Chemical Information Sources Wikibook: Changes and Plans

Originally compiled by Dr. Gary Wiggins, Indiana University, Chemical Information Sources was published as a book in 1991. Gary released it as a wikibook in 2007. Chemical Information Sources continued as a collaborative effort by chemistry librarians, mostly from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) under Ben Wagner’s (University at Buffalo) leadership from 2011-2014. Many thanks to Ben for all his leadership and efforts during this period, and also to all the authors who helped maintain its content. 

In fall 2014, to provide a long-term sustainable plan for maintaining the content, the CINF Division's Education Committee agreed to “adopt” three wikibooks that had been created by Gary Wiggins:  

Chemical Information Sources Wikibook
SIRCh: Selected Internet Resources for Chemistry
Chemical Information Instructional Materials

Initial efforts by the CINF Education Committee will focus on the first two wikibooks.

Editor-in Chief: We are pleased to announce that the ACS CINF Education Committee formally approved appointing Chuck Huber for a 3-year term as Editor-in-Chief for the Chemical Information Sources Wikibook during the ACS Spring Meeting in Denver (March 21, 2015).

Technical Editor: Effective January 2015, Dr. Martin Walker agreed to serve as Technical Editor for the Chemical Information Sources Wikibook. In anticipation of forthcoming changes, Martin created an archived version on March 7, 2015. For example, we hope to modernize the navigation and make it mobile-friendly. We also plan to use metadata templates for commonly cited sources in order to maintain the URL for a resource in one location. We also plan to merge the selected internet resources with Chemical Information Sources Wikibook content covering that same topic. 

Authors: As part of these efforts, the authors who are responsible for editing chapters will be reviewed. If you have edited a chapter previously and wish to continue doing so, please contact Chuck Huber. If you are interested in being a new editor, please indicate which chapter in your message to Chuck. If you have suggestions about new chapters that might be added, please also contact Chuck. His email address is huber@library.ucsb.edu. 

Because editorial efforts and authorship of wikibook content is only available in the “view history” tab, to recognize the work more formally and to give credit to author’s efforts, we plan to create a table of contents on CINF’s Chemical Information Literacy page that will include the names of chapter authors.

To help keep the Chemical Information Sources Wikibook useful, the content must be updated regularly. The ACS CINF Education Committee is honored to support this key resource and to provide a long-term sustainable path for maintaining it. We thank everyone who has supported it to date and look forward to working with authors and readers in the future!

Grace Baysinger, Chair, CINF Education Committee