Assistance Information Service

Toxic Substances Control Act Assistance Information Service U.S. EPA, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics Washington, D.C. 

The EPA maintains a TSCA hotline, formally known as the TSCA Assistance Information Service ( TAIS ), which is staffed by an outsourced service provider. The hotline provides basic information about TSCA, and contacts to EPA personnel who can provide more in-depth background. The hotline is a good resource for specific documents, and can fax or mail documents on request. The contact information for the TSCA hotline is ... 

OPPT New Chemicals Program Categories of Concern (under TSCA). A publication of the U.S. EPA Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, updated periodically and available from the TSCA Assistance Information Service,... 

TSCA Assistance Information Service Provides TSCA regulation information. tsca-hot- line epaniail.epa.gov 202-554-1404... 

PLASTEC. The Plastics Technical Evaluation Center (PLASTEC) is one of approximately 20 technical information analysis centers sponsored by the US Dept of Defense (DoD) to provide the defense community with a variety of authoritative information services. Located at the Armament Research Development Command -(ARRADCOM), Dover, NJ, PLASTEC has been serving this community since 1960 via state-of-the-art reports, handbooks, newsletters, current awareness studies, engineering assistance, bibliographies, literature searches, technical inquiries and special investigations on plastics, composites and adhesives... 

PLASTEC is one of 20 information analysis centers sponsored by the Department of Defense to provide the defense community with a variety of technical information services applicable to plastics, adhesives, and organic matrix composites. For the last 21 years, PLASTEC has served the defense community with authoritative information and advice in such forms as engineering assistance, responses to technical inquiries, special investigations, field trouble shooting, failure analysis, literature searches, state-of-the-art reports, data compilations, and handbooks. PLASTEC has also been heavily involved in standardization activities. In recent years, PLASTEC has been permitted to serve private industry. 

Employees at GE Global Research receive medical benefits, dental care, vision care, disability programs, product purchase discounts, educational assistance, adoption assistance, legal and financial information services, childcare assistance and more. The company also offers employee development and a variety of opportunities for student job-exposure and internship. 

GE provides its employees with tuition, adoption, parenting and child care assistance education and career counseling and legal and financial information services. 

The basic ILLINET Online Network (Illinois Online Network) was used as the major computer-assisted information retrieval program. Within this network IBIS (Illinois Bibliographic Information Service), which provides abstracts taken from journal articles published from 1991 through December 1993, and CARL UnCover (Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries), which provides titles to journal articles published in 1988 through December 1993, afforded much of the current and recent information reported on here. Abstracts of the pertinent literature published from 1982 through mid-1993 were also obtained directly from CA (Chemical Abstracts). It is hoped that the overlap provided this way assures the broadest retrieval of published results. All of these sources were searched by means of the following key words ... 

Any serious research effort directed towards achieving a commercial reward and patent protection needs assistance from adequate information services. Besides the scientific literature, related patents and patent applications must be available and can be traced through patent data bases and patent libraries. Computerized patent data bases (Table 10) usually contain all front page information of a patent or patent application, such as patent number, applicant, inventor, filing and priority date, title of the invention and the abstract, in some cases also the patent claims. Full copies of selected patents can be ordered from national patent libraries or from the patent office. 

J. E. Kemme, J. E. Deverall, E. S. Keddy, J. R. Phillips, and W. A. Rankin, Temperature Control mth High Temperature Gravity-Assist Heat Pipes., Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, 1975, available from National Technical Information Service, Accession No. CONF-750812-10. 

There is in Washington (732 Woodward Building) a privately operated Technical Information Service which may be of interest to chemists. Miss Bradshaw, its director, was employed for several years by a chemical corporation to assist in obtaining government... 

Valuable assistance in finding information can be obtained by consulting information intermediaries with subject expertise who can identify and access information resources unknown or unavailable locally. These individuals may be in local information centers or may be brokers who specialize in individual information services or creation of compilations of data for a fee. An example of this type of service is the Comprehensive Health and Environmental Monographs (CHEMS) division of Health and Environment International. This service creates detailed reports on the health and environmental effects of a chemical. Professional organizations, database producers, and government agencies can also be sources of experts as well as providers of direct information. An example of the former type of service is UNEP-Infoterra, an international referral and research organization of the... 

United States Environmental Protection Agency, Microwave assisted acid digestion of sediments, sludges, soils and oils , EPA Method 3051, National Technical Information Service, Springfield, VA, 1994. 

NRC/U.S. Coast Guard coordinate numerous information services, systems, and centers to assist in emergency response. Included are the Marine Safety Information Center, Hazard Assessment Control System, Chemical Hazard Response Information System, Oil and Hazardous Materials-Technical Assistance Data System, Structural and Nomenclature Search System, and Pollution Equipment Inventory System. 

The United States government produces many publications which will assist those assessing risks associated with chemical substances. The most important way in which details of publications are made known is through the US National Technical Information Service (NTIS) which produces Government Reports Announcements and Index, a fortnightly listing of abstracts of reports [2]. NTIS also publishes a series of weekly Abstract Newsletters on topics such as chemistry, and environmental polluticm and control. 

Assistant Director, United Kingdom Chemical Information Service, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England... 

Operational and technical staff - controllers, assistants, meteo staff, aeronautical information services staff, engineers (no line managers are permitted in these workshops.)... 

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