Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 08:53:41 -0500 (EST)
From: "Hugh A. Blackmer" 
To: "Barbara J. Brown" 
Cc: morton.c@liberty.uc.wlu.edu
Subject: Chem Abs yet again...

You might like to glance over the latest Oberlin Group maunderings about
What To Do About CA:

http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/scilib/caober.html

It looks like there's a 70% increase somewhere in the near future (says
Kathleen Kenny at Bowdoin), but Annette didn't know anything about that
when I mentioned it to her yesterday.

After YEARS of no usage by Chemistry faculty I had a call from Lisa Alty
wanting the STN password so she could try searching from home via the Web.
She said she'd get back to me with a report of how it went.

To summarize briefly what I see of our use: it's concentrated in the weeks
of R.E. Lee activity, and during the rest of the year I get at most 2-3
requests for searches in CA, which I do quickly in DIALOG.  The fact that
we don't have people doing honors thesis work in Chemistry is the main
thing that separates us from the other Oberlin Group libraries --as I've
opined on plenty of occasions, there's essentially NO use (or even
possible use) in the teaching of any but the most advanced Chemistry
courses, and since several of those are sort of biomedical, MEDLINE is
often a more relevant source anyway.  Getting RID of paper CA looks to me
like it would be a VERY hard sell, even though it's rarely used... 

Hugh Blackmer      hblackme@wlu.edu    or    blackmer.h@wlu.edu