often a visual subject (4). Publishers of journals know this and attempt to cater to it in their paper publications. Color is being used increasingly, for example, to make figures more intelligible. In the same way, the faster spread of Mosaic relative to that of the Wide Area Information System (WAIS) is another testimony to the attractiveness of graphics and illustrations. WAIS offers relevant feedback but normally provides only an ASCII display; Mo-
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,
saic pages, formatted with hypertext links, to chemical information and would reduce normally contain some pictures. Some exposure for new researchers below the museums, for example, provide pages that attention their work might deserve. have a description of their contents as So what of the future? No one doubts well as illustrations of some exhibits. that electronic information will continue to Electronics will help here. The incresupplement and replace primary journals mental cost of color illustrations or even on paper, just as it has begun to replace sound recordings is much lower in an elec- secondary services on paper. But what tronic context than with paper. Already kinds of electronic services will these be? Mosaic pages contain pictures and sounds Let me briefly touch on two possible in a great many contexts, and we can extrends. pect this kind of interface to spread. The If journals become electronic, for examlimitations of paper journals will be overple, their size could increase easily. There come. For example, we can anticipatejour- would be little difficultyfor a prestigious nal articles that contain data visualizajournal to become twice or four times as tion, such as synthesized animations of large. This might push marginal jourmolecular structure, and even the ability nals out of existence, as their papers went for the user to manipulate such images to better known publications, or it might (e.g., rotating a 3D molecular picture in just cause a great deal more junk to apthe article). Such software is already pear. Suppose the larger and better widely available outside of journals, and known journals take over from the smaller published articles could easily reference it. journals. Will this frustrate people-for Users should thus find the new elecexample, those in new interdisciplinary tronic journals more attractive than toareas-who are having trouble finding day's paper publications. places to publish? Or will smaller journals Another important item for readers is thrive in the electronic world because, quality control. Scientists rely heavily on with procedures somewhere between the names of the authors, even in peer- those of a traditional journal and those of reviewed journals. In a file that was not a bulletin board, they might have lower reviewed, they would probably rely encosts? My guess is that we will find the tirely on the work of people they already small journals retreating into such an inknew. This would not help enlarge access termediate state, becoming much like
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Figure 7. Scepter screen.
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some informal conference proceedings currently published. Although journals may get larger, the articles in them may get smaller. Computers incur little overhead distributing small items and, provided the journals can handle the reviewing, authors may move toward publishing many small snippets rather than saving up their data for a large article. Traditionally,the desire to increase the number of one's publications has been cited as the reason to produce smaller articles. On the other hand, it is easy with computers to quickly link together several publications on a topic so that the readers can assemble for themselves the equivalent longer article that might have been published in the past. The chemical laboratory will change to include more facilities for accessing the literature. This will mean, in many cases, upgrading the networks in the laboratories and increasing the amount of computer support provided to the chemists. This will benefit not only those who are searching the literature but also those who will access databases of chemical properties and programs that suggest syntheses or analyze spectra. The networks within the laboratory as well as the network connections from the lab are probably going to be upgraded. Currently a typical local net, whether Appletalk, token ring, or Ethernet, runs at 10 Mb/s (megabits/s) or lower, and connections out of many laboratories may be dialed up only at 9.6 Kb/s or 14.4 Kb/s. There will be an increasing demand for 100 Mb/s either on optical fiber or high-qualitytwisted pair (called FDDI and CDDI, respectively) within the lab and external connections ranging from ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) at 56 Kb/s to the Internet at 1.5 Mb/s. Considerably higher speeds are practical but currently expensive. The National Science Foundation is upgrading parts of the national research network backbone to 155 Mb/s ATM (asynchronous transmission mode). However, given that most bench workstations are not supercomputers, higher speeds are likely to be a few years off. Perhaps many chemists will find it more important to upgrade the display quality and speed of their local workstations than to try to match the state of the art in network connectivity.
Laboratory management must consider the tradeoffs between connectivity and local resources, between sharing programs/databases and buying multiple copies and, in general, between computing and traditional instrumentation. With time, more instruments will be connected to general-purpose machines that are also useful for literature searches, but that again will make them more complex and increase the demand for computer support to the laboratory. Laboratory staff also will have to decide whether to attempt to standardize machines, giving up
Laboratory management must consider the trudeoffi between connectivity and local resowces and between comfitding and traditional i m t mmentation. some local optimization in the interest of lower support costs. What will the chemist get for all this effort and money spent on computer support used for searching the literature? At this point, it is only possible to speculate. Presumably, chemists will be able to pick out appropriate techniques more rapidly, work more efficiently, and match their problems to solutions more perfectly. The economic models used may affect this; we do not yet know whether publishers will charge by the byte, the minute, the page, the month, or the chemist. From the standpoint of using the literature effectively, chemists hope that publishers will use a charging system that encourages browsing and reading, not something that pushes only toward single searches. Printing journal articles to read and study elsewhere will be possible, which may encourage the most effective use of existing material. One suspects that as integrated systems are developed, chem-
ists will move toward accessing databases and analytical programs as well as general literature searching. Finally, electronic publication will make searching in the library much easier. Does this mean that library work will increase while the fraction of time chemists devote to bench research declines? For example, the rise of computers in architecture has meant that simulation has replaced model building. If chemists start to rely too heavily on the literature and too little on actual bench measurement, there is a danger that people will believe everything they read and believe too much. In this scenario, the role of librarians will increase, chemists will spend more time in the library, and they may lose some of their bench skills. Is this any more serious than the replacement of many wet chemical analytical procedures with MS and other spectroscopic and chromatographic methods? I expect that we will reach a balance; I hope that we reach it fast enough to avoid a major disaster in the process and that innovation does not suffer as people find answers in the literature rather than thinking of new things themselves. We can anticipate a future in which information arrives on the screen, arrives in greater quantity, and becomes more important to the chemist than it is today. References (1) McKnight, C. ASLIB Pruc. 1993,45, 7-10. (2) Hoffman, M. M. et a1.J. Am. Suc. Znt Sci. 1 9 9 3 , 4 4 , 4 4 and 452. (3) Egan, D. E. et al. Proceedings ufHrpertext '91; Association for Computing Machinery: New York, 1991. (4) Ferguson, E. Engineering and the Mind's Eye; MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1992.
After receiving a Ph.D. in chemical physics, Michael E. Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories. Since 1984 he has managed the computer science research group at Bellcore (Rm 2A385, 4 4 5 South St., Morristown, NJ 07960-1910; e-mail:
[email protected]). He is best known for work in electronic libraries and for writing Unix system utilities, including those for table printing (tbl), lexical analyzers (lex), and intersystem mail (uucp). His other interests include document production and retrieval software, computer networks, computer languages, and human-computer interfaces.
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