Special Report: CD-ROM Makes Database Searching Easier

Materials scientist Mike Viola used to spend countless hours thumbing through volumes of The Official Gazette of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. As manager of product technology for Hyperion Catalysis International Inc., a startup chemical company in Lexington, Mass., Viola is responsible for keeping current with technical developments in Hyperion's line of business, commercializing graphitic microfi-bers such as those used in batteries and adhesive plastics. So each week, when a

Written byJulia King

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In the five years that CD-ROM products have been available, no one publisher has emerged as the leading marketer of disks for the scientific community, according to Norman Desmaris, editor of CD-ROM Librarian, an industry newsletter. On the other hand, Medline, the National Library of Medicine's database, has become one of the top-selling disks for those companies publishing scientific CD-ROMs. Currently, more than a dozen versions of Medline are available from publishers such as Silver Platter Information Inc. in Newton Lower Falls, Mass., and Compact Cambridge in Bethesda, Md. The majority of Medline users are researchers in the life sciences and medicine. Prices vary from version to version of the database, but most cost between $1,000 and $2,000, depending on backfile configurations. What differentiates the Medline versions from others--and what differentiates all publishers' CD-ROM databases from each other--is the search software on which they run, the frequency with which they ...

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