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stock boom because there are simply not enough shares to be traded. Now, Thermo Instrument Systems is buying all the outstanding shares and drawing in the offspring companies. ThermoSpectra and Thermo Vision have already been reintegrated. According to Chapman, the eventual plan is to have a single, publicly traded company focused on instrumentation. The timing of the draw-ins for the remaining companies will vary, says Chapman. Stay tuned.
Pay-per-use FT-IR and Raman Nicolet and Galactic Industries announced FTIRsearch.com, an Internet-based service for searching FT-IR and Raman spectral libraries. The site, which is expected to be fully operational on April 17, provides access to >71,000 FT-IR and ~16,000 Raman spectra. It is tailored for the less-frequent IR user, charging on a pay-per-use basis.
GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY ANDI questionnaire Attention chromatographers and mass spectrometrists: The Analytical Data Interchange (ANDI) subcommittee of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) needs your help. The ANDI protocols for chromatography and MS data files have been approved, but they are about to be revised and possibly even merged together. Before any changes are made to the standards, however, the ANDI subcommittee would like to hear what you, the end user, wants. A questionnaire is posted on the ASTM Web site (http://www.astm.org/COMMIT/E49quest.pdf). Anyone interested in providing input to the ANDI efforts should fill out the questionnaire and fax it back to the ASTM subcommittee E01 manager (Tom O’Toole, fax 610-832-9666). ANDI is an effort to standardize software for analytical instruments so that data files generated on one manufacturer’s system can be read by another manufacturer’s system (Anal. Chem. 2000, 72, 103 A).
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