SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
Program Seeks To Apply Electronic Technology To Chemical Information lanning grants for projects aimed at speeding access to chemical information through electronic technology have been made to eight universities and two colleges by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The project proposals resulting from the $15,000 grants will be evaluated by the foundation, which expects to award up to two implementation grants of $75,000 each in 1995. When the foundation issued its request for proposals for the planning grants, it ''touched on a nerve/' says Robert L. Lichter, executive director of the foundation. Although there was only one month between the request for proposals and the deadline for their receipt, 86 proposals were submitted. The large and quick response, Lichter notes, stems from a widespread concern about costs of maintaining access to information. It also indicates the magnitude of the challenge facing libraries and their users and the breadth of the commitment to meeting it. The foundation views efforts in chemical information as particularly timely because of the nearly simultaneous rise in the costs of science library services and the rapid development of electronic technology that can be applied to producing, archiving, and retrieving information. According to Lichter, the foundation looked particularly for proposals driven by the needs of chemical scientists that involved collaborations between librarians and chemical faculty. The proposals chosen for funding encompass an array of approaches (project descriptions are in parentheses): • Washington University, St. Louis (evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of the distributive access model of the electronic library) and Texas Wesleyan University, Fort Worth (undergraduate cooperative access to information resources) will establish "virtual" libraries through prototype networks and will evaluate the costs relative to a traditional library. • Brown University, Providence (elec-
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tronic distribution of preprints of chemical publications); Northern Illinois University, DeKalb (establishment of an Internet gopher site for chemistry information); and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick (a filtered alerting service for new chemical publications) will examine uses of the Internet for access to and distribution of both published articles and preprints, whereas Trinity College, Hartford, Conn, (development of a networked gateway to local and remote chemical literature sources) will explore alternative gateways. • Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass. (development of a grapliical input query for retrieval of chemical information) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (application of a natural-language ex-
pert system for access to the chemical literature) will develop query systems using grapliical input or natural-language expert systems that will be transparent to users at workstations. • Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (conversion of pre-1988 chemical literature to electronic form for archiving and retrieving) and Yale University (electronic seminar system: creation of a digital library through digital articles and hypertext links) will address the effective use of the chemical literature from different perspectives, which requires not only that future publications be prepared in electronic form but also that current and older literature be efficiently incorporated into new approaches. ]amcs Krieger
Carbonylation proceeds via oxacarbyne complex Chemists at Osaka University, Japan, One of the two familiar carbonylation have found what seems to be a third fun- mechanisms proceeds by migration of a damental mechanism for incorporating hydrocarbon group or hydrogen, R, in carbon monoxide catalytically into organic compounds [/. Am. Chem. Soc, 115, 11614 (1993)1. The reacNew carbonylation mechanism tion is unusual in that it carbonyforms oxacarbyne complex lates a diacetylene. Additionally, it introduces two molecules of carbon monoxide sequentially. Chemistry professor Sliinji Murai discovered the new reaction in work with Naoto Chatani, Yoshiya Fukumoto, and Tomohide Ida. At this early stage of development, it is impossible to say whether this third mechanism will ever be the basis of an industrial process, or whether it will ever even find wide use for making research compounds. However, any such catalytic method has at least industrial potential. And study of the intermediate and type of reactivity in this new mechanism may lead to ideas of reactions different from the one announced HSiR3= fe/t-Butyldimethylsilane from Osaka.
