About the author

W. Val Metanomski received his B.Sc.(Eng.) degree in chemical engineering from the University of London, England, in 1952, and M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto, Canada, in chemical engineering (1960) and polymer chemistry (1964), respectively. He is currently a Senior Scientific Information Analyst in Editorial Operations of Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). Since joining CAS in 1964, he has been involved in abstracting, indexing, and naming, especially of polymers, in defining technical content of CAS publications and services, and in a variety of editorial projects.

He has presented and published papers on oxidation-reduction polymers, abstracting, indexing, chemical nomenclature, and chemical information retrieval, some with a definite historical slant.

He has been active in the ACS Division of Chemical Information (CINF), was its chairman in 1987, and received their Meritorious Service Award in 1992 for service to the Division and the profession. For their 50th anniversary, he compiled a booklet on "50 Years of Chemical Information in the American Chemical Society, 1943-1993".

He has participated in the activities of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) as a member of their Commission on Macromolecular Nomenclature (1987-1999). He currently serves as the Secretary of their Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (IDCNS). He edited the IUPAC "Compendium of Macromolecular Nomenclature" (1991) and coauthored a guide to IUPAC recommendations, "Principles of Chemical Nomenclature" (1998).

Between 1989 and 1999 he chaired the Nomenclature Committee of the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry (POLY). In 1991, he initiated the publication of a regular column "Macromolecular Nomenclature Note" in Polymer Preprints. He contributed a chapter on "Nomenclature" to Wiley's "Polymer Handbook" (4th ed., 1999). He received the POLY Distinguished Service Award in 1995.

Val currently serves as POLY Historian. In that capacity he compiled a list of POLY milestones for the whole period of POLY existence, which was displayed as a poster at the POLY Millennial 2000 meeting. This information will also be displayed at the 221st ACS National Meeting held in San Diego, CA in April 2001.