| THE CIS NEWS | March 2002 |
| This issue of The CIS News is coming to you from the CIS E-mail address -- cissupport@nisc.com. Comments, questions, complaints, etc., should be directed to that address. | |
| HOW MANY DATABASES? (AND WHAT ARE THEY?) | |
| In the last issue of this occasional newsletter, back in October, we explained how to get a list of all the databases currently included in CIS. Shortly thereafter, a programming change obsoleted the procedure we described. So here is the CURRENT explanation of how to generate a list of the databases in CIS. | |
| First, click in the search box -- toward the top right -- that's labelled Database File. This will cause the cursor to blink in that box. | |
| Second, click on the box at the far right, near the top, that's labelled Index. | |
| This will result in display of a list of the databases currently included in the system. The display will appear in the results area at the bottom of the screen. There are currently either 28 or 30 databases in the system, depending on whether you count TRI 1997 - 1998 - 1999 as one database or three. All of these databases are automatically searched for any input you make in the search screen (unless you have restricted your search with one or more entries in the Database File box). The fact that you can use our single search screen to reach so many databases simultaneously is one of the main virtues of the new CIS. | |
| By the way, the procedure above works for ALL the search boxes on the Advanced search screen (the one you should ordinarily see whenever you log in to CIS). Click the cursor into any search box, then click on Index, and the result will be a display of all the terms registered in that particular search box. | |
| IRIS | |
| We recently incorporated EPA's IRIS database -- Integrated Risk Information System -- in The CIS. It is identical to, and different from, versions of IRIS you may have seen elsewhere. | |
| One similarity between CIS's IRIS and others lies in the hypertext links that allow you to view background documents that pertain to some of the monographs. For example, there is an EPA Toxicological Review relating to Chloroform. Consequently, a line appears near the top of the IRIS record for Chloroform which invites you to "Click Here To View a Toxicological Review For This Substance." This invokes an Adobe Acrobat routine that results in on-screen display of the text of the Toxicological Review. There are twenty some records in the system that contain these links. | |
| Note, however, that our IRIS looks slightly different than others you might have seen. It contains all the text that appears in any version of IRIS, but it lacks the boldfaced section headers that sometimes appear in IRIS, the different type sizes, etc. In short, our IRIS looks duller than others. We did this to avoid the gibberish characters that sometimes appear in other Web implementations of IRIS. If you know how to interpret the hexadecimal codes underlying these gibberish characters, you can make out that they represent things like plus/minus signs, Greek letters, and other non-standard characters. However, you shouldn't have to do that. Consequently, we reduced the text of the IRIS monographs to the admittedly dull form that appears on CIS because this allowed us simultaneously to convert the gibberish characters to a readable format. | |
| UPCOMING: OHMTADS | |
| We have not yet installed the OHMTADS database in CIS, but the editorial work on it is now done, and it should appear in the system in the next month or two. | |
| We had our doubts about re-introducing this database: EPA ceased updating it in the mid-1980s, and there's a good deal of material in the database that has been rendered incorrect over time by changes in regulatory requirements. However, users are accustomed to the database, several asked that it be restored, and it does contain a wealth of still-useful data and references. Consequently, we are going to restore it to the system with a top-of-the-record warning about the age of the database and the need to verify critical information through more current sources. | |
| Before we could bring OHMTADS back to the new CIS, however, we had to spend months straightening out the file we inherited from the old system. The largest problem concerned the CODENs, the six-character codes -- like FEREAC -- that denoted the source from which some data element was drawn. There are some 40,000 of these in the database. The old CIS had a command that allowed you to interpret these codes into the full title of the reference, but there is no such command in the new CIS. Consequently, we had to interpret all the CODENs and embed the interpretations directly into the texts of records at appropriate points. | |
| That task was difficult, particularly since the CODEN file turned out to have been somewhat corrupted. We had to fix entry after entry after entry where two characters had gotten transposed, or a character had been dropped, or some other trivial error prevented proper interpretation of the code. There were perhaps 5,000 of these trivial errors, and we were able to fix almost all of them. There are a few uninterpreted codes left in the database -- a hundred or so out of 40,000 -- and we simply have no way of calculating what they represent. We're certainly irritated by these lost CODENs, but we suspect that our interpreted set is both broader and more accurate than the equivalent set in any other version of OHMTADS. | |
| The other task we took on had to do with correcting errors that turned up in the text of the OHMTADS monographs. Some of these were trivial (hundreds of misspellings of ordinary English words, for example), but some of them actually touched on data -- garbled chemical formulas, data from one field that appeared under the heading for another field, bits of text that broke off in mid-sentence, and so forth. We make no pledge that we got all of this -- we have neither the mandate nor the capability to do a complete, systematic re-vetting of everything OHMTADS contains -- but we got a LOT of it. Consequently, we think we can say with confidence that if you're using OHMTADS from any other source, the version soon to appear on CIS is better and more reliable, and we hope you'll give it a look. | |
| MORE ON ON-SCREEN TSCATS IMAGES | |
| As noted previously in this newsletter, we began putting up on-line electronic versions of TSCATS documents early last year. EPA provided us with some samples at first, then with several hundred document images for newly processed documents. EPA intends to continue to produce electronic images for all TSCATS documents as they are processed in the future, and we will continue to make them available to our users as they're received. | |
| However, the total number of documents
available on-line in electronic format is currently only a few hundred -- and the question
is, What's to be done with the backfile of around 25,000 previously processed TSCATS
documents? These are the documents we provide to you in microfiche form, and those
microfiche currently fully fill three large and substantial steel shelving units in our
office. Will they ever be processed into electronic form for on-line display? |
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| We're still not sure what the answer is, nor is EPA. EPA recently sent us a set of electronic images of about a hundred backfile documents, and we'll be loading them on-line shortly. However, this set was produced in part as an experiment, and the cost proved to be quite high in relation to the budget available for the rest of the job. Consequently, EPA wasn't sure how much they were going to be able to do in the near future, or how quickly. They certainly would like to produce the documents in electronic form, but even the government doesn't have infinite resources, and there are limits to what they're going to be able to do. We'll continue to keep in touch with EPA on this, we'll put up whatever they are able to produce, and we'll let you know if we eventually proceed with a plan of our own to produce some of the shorter, more popular documents at our own expense. We have already started to do this for AQUIRE (electronic images of full-text source documents will be attached to some 10,000 AQUIRE records in the next update), and we may wind up doing something like this for TSCATS as well. We'll keep you advised. | |
| RTECS STATUS | |
| In the last issue of this newsletter, we mentioned that
editorial work on RTECS had ceased in early 2001 while the National Institute of
Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) tried to find a private- sector firm to take the
database over. We are now advised that a private-sector firm has indeed signed a contract
to assume ongoing responsibility for the development and distribution of RTECS. We are not
at liberty to mention who it is -- they have not yet made any announcement of the event
themselves -- but it's a first-rate outfit that's well known to the RTECS community, and
we expect they'll do an excellent job. Although they have a few more t's to cross before
they're fully in gear, they are actually at work on an RTECS update already. They are
hoping that their first update will almost completely catch up with the year's backlog of
material, and that first update may be available within the next 6-8 weeks. In any event,
we're sticking closely to the situation and will bring the updated RTECS to CIS users as soon as it's available to us. |
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