Subject: Re: CCL:Chemistry WWW

From: [email-masked] (Rzepa,Henry)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 09:05:59 +0000

>For those of you keeping a WWW chemistry list up to date,
>try using webcrawler to find new sites. A search for
>"chemistry" turned up many hits
>
>http://webcrawler.cs.washington.edu/WebCrawler/WebQuery.html

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. 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. 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!!

Maybe via an ACS symposium? In Chicago this August?

Dr Henry Rzepa, Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY;
[email-masked] via Eudora 2.1.1, Tel  (44) 171 594 5774 or 594 5809.
Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. World-Wide-Web URL:
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa.html