From: IN%"POSTMASTER@EMBL.BITNET" "General PostMaster" 7-FEB-1990 17:25:03.61 To: HARPER@cc.Helsinki.FI CC: Subj: Automatic response to : GET SOFTWARE:BIOBIT.8 Received: from jnet-daemon by cc.Helsinki.FI; Wed, 7 Feb 90 17:24 EET DST Received: From EMBL(NETSERV) by FINUHB with Jnet id 1249 for HARPER@FINUH; Wed, 7 Feb 90 17:24 O Date: Wed, 07 Feb 90 16:06:39 From: EMBL Network File Server Subject: Automatic response to : GET SOFTWARE:BIOBIT.8 To: HARPER@cc.Helsinki.FI Reply-to: General PostMaster Organisation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory Postal-address: Meyerhofstrasse 1, 6900 Heidelberg, W. Germany 8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 8888888888888 8888888888 8888888888 8888888888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888888888 888 888 888 888888888 888 888 888888888 888 888 888 888888888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 888 8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 888 8888888888 888 8888888888 8888888888 888 888 No 8 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% INDEPENDANT NEWSLETTER PRODUCED AT HELSINKI UNIVERSITY, FINLAND << EDITED BY ROBERT HARPER >> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% It would appear that in recent months there has been a genuine interest in the new Bboard on BIONET which deals with the tables of contents from various scientific journals. I have spoken to many scientists in Finland who are very grateful for this service since it gives them a three month heads start on the battle for requesting reprints from the original author. Since this is rather a topical subject I have decided to do a review of Current Contents on Disk. I have just installed it at our laboratory so I thought it might be good to give my impressions of this commercial product (Ed. Easy up there Rob this is BITNET/EARN you know.....) For some time our laboratory has been subscribing to Current Contents for the life sciences, so when it was recently announced that it was now available on diskette, we thought it might be a worthwhile proposition to investigate. We ordered it on a 3" diskette for a PC but it is also available in the larger 5" format and also for the MAC. The price was about $253. If the disks come once a week, and there are 52- 70 disk in the year, then a quick calculation reveals that you would be hard pressed to buy the disk themselves for that price, let alone the information. (Ed. Looks like a bargain) About a couple of weeks after we placed our order the first disks arrived. We soon discovered that we needed a programme disk to make the package work. It arrived about one week later. The programme package contains a easy to use USERS GUIDE which takes you through the basics of installing the programme on your computer, the programme itself, and batch of REQUEST-A-PRINT forms for your dot matrix printer. Installation is completely automatic and is taken care of by a BAT file thoughtfully provided. This creates a directory on your hard disk called CCOD (Current Contents on Disk). There are 5 main files. 1) CC.EXE the main programme 2) CC.HLP help files for the main programme 3) PKUNPAK.EXE decompresses data from the weekly diskettes 4) SETUP.EXE Customization according to hardware 5) INSTALL.BAT A batch file for getting the system on your hard disk. As you can imagine the whole Current Contents on disk might be expected to take up considerable space so if you want to look at a lot of issues at one session then make sure you have a hard disk big enough to handle the job. A typical diskette has about 600-700K of info on it, and a couple of times the issue has been so big that TWO diskettes arrived in the post. The information on the disks are archived to save space. If we have a look inside the 89052221.ARC, which is CC issue 21 for 22nd of May 1989, we can see what its contents are like. Searching Archive: 89052221.ARC Filename Length Method Size Ratio Date Time -------- ------ ------ ------ ----- ---- ---- ADDRESS.DIC 55564 Crunched 33130 41% 05-11-89 16:43:10 ARTICLE.DAT 362765 Unknown 333122 9% 05-11-89 16:48:38 ARTICLE.IDX 10228 Squeezed 8575 17% 05-11-89 16:48:40 ARTICLE.PTR 153392 Squeezed 126895 18% 05-11-89 16:48:00 AUTHOR.DIC 107233 Unknown 58596 46% 05-11-89 16:39:58 DICTION.IDX 2394 Crunched 1928 20% 05-11-89 16:50:16 DISCIPL.DIC 340 Crunched 274 20% 05-11-89 16:47:20 DOCUMENT.DIC 189 Crunched 171 10% 05-11-89 16:35:18 GAPAGE.DIC 24555 Crunched 11565 53% 05-11-89 16:48:00 ISSUE.DAT 9747 Crunched 5040 49% 05-11-89 16:32:04 LANGUAGE.DIC 37 Crunched 35 6% 05-11-89 16:34:02 SOURCE.DIC 2357 Crunched 1661 30% 05-11-89 16:44:30 TITLE.DIC 101715 Unknown 58795 43% 05-11-89 16:38:58 ---- ------ ------ ----- 0013 830516 639787 23% Luckily the user does not need to worry about ARCING since the main programme is designed to take care of that. You simply start up the programme with CC and place the current week's diskette in the A drive and ask CC to load it for you. The files are then decompressed and copied onto a separate directory on your hard disk from where you can get down to the real business of looking for the information that you want. The main programme presents you with