Introducing Chemistry Undergraduate Students to Online Chemical Information Retrieval Yecheskel Wolman The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91904, Israel During the last few years a revolution has been taking place in the science library-the increased use of automated literature searching, in general, and of online information retrieval, in oarticular. Most of the undereraduate chemistrv maiors (even those who do not go on to graduate studies) are going to be exposed very early in their professional career to this revolution. More and more of their literature searches will be computerized ones, which might be run by a "middleman"-the information specialist-or by themselves using a suitable software package. However, this re;oluti& and its short-range implication is hardly felt in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum. This situation should not surprise us a t all, as the whole problem of teaching chemical information retrieval is a very acute one (.1.) .
Few introduction to andlor teaching programs covering online chemical information retrieval to the chemistrv undergraduate student have been reported in the literature (2-7). . . All those oroerams suffer from one or two of the following disadvantages.
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1) Hieh cost (2.3.5.7). . . . . Vendors cwrentlv charee $138-118 an hour fo;the CAS chemical suhstanees dicti&arv files.. 5 6.U 8~an hour for the (:AS bibliographic files, up tcr SU.15 for all online typed record and up ro SU2X for an offlineprint~dword. On topof rh~s one has to add the eammunicationfees which could be as high as $40-45 an how (depending upon one's global location, type of rvnneetion to the c
