This paper is the first of a two part series reporting on a British Library funded project which has investigated the current use of automated chemical information systems by academic chemists in the UK. We will describe the results of a preliminary survey of 239 academic chemists based in ten universities and drawn from different geographic regions to represent England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Almost 100% of staff from each university took part in the survey, which enabled us to produce an accurate picture of the extent of use of 'leading-edge' information systems by academics. While around 90% of staff are currently using online bibliographic bases, the percentage falls to 39% for those who use advanced structure-based systems. Obviously, more than 60% of academics are not taking advantage of any of the advanced systems. We have also investigated the use of 'leading-edge' systems in rela tion to: (i) research productivity of departments as measured by the Universities Funding Council's (UFC) research assessment exercise and (ii) subject specialisation of chemists (via organic, inorganic, physical and analyt ical). It was found that those departments which received a higher research rating (3, 4 or 5) in the last UFC rating are also more progressive in the use of 'leading-edge' systems. The figures ranged from 22% for a department with a rating of 2, to 57% for a department which received a top rating of 5. Regarding subject specialisation, our results showed that organic chemists and inorganic chemists make more use of these systems than physical chemists. The percentage of users in each of these categories was 40%, 36% and 23% respectively. This is because most of the currently available 'leading-edge' systems are structure- based and therefore are of less use to physical chemists whose information need has an alphanumeric format.
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