to provide the optimum service and meet the needs of the future.

Dr. Shank, director of libraries of the Smithsonian Institution, surveyed 131 library collections in both the public and private sectors of the science community in his 1966-1967 project sponsored by the New York Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency (METRO) and financed by a $40,000 grant from the New York State Science and Technology Foundation. METRO, a non-profit corporation established to promote cooperation among research libraries in the area, is partially funded through the New York State Education Department, Division of Library Development, as one of nine such systems of libraries in the state. It has 50 member libraries with nearly 25 million volumes in their collections.

Dr. Shank's report shows that there are more than 60,000 engineers, scientists, and teachers in these fields in the five boroughs of New York City and in Westchester. This sector of the community comprises some 10% of the total of scientific and technical personnel in the nation. They have access to almost three million scientific and technical books, periodicals, and reports. In order to offer the public a program that would realize the fullest potential in scientific information facilities, Dr. Shank envisions a new Science and Technology Information Center in the New York Public Library, replacing the existing Science and Technology Division.

The State Education Department has provided a special grant of $48,000 with which METRO can begin the implementation of a cooperative acquisitions and storage center, one of the 18 recommendations in the report. Other recommendations in the report are for supplementary academic library collections to serve the needs of area students in science and engineering, a central advisory and referral service, a central serials supply service to provide photocopies and interlibrary loans, a communications network for rapid transfer of information, a central translation facility, and a vigorous informational and educational program for scientists, engineers, and librarians.

A limited number of copies of the report will be available on interlibrary loan. Requests should be addressed to the METRO Clearinghouse, 11 West 40th Street, New York, N. Y. 10018.

Regional Medical Library Grants

The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Health Sciences Library of the University of Washington, Seattle, have been designated as Regional Medical Libraries by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). A grant to the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston has been extended for another year.

The Library of the College of Physicians will use its $199,120 grant to provide expanded services to health professionals in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and southern New Jersey. It will be designated as the Mid-Eastern Regional Medical Library. The Health Sciences Library received a grant of $124,040 to serve as the Pacific Northwest Regional Medical Library, making bio-medical information more readily available to health professionals in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana.

Both libraries will offer interlibrary loan and photocopying services and demand search bibliographies for individual requesters from MEDLARS (NLM's computerized Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System).

Renewal of the grant to the Countway Library (serving the New England states) provides $254,733 for continuation and expansion of its Regional Medical library services. (Countway was the first library to be funded as a Regional Medical Library.)

Registration of Compounds in Chemical Abstracts

To permit the registration of chemical compounds from Volumes 69 and 70 (July 1968 to June 1969) of Chemical Abstracts, the Chemical Abstracts Service has been awarded a $1,119,564 contract by the National Science Foundation. The processing will involve the identification, selection, naming, structure drawing, editing, indexing, and computer registration of an estimated 510,000 new chemical substances reported in the world literature and the listing of their names and bibliographic references. The funds also will provide for support of selected developmental projects in processing of large files.

The work will continue the buildup of registry files started in 1965 with the registration of substances being indexed in Volume 62 and

continuing since that time with subsequent volumes. More than 900,000 individual compounds have been registered so far.

This project forms part of the work necessary for the development of a discipline-oriented, computer-based chemical information system centered in the American Chemical Society. It is anticipated that NSF will continue to help support the registration of compounds from the current literature until the developing system can become operational.

Government Project Reporting Study

A study of government-wide systems for reporting on scientific and technical research projects will be undertaken by Peat, Marwick, Livingston and Company. The National Science Foundation has funded the study with a $174,687 contract.

In recognition of the need for greater coordination among government agencies concerned with scientific and technical research, the study will be government-wide in nature, requiring the cooperation of all these agencies. The purpose is to develop a realistic plan for implementing a government-wide project reporting system that will ultimately permit free, efficient, and relatively complete exchange of data on research and development projects sponsored or performed by Federal agencies. The ideal system contemplated would be implemented entirely through use of existing agency facilities and would require only policylevel guidance for its continued operation.

The President's Office of Science and Technology will monitor the study. Peat, Marwick, Livingston and Company will finish the study in about six months.

Survey of Scientific Societies

A contract for a survey of professional sci

entific societies has been awarded to Wolf Re search and Development Corporation by th National Science Foundation. Work under th $21,900 contract should be completed by De cember 1968.

