Beilstein’s handbook
A digital database just isn’t as evocative as the smell of the stacks
For chemists of a certain age, the word ‘stacks’ conjures twin sound and smellscapes associated with walking down the narrow canyons of library shelves, flanked by many-coloured volumes, to keep abreast of the literature. For current journals you might flip through the table of contents to see the latest news. But the search for older articles had a daunting learning curve involving several key gateways.
The indices of Chemical Abstracts occupied one end of the library’s collection of journals. You selected the decennial indices, searching by author, molecular formula or by subject. These gave you a list of cryptic code numbers like 89:463186k, each of which referred you to a short abstract buried in countless volumes further along the shelves. The abstract now pointed you to the original article, which was hidden somewhere deeper in the stacks with their unmistakable smell of books.