Subject: WWW Home pages: No apology for continuing the thread!

From: [email-masked] (Rzepa,Henry)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 18:53:44 +0000

Karl Jalkanen writes
>And what did I start this
>topic on ....  Yes,  UCLA as one and only info server for
>Chemistry homepages.  NO way.  It would be a nightmare for
>the poor guy at UCLA.  My vote is for:
>>American Chemical Society to add in the footnote the
>www server for each author.

I am still baffled by what an entirely new chemistry user does.
He goes to his depts home page. But how would he/she
then proceed if the local webmaster is shall we say dormant.
 Currently, off to say a UCLA or a Webcrawler
or Lycos search, because they have a "quality" reputation.
Or perhaps a national "mirror" if that country has organised
the funding to pay for it. As for WWW addresses in journals,
I started putting my e-mail address in all  such papers in
1986. It is STILL not the norm. It may take years for this
to become common. Indeed I only know of two papers
where this has happened.

 >And what about
>the professors putting their lecture notes on various
>topics available on the net.  This would be great as then
>everyone could really have access to the great lectures
>and lecture note preparers.  Then the professors would
>have more time to spend writing grants, papers and doing
>research.  Have an internet chemistry department.  All
>classes on the net.

Several have started this concept. We put up a self-entry
page called http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/GIC/ with lecture notes,
spectra, tutorial material, stories etc. We put up and then removed around
20 lab experiments because the safety implications are profound
(not all countries have the same legislation). A number of sites have
contributed, and we hope that if this grows, what Karl writes about
above will indeed come about. Take a look also at the only Masters
Course on a molecular topic on the Internet;
http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html
on Principles of Protein Structure.

Of course, this raises other issues. How do we assess students
that may simply have plagiarised the Internet for their work! But
I think I do indeed digress at this point. No, I am not volunteering to
start a new discussion list!

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