Contract Work

Randy D. Ralph, MLIS, Ph.D.

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Participated in the initial design of the Chemical Regulations and Guidelines System (CRGS) for the Interagency Regulatory Liaison Group (IRLG) under the aegis of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  • Assisted in the development of the initial CRGS database design.
  • Developed the initial controlled vocabulary for conceptual indexing.


Participated in the Toxicology Information Project of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

  • Developed the initial controlled vocabulary and coding scheme for conceptual indexing.
  • Abstracted and indexed all articles selected for inclusion in the project database.
  • Designed and developed Taxicon, an hierarchical computer coding scheme for indexing taxonomic information.


Managed all information retrieval activities undertaken in connection with the development of the Pesticides Literature Reference System for the EPA.

  • Built and directed a team of manual and on-line literature searchers to collect all scientific literature on 52 selected compounds.
  • Screened all literature search results to eliminate duplicate citations.
  • Managed a team of abstracter/indexers for the Coal Processing Project of the Department of Energy (DOE) at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
  • Directed the selection, abstracting and indexing of items published in the Federal Register for inclusion in the project files.


Formulated and conducted all manual and batch-mode computer searches undertaken for the Walter Reed Army Hospital Subscriber Search Service.

  • Responded to on-call literature search requests and organized, planned and executed full retrospective literature retrieval.