Swain Library News

To update their infrastructure, all content on the the Royal Society of Chemistry’s web site will be unavailable on:

• Monday, 28th April
• Tuesday, 6th May
• Monday, 12th May

Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and SciFinder Scholar

SciFinder Scholar 2007 for Mac OS X, released in June 2007, was found to be incompatible with Apple Intel powered computers using Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), released in October 2007. A workaround is now available. This is a “quick fix” pending further development investigation, code change, and quality testing.

CAS recognizes the importance of the Mac platform to the scientific community and is actively investigating the reported problems. A change to memory initialization handling in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) appears to be the cause of the problems reported. SciFinder developers are actively working on creating solutions.

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“The American Chemical Society observes Earth Day with the Chemists Celebrate Earth Day (CCED) program. ACS offers a suite of events, contests and educational resources that can be used by ACS members, chemical educators, and chemistry enthusiasts to illustrate the positive role that chemistry plays in the world. Learn more about the celebration and how you can get involved.”

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Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it’s just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.

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One new feature that RSC has just introduced is a structure and sub-structure searching function to help you find relevant articles by drawing your own molecule using ChemAxon’s MarvinSketch or pasting in a ChemDraw or ISIS/Draw file.

They’ve also widened the compound identifiers to include groups and relationships via the ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) ontology. Links to patent information and to compounds in PubChem have also been added.

Covering the years 1974-2006, SPRESIweb 2.6 version developed by InfoChem is an integrated scientific database containing over 6.1 million molecules, 3.85 million reactions, and 28 million factual data entries that were extracted from 636,000 references, and 164,000 patents. For more details: SPRESIweb description (pdf).

Users can identify which substances contained in their hit lists are commercially available directly during the search and order them right away through the hyperlink to homepage/online catalogue of the particular supplier. This new feature allows also supplier specific structure searches. Results also include link to ACD’s I-Lab.

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Swain’s new book list for March 2008 is now available:

Swain Library monthly new book list