In the UK, British Expertise in Science and Technology (BEST) was
launched with backing from the relevant Government Department and the
Science & Engineering Research Council (=NSF), and research
administrators for years have been exhorting researchers to complete
forms so that they are entered on the database (which a commercial
publisher publishes on CD-ROM and on-line).  I guess that Sussex has
about half the eligible people on the database.  We do not subscribe to
the service (and no faculty to my knowledge has asked that we should),
but assume that the publisher has found a market - amongst industrial
corporations and other potential sponsors of research.  I have no hard
evidence to confirm such useage.

Some 20 universities are collaborating on the development of a suite of
systems covering many areas of univerity management, based on Oracle.
One system is called 'Research and Consultancy' (RAC) and is designed to
record the information required by BEST (and much else, e.g. all staff
publications, major research equipment) for researchers in all
disciplines.  So I am faced with receiving soon software which is
already paid for but has very high implementation costs - and brings
limited assurance that it will actually be useful.  One aspect of
implementation is providing and maintaining a keyword index.  Can anyone
tell me more about the NSF/NIH keyword thesaurus version 4, mentioned by
one correspondent?

Best wishes from across the Atlantic,

John Farrant, Director of Research Administration, The University of
Sussex, Sussex House, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9RH,  UK.  Tel:   +44  273
678609 (switchboard:  606755). e-mail: xxxxxx@sussex.ac.uk