Dominic Ryan raised some very valid questions about the relationship between CSIR and other services. My general philosophy about this is that CSIR is intended to help people discover software and information that may help them with their research, teaching, etc. We don't produce the software or the mailing list traffic (except for cases like this :-) -- we rely on its existance and just try to help people find and use it. To deal with his points more specifically... Dominic Ryan wrote:
Doesn't this sound a lot like QCPE, but bigger? This, to me, begs the question, is QCPE now redundant, even in the latest inception on the CCL web pages?
QCPE has a venerable history in our community, and I definitely do not think it is redundant. The problem is that QCPE doesn't meet everyone's needs -- for whatever reasons, some prefer to offer their software from their own web or FTP site or some other archive such as CCL, while others prefer to sell their software. As a result, we end up with scores of sites (including the web sites of commercial vendors) where you might look for software to meet your needs of the moment. How many of these sites do you know of? Are you missing useful software because you don't know the right site to look at, and because no one mentioned it in answer to your query on CCL (or wherever)? This is where CSIR comes in. We want to provide a _virtual_ software repository -- we don't have to hold the software ourselves (though that is an option), we can point you to its source. That source may be QCPE or a commercial vendor or someone's web site. I would expect that if we had QCPE's holdings in our catalog (something I plan to discuss with QCPE and CCL people), we could only increase their business by helping more people find out about the software they offer. The same for any other "repository". We want to offer breadth of information and leave the depth (the software itself) mainly to others. In this way we limit CSIR's scope and therefore the cost to offer this service. (Yes, we can act as a physical archive and will do so as far as resources allow. But if it gets too popular, and we begin to run out of resources we will probably seek collaborators to develop sub-discipline repositories and off-load some of the archive. In fact, CSIR uses a standard data model for its catalog, so even the catalog itself can be distributed and still operate seamlessly, if it becamse necessary or desirable.)
[...description of the AskNPAC Mailing List Archive...] More direct overlap with the CCL. I would love to see these two directions sorted out, particularly since $$ are getting put into both.
Once again, we're relying on existing resources, but trying to bring them together and make them easier to find and use. Yes, we archive CCL. We also archive this list and dozens of others. You can find most of this stuff on the Internet somewhere (though not all list owners archive their lists), but where is it? Can you search the archive easily, or do you have to retrieve a series of month-long files by email from a Listserv system and then search them on your own machine? Unles they happen to be hosted by the same site, how easily can you search _all_ the mailing lists which might have information that interests you? I like occasionally to look for interesting threads in a number of newsgroups, but I can't afford the time to process all of the messages I would receive if I actually subscribed -- especially if my interest is a narrow one. CSIR is merely offering a single, uniform point of access to the many lists that are already out there. As far as CCL in particular goes, Jan Labanowski (the proprietor of CCL) and I are very much aware of each others efforts, and have disccussed them in some detail. Quite happily, Jan has received and NSF grant recently to help develop CCL. Not to diminish his work in any way, but it centers around a single list and a single (though broad) topic. CSIR cannot hope to work at that level of detail -- we're trying to bring a wide breadth of information to the community. In due course, I expect we will offer _links_ to many of the things that Jan is developing to help computational chemists who utilize CSIR to locate additional information that may be valuable to them. The efforts are complimentary rather than competetive. It looks like this ended up as a pretty lengthy reply. You can probably understand why I didn't want to do into this detail in the initial announcement. Our Trends in Analytical Chemistry Internet Column also discusses these kinds of questions, in part, and its even longer :-) http://www.elsevier.nl:80/inca/homepage/saa/trac/resource.htm I'm happy to discuss this further or answer other questions. -- David E. Bernholdt | Email: bernhold@npac.syr.edu Northeast Parallel Architectures Center | Phone: +1 315 443 3857 111 College Place, Syracuse University | Fax: +1 315 443 1973 Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 | URL: http://www.npac.syr.edu ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)