Introduction

Microbiologists are faced with consideration of exponential growth in their laboratories on a daily basis. As users of a chapter on information resources for biotechnology they are exposed to a double dose of exponential growth. First, the explosion of information technology itself is due to the massive amounts of computing power available at ever diminishing cost. In turn, a population of computer aware and computer literate microbiologists represent a growing demand for more sophisticated access to modern information technology. The community of information technologists in concert with microbiologists are responding to this demand with a multiplicity of initiatives using various strategies.

The resulting activity induces feelings of inadequacy in the authors of such chapters as this, since at the moment of delivery to the editors the information is out of date. Resources previously known only by rumour are tested. Simple facilities being tested as pilot projects are quickly made available to the community. Local data banks open their doors to regional and even world-wide participation. Databases on databases spring up because of the need to discover available resources. The net result is an ever increasing base of information resources for biotechnologists.

In some cases, useful resources fall by the wayside, as have at least two of the resources listed. They have been discontinued in the interval between the first and present versions of this chapter. The root cause of such discontinuing of effort is lack of appreciation by the initial funding bodies of the complexity and time scale involved in database initiatives of this sort.