The "10th" birthday of the "web" passed mostly without comment in 1999;
I mention this since arguably 2004 (perhaps Jan, perhaps May)
would represent such for "chemistry". So it might be useful to ask
people on this list for any comments, eg along the lines of what
have been the significant changes in the way we "do" chemistry
as a result of the last ten years!
Given that many of us have opinions of where we would like to be,
in an ideal world, with the chemical Internet, it is all to easy
to look at some trends, and say "not there yet".
One "not yet there" aspect which I encountered yesterday was
what I call "TQA-induced" activity (TQA is the UK-speak quality
assessment exercise that some chemistry depts hare undergoing in
2004). A policy came down from upon high that we should ensure
that our students would have online access to as many teaching
materials as we could manage for the TQA. Accordingly, a steady
stream of such has been arriving on my desk (as coordinator of
such). Opening up e.g. the latest, I was intrigued to find a collection
of Acrobat files, many ranging in sizes between 6-14 Mbytes.
This size-induced Web unfriendliness probably originates in many
ways, one of which may well be clipboard-pasted graphics, probably
at very high resolution, which gets distilled in with no compression
by time-pressed secretaries (or even worse, simply produced from
flatbed scanners).
Indeed Acrobat (sometimes copy protected, rarely accompanied
by the "source document") seems increasingly ubiquitous on the Web;
virtually all electronic journals now offer it, e-books using it are
starting to appear (I posted on this earlier), and increasingly at the
very operating system level, "print to PDF" is offered as an option.
Acrobat is an asynchronous medium; it is far easier to produce
such, than to use (re-use) it (Acrobat parsers do exist however,
but how effective they are I do not know). Thus this frenzy
to populate the Internet with chemistry wrapped in Acrobat is
very much a one-way (non reusable) mechanism for the digital information
it represents.
So will we come to see the first 10 years of the chemical Web
really just as digital paper, or something much more fundamental?
Opinions welcome!
--
Henry Rzepa. Imperial College, Chemistry Dept.
+44 0778 626 8220 +44 020 7594 5804 (Fax)