a pull down menu with the following options. CC Issue Browse Search Articles Orders CC ISSUE Under the first option you can LOAD, OPEN, DELETE CC files on your hard disk, or visit DOS or quit to DOS. We are keeping the current month on hard disk, but the back issues are kept by the side of the computer so they can be loaded and searched at any time when anybody needs them. BROWSE The browse option allows you to look at the data by ISSUE, DISCIPLINE or JOURNAL. In each CC ISSUE the journals are grouped by discipline, and the disciplines are ordered alphabetically DISCIPLINE CONTENTS Animal & Plant Science Biochemistry & Biophysics Chemistry Clinical Medicine Experimental Biology & Medicine Immunology Microbiology & Cell Biology Molecular Biology & Genetics Multidisciplinary Neurosciences & Behavior Pharmacology Physiology If your discipline of interest is MOLECULAR BIOLOGY & GENETICS the programme will automatically select those journals that deal with that area. If you are interested in looking at individual JOURNALS then there are about 100 different ones to choose from. SEARCH The third option is the SEARCH option, and this is were the programme shows what it can do. We have it on a PS/80 with a 80386 processor and there is no hanging around and waiting for the machine to do work. The queries are answered very fast. One of the nicest features of the programme is that it allows you to define a PROFILE which you can use at every session to search for KEYWORDS that are of interest to you. For example lets say you are interested in NUCLEOTIDE SEQUENCES you simply enter the SEARCH STATEMENT "nucleotide sequenc*", which would look for the occurrence of those words in the title of any article published that week, and give you more information about it. The * wildcard will pick up words like "sequence", "sequences", or "sequencing". If you have a favourite author you can also make a profile up for him so that any time he writes an article the search will find out which journal he has published it in and tell you about it. ARTICLES & ORDERS For example if I give the search string NUC* SEQ* in the TITLE then for CC Issue 21 May 22 1989 in about a couple of seconds the programme will discover 7 hits. By being very specific about the search strings, you can select just those topics that are of interest to you. Author-Title : Search Results (Set #1) Pevzner, PA Linguistics of Nucleotide Sequences .1. The Significance... Pevzner, PA Linguistics of Nucleotide Sequences .2. Stationary Words... Danner, DJ Construction and Nucleotide Sequence of a cDNA Encoding it... Srinivasan, A Molecular Characterization of HIV-1 Isolated from a Serum... Sodeinde, OA Nucleotide Sequence of the Plasminogen Activator Gene of... Nanney, DL Shifting Ditypic Site Analysis - Heuristics for Expanding... Berdichevskii, Determination of the Nucleotide Sequence of the Son3 Frag... Once the hits have been displayed you can view them as Author/Title or as the Full Record. In this case if we want to look at the Danner article in more detail it is just a matter of highlighting it and selecting the Full Record option. Full record : Search Results (Set #1) Author DJ Danner, S Litwer, WJ Herring, J Pruckler Title Construction and Nucleotide Sequence of a cDNA Encoding the Full- Length Preprotein for Human Branched Chain Acyltransferase Journal Journal of Biological Chemistry 264: 13 (MAY 5 1989) Page(s) 7742-7746 GenArt U3266 Discipl. Biochemistry & Biophysics Document Article Language English Address DJ Danner, Emory Univ, Sch Med, Dept Pediat, Div Med Genet, Atlanta, GA 30322 When you are within the ARTICLES option you are presented with extra options at the bottom of the screen which are as follows: Contents View PIC GA R-A-R MarkAll File Print Briefly the options that were most useful for us were PIC (Personal Interest Checklist) which allows you to keep a special list that is of interest to you. R-A-P (Request a print) which allows you to load some specially prepared labels into your printer. With the ORDERS option all those articles marked with R-A-P, can be selected. The programme then prints out the author's address, and the title of the article that you want. It also prints out your return address on a removable sticky label, so that all that the author has to do is put his article is an envelope and affix the label with your address on it and post it off. This is a very thoughtful and convenient concept. Finally there is the possibility to extract the articles into straight ascii files which can then be worked on with a wordprocessor to make up your own literature reference database. Both Dialog and Medline styles are supported. (Ed. No more... the tedious job of writing out references) CONCLUSIONS. When introducing new software to scientists at our department there is always a period of trouble shooting and user education. With CCOD, I have been pleasantly surprised that the usual "hand holding" has been minimal, and that the software is so intuitive that it has been easy for PC users to learn. (Ed. Expect they will have a field day on the MAC) Disclaimer: Personal views of satisfied customer. Rob "What you want... baby we got it" Harper