Flashback

Two meetings organised by the Chemical Society in collaboration with the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) of the American Chemical Society recently took place at the Middlesex Hospital, London, and the University of Nottingham. These meetings demonstrated the search capabilities of CAS’s Chemical Titles (CT) computer tapes, which list titles, authors and journal references of 725 of the most productive chemical journals. 

Chemical searches from the audiences at the two meetings were punched onto IBM data cards and the information transmitted via telephone land-lines to the IBM Data Centre in London where a computer carried out the searches.

The Chemical Society’s information research unit at Nottingham has a programme which enables UK chemists to search CT tapes on a KDF-9 computer.

There are plans by the Chemical Abstracts Service to develop a registry system to assign numbers to chemical compounds of known structure to aid identification and information retrieval. It is still in an experimental stage - 444,000 compounds have been assigned numbers at present.

Chemistry in Britain (January 1967)

Ed. Find out how many structures CAS’s registry contains today compared with other databases in our database feature.