These private databases typically cover compounds that are unique to a company s products and production processes. This glut of databases has introduced the new problem of how to efficiently share these data and make the best use of them throughout the research organization. Each vendor s software is specific to that vendor s own brand of database and is typically incompatible with other vendors databases. When researchers use a particular software package to create a private collection of spectra, only researchers who are using that same software elsewhere in the company can make use of that database. Even when the format of the databases is not a problem, effectively managing the various databases is still an issue.
Commercial collections contain a large amount of data, so they can be quite expensive.
In addition, installing them can be a complicated and tedious process. When using desktop-based searching software, the process must be repeated on every workstation whenever new databases are developed or purchased, or existing collections are updated or extended. For these reasons, it is quite common for companies to install spectral databases and search software onto specific workstations that are reserved for spectral searching. Researchers needing to identify an unknown spectrum have to trek over to one of these workstations to access and search the spectral databases. All of these issues introduce inefficiencies into the research processes that depend on spectral database searching.