Gmelin Institute for Inorganic Chemistry and Frontier Areas

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The Gmelin Institute for Inorganic Chemistry and Frontier Areas was an institute primarily for chemical documentation, which was most recently based in Frankfurt am Main . It was named after Leopold Gmelin , who founded Gmelin's Handbook of Inorganic Chemistry , which was one of the institute's products. The institute was initially taken over by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1946 , since 1948 it was an institute of the Max Planck Society , and in 1997 it was closed.

History and tasks

The institute was created in 1922 from a working group of the German Chemical Society . After the Second World War, the institute was based in Clausthal-Zellerfeld in the former administration building of the Tanne plant and was taken over by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1946 ; from 1948 it belonged to the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. V. Since 1956 the seat of the institute was the Carl Bosch Haus in Frankfurt am Main.

From 1957 to 1967 the institute was affiliated with the Atomic Nuclear Energy Documentation (AED) section, which was financed by the Federal Ministry of Atomic Energy and renamed in 1961 to the Central Office for Nuclear Energy Documentation (ZAED).

The main purpose of the institute and its up to 120 employees was the publication of Gmelin's handbook of inorganic chemistry and the maintenance and updating of the online database with the same content on the database host STN International , which was created from 1984.

At the end of 1997 the publication of the 'Gmelin' was stopped and the institute was dissolved by a resolution of the Senate of the Max Planck Society on November 14, 1997 with effect from December 31, 1997 after a merger with FIZ Chemie had failed. At the time of the dissolution, around 70 people were still working at the institute.

By the time the publication was discontinued, 760 volumes of the manual with around 240,000 pages had appeared.

The databases can be searched using the Reaxys query language , together with the Beilstein and Chemical Patents databases .

In addition to the 'Gmelin', other products were also created and sold:

  • ICSD - Inorganic Crystal Structure Database , which contained around 36,000 crystal structures in 1997 and is also available online and CD-ROM via STN.
  • TYPIX Database - which in 1997 contained around 3,600 critically evaluated data sets of structure types of inorganic compounds and with which crystallographic data can be standardized and diffraction data can be calculated from powder images.
  • GABCOM & GABMET “Abbreviations of compounds and methods from chemistry and physics” a collection of over 4000 abbreviations from chemistry and physics published in German and English ( ISBN 978-3-540-93662-6 (German); ISBN 978-3 -540-93653-4 (Eng.)).

Directors

literature

  • Gmelin Institute for Inorganic Chemistry and Frontier Areas in the Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Society , in: Eckart Henning , Marion Kazemi : Handbook on the history of the institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm / Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science 1911–2011 - Daten und Quellen , Berlin 2016, 2 volumes, volume 1: Institutes and research centers A – L ( online, PDF, 75 MB ), pages 587–597 (chronology of the institute).

Web links