buchholz@ese3.ese.ogi.edu (Don Buchholz) (06/12/91)
I was asked by our campus Safety Committee to find out what I could about chemical database/inventory tracking/MSDS systems. We are looking for a package (PD or commercial) that can be used to keep a database of all the chemicals on campus, what their location is, quantities, MSDS information, and could be accessed (for searching) by someone who is only marginally chemically literate (purchasing dept.). A rough estimate of the number of records we would have to support is 3000-5000. The operating system of choice is Unix. However, if you have information about packages that run under other OS's I'd be interested in hearing about them, too. Nice features would be a database that knew how to sort chemical names properly. The ability to search by molecular formula or CAS # would also be nice. One member of the committee suggested that we find a system that incorporates bar coding so we could use a barcode reader to inventory the labs periodically. Obviously, we won't find everything we want in a single package, but we are interested in learning about what other labs are using (especially university and other research-oriented labs) to track their chemical stores. Thanks in advance, Don Buchholz Oregon Graduate Institute buchholz@ese3.ese.ogi.edu