Database for Chemical Safety and Inventory wanted

[Don Buchholz <buchholz \\at// ese3.ese.ogi.edu>]

 I was asked by our campus Safety Committee to find out what I could about
 chemical database/inventory tracking/MSDS systems.  We are looking for
 a package (PD or commercial) that can be used to keep a database of all
 the chemicals on campus, what their location is, quantities, MSDS information,
 and could be accessed (for searching) by someone who is only marginally
 chemically literate (purchasing dept.).  A rough estimate of the number of
 records we would have to support is 3000-5000.
 The operating system of choice is Unix.  However, if you have information
 about packages that run under other OS's I'd be interested in hearing
 about them, too.
 Nice features would be a database that knew how to sort chemical names
 properly.  The ability to search by molecular formula or CAS # would
 also be nice.
 One member of the committee suggested that we find a system that incorporates
 bar coding so we could use a barcode reader to inventory the labs periodically.
 Obviously, we won't find everything we want in a single package, but
 we are interested in learning about what other labs are using (especially
 university and other research-oriented labs) to track their chemical
 stores.
 Thanks in advance,
 Don Buchholz
 Oregon Graduate Institute
 buchholz \\at// ese3.ese.ogi.edu