Before dealing about the specific subject of this paper it may be useful to make some general points about library and information work in England. This will enable comparisons to be made between the overall situation in England and that which exists in South Africa.

England, or even the United Kingdom, is extremely small in comparison with most countries in Africa. However, the density of population, currently about 56m, and the historical development of the country within Europe over the centuries means that there are very many organizations with comprehensive libraries and information centers. This combination of density and proximity of resources has resulted in extensive informal as well as formal information networks being developed to assist industry, commerce and academia. The phrases information centers and information networks are significant because, in the United Kingdom, more so than in the rest of Europe, libraries have long since ceased to be depositories of documents, well-guarded by librarians acting as keepers. The emphasis has increasingly moved towards providing answers to queries, without restricting the potential sources used and ranging from classic monographic items, to data tabulations in print or on electronic media, to experts in the field.

Over the last seven to eight years, money available for library and information resources has diminished steadily in real terms. The effects of this have been gradual across different sectors, with university and national libraries being later than industry and commerce in having to reduce the availability of document collections and of services in order to save money.

In general, the view of accountants and fund providers has been that by organizing work on a computer or being able to collaborate with other organizations over computer networks, less money needs to be spent on physical books and periodicals collections. In addition, because staff can work so much faster with a computer (or so it has been said!) then fewer staff are needed to do the same amount of work.

The Library and Information Centre of the Royal Society of Chemistry, of which the author is the manager, has been fully involved in all these changes.

As the Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) was founded in 1841. The Library, as it was known until 1992, was one of the original components of the Society when it was founded (Bud 1980). After its foundation in 1841 the principal dates in the history of the Society are as shown in the following:

Under its Royal Charter it has an obligation to foster and encourage the growth and application of chemical science, by the dissemination of chemical knowledge; to establish, uphold and advance the standards of competence and conduct of those who practice chemistry as a profession; to serve the public interest by acting in an advisory, consultative or representative capacity in matters relating to the science and practice of chemistry; and to advance the aims and objectives of members of the Society so far as they relate to the advancement of the science or practice of chemistry.

As the needs of the Society's members and the chemical community as a whole have developed over the years, so the LIC has accommodated these changes (Clifford, 1916; Hoey, 1991). In particular, over the last few years, there has been an increasing demand for non-members of the Society to be able to use the comprehensive information/library services and facilities which are offered. The Library and Information Centre (LIC), was renamed from "Library" in 1992 in order to reflect the true nature of its work. Based in London, it contributes in no small measure to the achievement of the Society objectives.

Currently, the RSC is organized into two principal groups in order to carry out the Charter obligations: Learned and Professional, and Information Services. The LIC is placed within the latter group, which also produces primary, secondary and tertiary publications, books and electronic databases.

The headquarters, including the LIC, is situated in the center of London in the prestigious Burlington House on Piccadilly, with about 70 staff. The majority of the Information Services group, are included in the 200 staff based at Cambridge, 70 miles from London. About 30 staff operate a publications Distribution Center at Letchworth, 30 miles away.

2. STRENGTHENING LINKS

In mid-1993 the Society absorbed the information service previously offered by the UK organization called the Chemical Industries Association (CIA), when that body was restructured. The new service was named Chemical Industry Enquiry Service, CIES for short. It was offered on a fee-paying basis to non-RSC members and free to members and Corporate Members of the LIC. The motivation as far as the RSC management was concerned was the hope that revenue (i.e. a cash inflow) would accrue to the Society. This is an all-important aspect in the current, general economic circumstances. Later in the year, the operation of that service was transferred into the control of the LIC as being the logical place for it within the structure of the Society (Hoey, 1995).

At about the same time, the departmental structure of the Information Services group of the RSC was revised, and the LIC became more closely involved with departments operating from the Cambridge office. As a result it has become possible to participate more easily in new product and service developments and, for electronic products in particular, to ensure that efforts were streamlined and duplicate effort eliminated.

In late 1993, staff job descriptions and responsibilities in LIC were reviewed as the result of the loss of a senior member of staff. In May 1994, the new post of Senior Marketing officer was filled, with the objective of bringing some systematization to the hitherto irregular efforts to market the services of the LIC and link together the development of its services with the products marketed by the other departments in the RSC.

By early 1995, LIC became the first RSC department to offer remote access to users outside the Society to a database resident on an in-house computer; its books catalogue was offered to Corporate Members via Telnet. In the middle of that year this became one of the first offerings on the RSC World Wide Web server. Both these efforts involved detailed collaboration with other departments.

Each of these activities will be discussed in turn, below.

3. DEVELOPING A COMMERCIAL INFORMATION SERVICE

The LIC offers a comprehensive library and information resource to anyone in the world who needs it. Services and facilities offered by LIC include the following:

The transfer of the information service from the CIA to the RSC was arranged in such a way that it was agreed that the CIA would, in future, refer all information and data queries to the LIC. In practice some research questions are referred in error; these are passed back to the relevant CIA expert.

