A Symbolic Building: A new era in scientific information systems is unfolding

The dedication of the new Chemical Abstracts Service building marks something more than the completion of another construction. It symbolizes a whole new level of techniques of handling chemical and other scientific information. The change is more than growth in volume and complexity. A new era in handling information for the scientist is unfolding, and the CAS building is a marker for a new order of sophistication as well as of magnitude. The Chemical Abstracts Service now is a huge system, but it is more than ever a developing system. The funds invested in research through CAS each year now are greater than was the annual cost of operating Chemical Abstracts before World War II. Where success has attended efforts to keep an entire body of facts organized, related, and retrievable, as has been done in chemistry, scientists are bred to taking the literature for granted. Perhaps their greatest shock to date, ...