Subject: Re: CCL:Chemistry WWW

From: [email-masked] (Jesus M. Castagnetto Mizuaray)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 12:33:28 -0500 (EST)

Hello all! Here my 2 cents on this topic.

H. Rzepa said:
[...stuff deleted...]
> This raises an other interesting issue. Does Webcrawler (my favourite
> is Lycos; http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-home.html)
> provide any measure of "quality"?  I believe most strongly that this
> can only be done by "humans". OK, now we have a problem of
> comprehensiveness vs quality.
Agree, it is not easy to "measure" the quality of the material: something
related to the usefulness of the information, the depth of coverage,
the clarity, but what is clear for someone may not be clear to some other
one, e.g. a "bench" organic chemistry may find difficult to follow the
intrincacies of a force field parametrization procedure or a sophisticated
computational model, maybe he(she) will get the "feeling". So maybe the
material in the WWW should have several "layers" of organization, so you
can reach a wider group?

> I would not claim that any collection
> of home pages really addresses this issue. Indeed, for any single
> person to set themselves up as the arbitor of quality is also
> dangerous.
Not only dangerous, also imprecise, because it will be a subjective
judgement, it is not clear how one can measure a WWW page, the usual
notions that one (conciously or not) apply to the judgement of the
validity or quality of journal articles or books is not easily 
transferable to the WWW. Most of the time you find a mixed bag of
materials, some good, some not so; that is because this is a medium
in evolution, the standards are still being develop. So maybe some
degree of responsability and awareness of what is avialable should
guide the WWW authors. Try to offer something original or at least
not to be a mirror only of another Web page (although this could have
its uses).

> So how do we give a star rating to any page? Do
> we have an Oscar ceremony each year? Does it go by word-of-mouth?
> Lets face it, most people can place chemistry journals in their
> "unnoficial" pecking order of quality with little difficulty. I
> am not offering answers here, but I think we should try to get some!!
Agree on this also. Maybe a loosely coupled "peer review"-style
mechanism? (this has its problems), or have an annual (or other
periodicity) Web page vote (a la PING -URL unrelated to chemistry-),
some editorial rules like the ones that exist for journal articles,
or maybe measure by the number of acesses to a Web page (a statistical
and maybe flawed measure of the quality or degree of interest of
the page), or something else.

One last thing. If this discussion is going to go for long, maybe it
will be pertinent to take it out of the CCL list so we don't deviate
from the topics this list was created for.

Greetings.

_____
  Jesus M. Castagnetto Mizuaray   . "Energy of activation: The useful
    Dep. of Chemistry -  NYU      .  amount of energy contained in a 
4 Washington Pl, Rm 514, NY 10003 .  cup of coffe" (The Last Word-The
   [email-masked]    .  Ultimate Scientific Dictionary)

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From: Steve Heller <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 13:52:50 -0500 (EST)

With all this bandwidth about Chemistry WWW sites let me add a comment 
and a request.

I have just started as an editor for Trends in Analytical Chemistry 
(TrAC) responsible for a regular column on "The Internet".  The hope and 
plan for this column was to provide a formum for various activities on 
the Internet.  Guest columns are expected to be the main source for the 
columns.  From the recent discussions here, it would seem to me that 
perhaps one or two people would like to offer to write an article on 
Chemistry WWW sites from the perspective of a user.  There is a article 
already in the pipeline by Steve Bachrach, but - as Steve says - there 
are lots of other opinions out there.

Besides appearing in print the collection of columns will be available 
(free) on the Elsevier server.

Anyone who wants to volunteer to write about 2000 words should let me 
know. I expect to be able to get the articles reviewed quickly via e-mail 
(which has worked so far very well) and into press and on the Elsevier 
server pretty quickly.  Plesase send responses directly to me:

Steve Heller
[email-masked]
(Phone: 301-504-6055)