Chemistry - Where to find common inorganic/organometallic molecules?

Solution 1:

I appreciate the suggestions but some digging found a few possibilities:

• As I mentioned in the question, there's the Cambridge Structural Database, which includes over 700,000 compounds (both organic and inorganic/organometallic). It's decidedly not free, but available at many universities.
• There is the "Teaching Subset" of 733 compounds from CCDC which offers a Java web view of interesting compounds, including plenty of VSEPR examples and inorganic and organometallic species. This is free to access, but as far as I can tell, not free to redistribute.
• Cool Molecules from St. Olaf college, including 900+ structures from experimental data, and lots of inorganic and organometallic species (most elements are reflected), including lots of "cool" or unusual shapes (e.g., hexagonal bipyramidal).
• Crystallography Open Database as mentioned by @permeakra. I was aware of this for solid-state materials, but it seems as if they've merged in data from CrystalEye, a resource which grabbed crystallography data from journal articles, including many molecular species now, and can be browsed by journal (e.g., Organometallics).

The last two resources seem the best, since the data can be freely distributed. They also don't require using Java to view the structures.

Solution 2:

Gmelin is supposed to be the largest database of inorganic/organometallic chemical information (as Beilstein is for organics). Both are now part of Elsevier's Reaxys, which is as far from open source as you can get.

PubChem does list inorganic molecules and coordination compounds, but I am not sure how easy it is to systematically mine them.