New FID Study Group

A Study Group for Revision of the Universa Decimal Classification in the Field of Chemis try and Chemical Technology (C54/66) ha been established by the United States Nationa Committee for the International Federation fo Documentation (FID). The Group is under th chairmanship of Kurt Loening, chairman o the American Chemical Society's Committe on Nomenclature. It will work in cooperation with the international FID Study Committee whose secretariat is in England.

Persons interested in contributing to thi endeavor should contact Dr. Loening at Chem ical Abstracts Service, 2540 Olentangy Rive Road, Columbus, Ohio 43210.

CAS To Unify Input to Info System

To unify the input to the Chemical Abstract Service (CAS) computer-based information systems, the National Science Foundation ha signed a $162,180 contract with CAS for the necessary development effort. CAS will shif nomenclature and bibliographic data input op erations from 7010 to the 360 system computer creating in the process standardized, unified procedures in a more reliable, more efficient and less human-dependent system of accumu lating data banks. Paul E. Brunswick is proj ect officer.

This project on unified input is part of the computer-based, discipline-oriented chemica information system being developed.

Information Exchange Among Psychologists Promoted by National Science Foundation

Psychologists, like other scientists, need better ways to communicate their scientific findings. To help them develop a more flexible information system, which can interact with other systems in sister sciences, the National Science Foundation has granted $450,950 to the American Psychological Association (APA) for planning and design research.

The purpose of the project is to outline a program for new communication media for psychologists and to start it off. NSF funds will also enable APA to acquire capability for improving computer production of one of its important means of exchanging information, the publication Psychological Abstracts. A long-range plan covering the entire communication program is included in the project.

Within the next five to seven years a national information system for psychology is expected to emerge from this work.

Feasibility of Entomological Data Center To Be Studied

The feasibility of a center or other advanced system for the communication of entomological information will be determined in a National Science Foundation funded project. The Entomological Society of America (ESA) has received a grant of $42,950 for the project entitled "A System-Designed Entomological Data Center A Feasibility Study." R. H. Foote is the principal investigator.

Evaluations of the information needs of the entomological community and of the existing communication media available to that community will form the basis for the determination of feasibility. In these evaluations ESA and its contractor will make extensive use of questionnaires and will carry out a number of site visits as well as analysis of selected secondary publications.

NSF Provides Funds for Cooperative
Regional Computer Experiments

The National Science Foundation has awarded 55 grants in a program to determine the value and costs to educational institutions of sharing computers and related activities on a regional basis. The grants, totaling $3,124,700, were made in partial support of seven regional groups.

Each group includes one institution that will:

(a) serve as a regional computing center to the group, consisting of educational institutions including universities, colleges, junior colleges, and secondary schools;

(b) work with the other members of its group to develop computer-oriented curricula; and (c) train faculty and teachers of its own and member institutions in the uses of computers in education.

Each of these regional groups will share a different form of computing service, and each grouping will involve institutions with different educational characteristics. Some participating institutions will have computing services provided them for the first time while others will be able to extend or expand existing services.

Depending on the nature of the cooperative programs, some participating institutions received independent grants; in other cases all participation is supported through a single grant to the institution serving as the regional computing center.

The National Science Foundation plans to continue this experimental program for a second year in order to include a number of additional cooperative educational computing experiments. These regional computing activities are intended to serve as models for other nonparticipating institutions attempting to assess the role and costs of computing activities.

For further information, contact Special Project Section, Office of Computing Activities, National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C. 20550.

College Management Info System Planned in OE Research Project

A regional management information system was one of three major new research projects announced by the United States Office of Education (OE) as part of the national search for solutions to problems stemming from the boom in U.S. college attendance. The Office estimates that the college population will exceed 10 million by 1976. The other two projects, supported by OE's Bureau of Research involve planning in higher education and new methods of college construction.

The information project, to last five years, is a cooperative effort of 14 states to develop management information systems for their colleges and universities and state higher education agencies. One aim is to provide educational leaders with information about the costs and results of college and university programs so they can make better decisions about allocating resources.

The project will be administered by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

The investigators will identify the kinds of information needed to meet the reporting requirements of local, state, and Federal governments. They will set up a computer-based system of collecting and reporting compatible information that will satisfy specific local and state needs while permitting comparison of data among the 14 states. The project also will coordinate efforts throughout the region to facilitate exchange of information among the states.

The states involved are Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming-all members of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Educationplus Illinois.

