From owner-chemistry@ccl.net Wed Mar 17 12:22:00 2021 From: "Alexandre Hocquet alexandre.hocquet_+_univ-lorraine.fr" To: CCL Subject: CCL: We were here before the web and hype : 30 years ! Message-Id: <-54292-210317115909-27460-AfekVybx4JLRcjO5vR2dCA]=[server.ccl.net> X-Original-From: Alexandre Hocquet Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2021 16:58:54 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Sent to CCL by: Alexandre Hocquet [alexandre.hocquet() univ-lorraine.fr] Dear CCLers, Can you imagine that the CCL is more than 30 years old? We were here before the Web and hype... I am paraphrasing here a post by Jan Labanowski [in May 2001](http://www.ccl.net/cgi-bin/ccl/message-new?2001+05+17+008). I just replaced "10" with "30". The CCL was born in January 1991, and the "web and hype" slogan has already been reused two years ago, thanks to an initiative from Egon Willighagen and Rajarshi Guha, when a tribute to the CCL was published in the [Journal of Cheminformatics](https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-018-0322-7) by Frédéric Wieber, Alejandro Pisanty and yours truly. The paper's conclusion hinted that "the issue of the preservation of CCL heritage is essential. Mailing lists archives are a unique opportunity for historians". As historians of science, we (Frédéric Wieber and I) are trying to undertake to preserve the list into a queryable database. Even though the task is far from being a daunting one in the era of Big Data, it still possesses its technical, legal and institutional challenges, especially without any dedicated funding. We are thus considering applying for a dedicated grant (and are willingly taking advice about where to ask). We do believe that chances would be higher if people from the community showed support. The aim of this message is thus a call to volunteers : is your department, your lab, your institution willing to engage in this endeavour ? Jointly applying to a grant altogether ? writing a letter of support ? Inundate the project with ridiculous amounts of money and/or man*months ? Every contribution to the cause is welcome ! -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré Alexandre.Hocquet|*|univ-lorraine.fr https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet ***********************************************