The LIC has always received and answered queries on some commercial topics, but this was a relatively small part of its work in comparison to the technical and scientific component of its work. However, this meant that in 1993, it already possessed many of the reference resources needed in order to answer the questions which began to be received from CIA members and others who might have first contacted the CIA. It had also charged for some services but on an advance payment basis whereas, in order to cope with the new customer-base of non-members wanting information in an ad-hoc fashion, very quickly, it was necessary to negotiate charges to be made by credit card, at the time of each query being received, usually on the phone. The new charging policy also affected CIA members and other users of the CIA radically, because their service had been free when it was in-house.

After about a year of feeling our way, with staff learning new telephone skills, setting up a new accountancy procedure and buying in some more electronic databases and printed reference tools, the LIC was able to deal confidently with business-type queries on the following subjects on a worldwide basis, in addition to the established service for technical and scientific queries:
 

• Producers and suppliers of chemicals

• Equipment and service providers

• Tradename clarification and owner of tradename details

• Legislative and regulatory matters

• Company data

• Chemical industry and production statistics; price trends

• Identification of market research

4. CREATING LINKS WITH OTHER CHEMISTRY INFORMATION PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

The RSC produces 16 primary and 5 review periodicals, some 50 books per year, 23 secondary periodicals and 13 electronic versions of these. All these are held by and used in the LIC. A current awareness Search Service is available from the Cambridge offices. Editorial staff have always used the LIC resources to check bibliographic accuracy etc. In the last few years, steps have been taken to ensure that subscribers to these services are all aware that the LIC can support them by providing document delivery follow-on. Where a potential subscriber needs to evaluate products s/he can test them at the LIC in person or buy them in an ad-hoc fashion via requests to LIC.

All the RSC online products are used in the LIC and its CD-ROM products are available in the LIC for use directly by visiting researchers or by staff in response to queries. These are:

A common-stock policy is now operated by the British Library in order to save money by reducing the number of chemistry-related periodicals held by both the London-based, Science Reference Information Service and the Yorkshire-based, Document Supply Centre. Together with the cutbacks in university budgets for books and periodicals this means that chemistry information resources, in the London area particularly, are much more limited than hitherto. All these organizations and LIC belong to a group, recently renamed "London Chemistry Library Group" which holds discussions regularly in order to keep abreast with operational aspects in each others organizations, in an attempt to minimize customer hardship. Because of its Charter obligations for the "dissemination of chemical knowledge" and its "obligation to foster and encourage the growth and application of chemical science" the RSC has so far supported the LIC in its endeavors to retain its collections intact and make them even more accessible by using new information technology. Another advantage that the LIC can offer the chemistry community is the fact that almost all of its collections and resources are at one location and available for use within a few minutes.

5. CHEMISTRY INFORMATION AND THE INTERNET

The RSC offered its first computerized information service in 1967 (Barker et al., 1970); this was a current awareness service, and the forerunner of the Search Services facility still offered, as mentioned above. Other services followed, using first the online hosts and then CD-ROM technology. The LIC entered the electronic information business in 1977, by offering online searches from an Extel terminal with a Post Office 300 baud modem and subsequently has stayed at the leading edge of information technology usage in pursuit of the effective provision of chemistry library/information services to users (Hoey, 1992).

The last five years, however, have seen a rapid changes in the way information can be made available to the chemistry community as a whole, largely because of the development of personal computers (pcs) and communications networks, whilst the costs for the hardware and software involved have decreased (Hoey, 1996, October). "End-users", meaning the people with the problems to be solved and the information needs to be satisfied, are now able to afford, understand and access relevant in-house and networked databases themselves, if they wish. This, perhaps surprisingly, increases rather than decreases the responsibility of information and library workers to help provide solutions to problems, by giving guidance to those who need it, about how to use all the latest systems and resources.

For the LIC, this has meant continuing to adapt; its fully integrated internal library management system is networked around the whole of the department and the Society, allowing access to both internal, pc-based, and networked external information resources relevant to the chemistry community. Note the deliberate emphasis on "information relevant for those in the chemistry community" a term now itself used in the widest sense. Chemists may need non-chemistry information to do their jobs effectively and vice versa. For example, banks and other non-main-stream chemical businesses may need a good knowledge of the chemical industry simply in order to make investments etc. In general, there has been an increasing awareness that industry sectors can benefit from one another by the exchange of information and by examination of related industries and competitors' performances, so that cross-sector information processing has become more routine.

Today, LIC is equipped to tackle any chemistry-related library and information problem. For example, requests for copies and loans of periodicals and books have been received by email since mid-1990, first via Telecom Gold and later, in addition, via the UK academic network (JANET) and then the Internet. Nowadays, about one third of all document delivery requests are received via email. Plans are in hand, working with major database hosts and owners, to offer their customers digitized document delivery in addition to the current methods for satisfaction of requests resulting from searches of their secondary databases. It is likely that when the RSC primary periodicals become available in a fully digitized form, early in 1997, these will be the first that the LIC offers to deliver in digital form over the Internet.

