On Jan 14 Robert Murray asked:
 
"I work in the Development office at the Museum of Science
 and Industry in Chicago.  Can anyone suggest one
 online service over another.  We have Datatimes, and Dun
& Bradstreet for research.  I'm thinking of dumping D&B."
 
We use Dialog (which includes Dun & Bradstreet) and the
Science and Technical Network (STN) among others. Both
are databases of databases and there is a lot of overlap
between the two. However, pricing can be very
different -- one might cost more per search, while
the other costs more to display the record.
 
In the old days (before Internet was common) it used to be
cheaper to search STN but display the record in Dialog.
Dialog recently changed it's pricing structure so I'm not
sure that's still true. (For a discussion of Dialog's new
pricing see "Dialog Price Restructure Evaluation" in
Searcher, Vol. 2, no. 8, Oct. 1994 pp.44-59.)
Anyway, that's assuming you can afford or want both
services.
 
Both Dialog and STN are available through Internet. Dialog
has it's own home page at  http://www.dialog.com. STN's
address is supposedly 134.243.5.32 or STNC.CAS.ORG,
but I haven't had any success.
 
We find STN especially helpful because it contains the
complete abstract for Chemistry Abstracts as well as
European and Japanese resources (not to mention neat
ways of getting to chemistry information.) We use Dialog
more often though. Both include many journal articles
 full-text and include document delivery services.
 
Enough of  a commercial, don't you think?
 
Jackie Zak
Documentation Program
Getty Conservation Institute
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P.S. for Conservation Information, see
http://indy.chin.doc.ca/CHIN/CHINPubs/English/cin-e.html
or Walter Henry's Conservation Online (CoOL) at
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/