Evaluating an in‐house or bought‐in service

The Beecham Pharmaceuticals Research Division (BPRD) is that part of Beecham Group concerned with research into ethical products, that is, into drugs which only can be obtained on prescription. The Research Division has a staff of about 1,000. The Information Services Unit serves these staff with their information needs and to do this there are twelve information scientists, four librarians and sixteen assistants. The information budget for salaries, materials, services, etc., totals several hundred thousand pounds. The service offers current awareness via an in‐house bulletin; conventional retrospective searching plus the use of Derwent systems and on‐line searching of the Lockheed, BLAISE and SDC data bases; in‐house documentation via a Master File and WLN chemical structure indexes. The budget figure is quite large but in the pharmaceutical industry information budgets of £1m per annum are known.