Standards for Remote Computer
Operation Studied by NBS

The present and anticipated rapid growth in the number of persons having access to computers from remote terminals has led the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) Center for Com

puter Sciences and Technology to appraise the need for standardizing user procedures and data formats. John L. Little of the Computer Center has directed this work, which includes a study by Rockford Research Institute, Inc. Mr. Little and Calvin N. Mooers of Rockford conclude that the users' dialogue with the computer system can take place with the use of a small number of stylized terms, facilitating standardization.

Today more than 2,000 remote terminals have access to central computers; and it is expected that by 1972 something like 300,000 terminals will be incorporated in about 15,000 storage and processing complexes, large and small.

There is almost no agreement among the various systems on means of calling for the same operation. Computer systems now benefit from standarization in certain areas. On the media level, for example, magnetic tape is found to be of specified widths, thicknesses, and magnetic characteristics. Hollerith cards are of certain size and have punches of the size and locations that are readily machine recognizable.

Another area of successful standardization is data encoding. At present efforts are under way to standarize computer language; USASCII (The USA Standard Code for Information Interchange) may ultimately serve all federal and other computer users.

The NBS study found that the computer user community now needs standardization of procedures for communicating with the central computer. User signals to gain access to the system, to delete, and to stop an operation, for example, should be as universally recognized. Unfortunately, not enough similarity in usage exists among computer services to select for each expression a form that is a consensus; the codes suggested by any standarizing committee will no doubt be unfamiliar to most users. However, these standards should be selected and advanced now to avoid the greater cost if this is postponed.

* "Standards for user procedures and data formats in automated information systems and networks," by J. L. Little and C. N. Mooers, Proc. Spring Joint Comp. Conf., April 30-May 2, 1968 (Thompson Book Co., Washington, D.C.)

NLM Contracts for MEDLARS II

MEDLARS, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) computer-based Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, will undergo a major expansion and upgrading. A $2,037,505 contract has been awarded to the Computer Sciences Corporation of Los Angeles for the design, development, and program support for MEDLARS II.

The innovative MEDLARS, in operation since 1964, provides health professionals access to the world's biomedical journal literature. The system produces Index Medicus and many discipline-oriented and individualized bibliographies.

MEDLARS II will provide for an integrated, automated system for the performance of all major NLM functions. Automated support and control will be supplied from the time material is ordered from a publisher, through cataloging and indexing, to its appearance in a NLM publication or in response to a search request from an individual practitioner, scientist, or educator.

The heart of the MEDLARS II system will be a set of interrelated computer programs called Computer System for Medical Information Services (COSMIS). A major new data management system, COSMIS will enable person using MEDLARS II to address the computer in a language closely approximately conversational English.

The Computer Sciences Corporation contract does not include the computer equipment; NLM (through the General Services Administration) will procure an IBM 360-50 computer. An initial version of the expanded system should be operational by the middle of 1969 and an on-line version by mid-1970. Progressive im

provements will be made under the contract through 1971.

Computerized Blood Inventory System

Three research contracts for studies on the feasibility of a computer-based regional or national inventory system for whole blood, blood products, and blood donors have been awarded by the National Blood Resource Program of the National Heart Institute, National Institutes of Health. The contractors will explore the advantages, disadvantages, and applicability of such an inventory system, employing both theoretical and practical approaches. Theoretical approaches, for example, might involve development of hypothetical and simulated models of the proposed system; whereas one practical approach might entail developing sample systems suitable for actual trials on a small scale.

The new contractors and their awards are Community Blood Council, New York, New York, $357,386; Milwaukee Blood Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, $184,000; Research Foundation, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York, $177,860.

Although located at the National Heart Institute, the National Blood Resource Program is a cooperative endeavor involving a number of Institutes and Divisions of the National Institutes of Health and other federal and nonfederal agencies concerned with the acquisition, processing, distribution, usage, or study of blood.

One specific R&D goal of the Program is to study the feasibility of a computerized national or regional daily shelf inventory system for blood and blood products to minimize losses due to outdating, forestall or meet local shortages, and to minimize problems arising from fluctuations in supply and demand.

The following grants and contracts were awarded by the National Science Foundation during June-July 1968 in support of improved dissemination of scientific information: CHEMICAL INFORMATION

American Chemical Society/Chemical Abstracts Service, $2,394,764 for experimental development of a

mechanized registry system for chemical compounds and for research and development in selected information handling problems.

American Chemical Society/Chemical Abstracts Service, $162,180 for research and development related to the National Chemical Information Program.

IIT Research Institute, Inc., $150,281 for the establishment of a Chemical Information Center in order