ACS (American Chemical Society) Publications has begun to digitize the Supporting Information for nearly 50,000 articles published in ACS journals prior to 1996.

From Dave Martinsen – ACS Publications:

In August 2012, ACS Publications began a program to strategically re-invest in and upgrade its broadly subscribed ACS Legacy Archive – containing over 450,000 articles published since 1879. This included a conservation program to digitize Supporting Information for articles published prior to 1996 in ACS Journals. This project will add the SI for nearly 50,000 articles: in total it spans about 800,000 pages of searchable and indexed information.

This material has previously been available only in microform – and even then was accessible to only a fraction of the ACS Legacy Archives current installed base due to scattered/incomplete holdings, the overall decline of the microform format, or as Ben indicates, missing or damaged media.   We are in process of scanning, digitizing and OCRing the files: this material will be uploaded thoughout 2013 as it makes its way through ACS quality assurance processes.

There are 3 primary benefits to the scientific and library community from this project.  First it preserves and makes broadly accessible a significant amount of the 20th century’s primary research data.  Secondly, with indexed metadata and full text search of the actual content files, it vastly increases the materials’ discoverability and integration into the current research workflow.  Finally, there will be no additional charge to current subscribers or one time access licensees for access to this information:  access to supplementary information – both meta data and the complete information files, will be available at the Abstract level, requiring neither subscribed access nor authentication to access or download.

For more information, please see ACS Publications’ FAQs for Supporting Information.