Chemical Abstracts Service (known as CAS to those who care) is arguably the most important database provider and vendor in the chemical information field. Conveniently, it's located 4 hours away from Bloomington in Columbus, OH. For my Chem Info Retrieval course, we took a field trip on Tuesday. :) Although it was 8-9 hours round trip, we got a good 3 hours in at their home offices.
We saw one of their editors at work, doing what CAS does -- indexing and abstracting chemical information. We saw the tools they use to go through a document, create the links and the indexing and the associations. This was super cool to see (because I'm a huge nerd). We had a couple of guys who seemed to exude "sales staff" give us presentations on STN Express and SciFinder Scholar, two of their most popular access products. Too bad we already knew everything they were telling us. Then we saw the Data Center. Picture a command room in some sort of James Bond movie, complete with big screen computer displays showing intricate network diagrams and clocks showing time in cities around the world. Yeah. Also, we saw the server room. You know how CAS has a file (called REGISTRY) that contains data on over 25 million chemical compounds and 50 million biological sequences (DNA and protein)? Yeah, I saw the servers that that file is stored on. Crazy.
So that was cool. Also fun to talk to Alison Rollins for most of the trip and foist my music tastes on various people in the car. Hee. In other news:
- Some bike race is this weekend. I don't know.
- The Twins r0x0red the Tigers last night -- 5 runs in the first inning. Nice.
- I have a lot of stuff to do. I may not be posting again for a while.
Yay weekend! Too bad it will be busy with homework... sigh. That's the end of the semester for you. Peace, friends.