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Vol.
28 No. 2
March-April 2006
IUPAC
Wire |
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News
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In Memorium — Dale B. Baker
Dale B. Baker, director emeritus of Chemical Abstracts Service
(CAS), died 11 December 2005 in Columbus, Ohio. He had served
as director of CAS from 1958 until his retirement in 1986.
Under Baker’s leadership over those years, CAS invented
database publishing by developing databases from which any
form of output, printed or electronic, could be produced.
Baker started with CAS as a part-time office boy in 1939 while
attending Ohio State University. After graduating with a degree
in chemical engineering, he spent four years working as a
supervisory chemist at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.,
before returning to CAS as an assistant editor in 1946. He
rose steadily up the editorial ladder, succeeding E.J. Crane
as director in 1958. During Baker’s tenure as a director,
CAS faced many challenges, including a difficult transition
from a subsidized operation of the ACS to a financially self-sufficient
division.
When Baker joined CAS, the organization had for decades been
identified as the publisher of the printed Chemical Abstracts
(CA), the leading reference work for keeping chemists and
other scientists in touch with the latest chemistry-related
publications. But keeping up with the explosion in scientific
research required the adaptation of new technology. Starting
in the 1960s, under Baker’s direction, CAS moved from
the conventional, print oriented abstracting and indexing
cottage industry to become a highly automated operation of
international stature. In the course of that evolution, CAS
developed one of the world’s premier automated information
processing and retrieval systems, which served as the model
for those in other scientific disciplines.
www.cas.org/dalebaker.html
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