26 Mar 1999
I need to make a place in which to put together the various bits that have to do with crises in information access in the sciences, principally the controversies and problems surrounding ISI's Web of Science, Chemical Abstracts, the various conundrums of online access, full text, various products that purport to improve end-user access to journals, etc. I hope it'll eventually become orderly, but at least for starters it's just a collection of the links that ought to be grouped together.

Oberlin Group Science Librarians on CA and alternatives (a listserv flurry of March 1999)

my summary of thoughts of the moment re: the above

ACS Accreditation: Library and Chemical Literature and Information Retrieval requirements

20 April
Review of Web of Science (after a trial in Fall 1997)

summary of citation indexing, April 1999

Instructions from Princeton University Biology Library, for Science citation index, Web version

I see in the March/April 1999 STNews that they now have CAOLD ("chemistry-related literature and patents from 1907-1966") available online.

30 June
A desideratum that occurred to me today and seems worth writing out in some detail:
Getting a sense of the moving frontier of science within a subdiscipline is easy enough --the non-primary articles in Science tell tales every week, and if one is an investigator in a particular subdiscipline, one just knows what's going on. But systematic means to explore the moving frontier across the broad spectrum aren't readily available. Citation indexing would serve nicely, if there was a way to automate the clumping of publications according to the overlap of their citations --sort of an automated and generalizing "find more like this one" in which the search algorithm is heavily weighted by bibliographic content. To make it really useful, one would want to be able to use this sort of data mining to explore disciplines, subdisciplines, etc., for example asking the empirical question: what's going on in Biology now? and then being directed to a data-based subdivision of biology's subfields and sub-sub-fields. This is a massive project, the sort of thing ISI is in fact equipped to do, though the reason to do it is mostly pedagogical, not revenue-producing.