ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the essential features of the research landscape during the period 1991–2000; and highlights the most important events that took place during that time. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was intended to control significant flows of Higher Education Funding Council for England research funding to individual institutions that could demonstrate that they could conduct quality research and thus were 'safe hands'. With RAE money institutions could fund their research infrastructure, and provide staff with space and time to research and experiment. Library and information science research has traditionally focused on textual information but there are many academic disciplines that have developed databases containing very specific types of information. One such discipline is chemistry, where there is a need to search and to process very large databases of chemical molecules, and this was the subject of continuing interest in Sheffield for many years.