The first services on the Internet, email and Telnet, considerably opened up the information resources which the LIC could use to help its clients. Just as questions have been received via email increasingly over the years, so can replies be sent by that route, saving retyping or postage costs and reducing delivery times, particularly important for overseas clients. Email "conferencing" or discussion groups, such as the "Chemical Information Sources Discussion List (CHMINF-L) (Wiggins, 1996/1) have become an invaluable backup source for otherwise unsolvable queries, particularly for small libraries. Telnet was, and remains, an extremely useful way of checking other organizations' holdings, the accuracy of bibliographic references or, indeed, making resource purchases.

As noted above, online access to the LIC books catalogue was made available via Telnet in early 1995. When the RSC World Wide Web (WWW) server became operational on the Internet, the LIC was one of the first departments of the Society to have a presence on the WWW, with its books catalogue as the linchpin. Recently, the periodicals holdings of LIC, about 3000 titles in all, stretching back to the seventeenth Century has been added to its WWW pages. Both these catalogues can be searched and requests made to the LIC about them or any other facet of LIC's business directly via the WWW.

Many "traditional online hosts" are now making their services available over the Internet with a WWW interface joining the somewhat disparate services that were initially offered. This means that, gradually, a substantial, coherent body of information relevant to chemists is becoming accessible in "one place", albeit a virtual place! Meanwhile, compendiums such as "Chemical Information Sources from Indiana University" (Wiggins, 1996/2), remain invaluable.

As in-house networks become more robust and match up better with external networks so it will be possible for individuals and individual library and information services to utilize the WWW with a minimum of fuss. The LIC has for some time been the focal point for such use at the RSC in London. It will shortly extend its facilities so that visitors to the LIC will be able to sit down in the Reading Room area and check their own email, make WWW searches and read full-text periodicals or fully electronic publications which, for example, may include three dimensional images of molecules on screen such as in the CLIC project ongoing in the UK at present (James, 1996).

LIC offers a total of eighteen CD databases for use by visitors to the Society or by staff. A long-overdue project to make these accessible over a network instead of at one place should benefit from the improved network facilities generally available now, and from the possibility to load more CD databases directly onto a pc server in cache memory, hence speeding up retrieval speeds. At the same time, work is progressing towards making digitized images of a selection from the LIC's large historical collection (Hoey, 1996, December). This is made up of monographs, portraits and Society archives. The historical monographs and portraits collections extend back to the sixteenth Century, the latter group being increasingly of interest to publishers of directories both in hardcopy and electronic media. Initially it is planned to make a CD database of these as a precursor to making images available via the WWW. The Society archives include many fascinating documents in manuscript written by famous chemists of the nineteenth Century. Page images of these manuscripts on the WWW, as of the portraits, will reduce the need to handle the originals when reference is made to them. Apart from the obvious possibilities for increasing the revenue made from sales of the images, it is hoped that scholars from all over the world will benefit from the opportunity to make preliminary assessments of documents which they may wish to research, hence saving traveling costs.

The past few years have been remarkable for the pace of developments in the use of new information technology in chemistry-related library and information services. The Library and Information Centre of the RSC is remaining at the forefront in the usage of the latest systems and resources in order to be able to continue to offer the broad-based chemical community the best possible means for achieving effective answers to their business and scientific problems.
 
 

REFERENCES

Barker, F. H. et al. (1970). Report on the Evaluation of an Experimental Computer-based Current Awareness Service for Chemists. United Kingdom Chemical Information Service. Research Report, No. 1. London: Chemical Society.

Bud, R.F. (1980). The Discipline of Chemistry: the Origins and Early Years of the Chemical Society of London. Thesis.

Clifford, F.W. (1916, February). The library of the Chemical Society. Library World, pp 228-231.

Hoey, P. O'N. (1991, February). The library today. Chemistry in Britain. pp 153-154.

Hoey, P. O'N. (1992). The Data Trek automated library management system in the Library of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Program, 26 (1): 19-28.

Hoey, P. O'N. (1995). "Developing a fee-paying commercial information service from a learned society's scientific library". Paper presented at the Second International Conference, Crimea 95, Eupatory, Ukraine, 10th-18th June, 1995. Proceedings volume 2, pp 79-85.

Hoey, P. O'N. (1996, December). "Development in chemistry information resources since 1962", To be published in Journal of Information Science.

Hoey P. O'N. (1996, October). "Preserving the Society's past", To be published in Chemistry in Britain..

James, D. CLIC project details may be found on WWW at the web site with URL: http://chemistry.rsc.org/rsc/clic.htm

Wiggins G. (1996/1) For Internet users who wish to join the CHMINF-L, send an e-mail message to: LISTSERV@IUBVM.UCS.INDIANA.EDU

The message should read: SUBSCRIBE CHMINF-L firstname lastname

Wiggins G. (1996/2) Private communication. "Chemical Information Sources from Indiana University" is available at http://www.indiana.edu/~cheminfo