I hope I don't come across as wanting to do away with something that we might all want. I certainly don't want to minimize the value of collected and indexed information. I am glad of the clarifications to the roles of QCPE vs CSIR, but I am left with a concern born of the rapid advances in internet search engines. Perhaps the point borders on the philosophical, but do we really need a centralised repository for lists? I have not yet had a problem that could not be solved by searching with HOTBOT, AltaVista and DejaNews, *and* the people that respond to the CCL. It seems that distributed computing (and therefore storage, indexing and distribution) are greatly enhanced by these newish search engines. Can you expect to be covering the sort of information you are talking about *better* than the search engines? Or will I have to search through CSIR and then the search engines? I see an awful lot of sites these days wanting to be THE site for a given field. As long as the information is available to the search engines I think the issue goes away. Perhaps establishing a ready window into the data for the search engines to have access to it woud be an alternative, and much cheaper, strategy? Is the real problem that listserv archives are not available for indexing (ignoring for the moment the lack of archives you point out)? If this is a service about to be offered at no cost to anyone, including funding agencies, then I guess the whole question goes away. But, Jan has made clear that money is required to enable such an endeavor and it seems prudent to raise the questions of making best use of what is already out there. But please, I am not trying to shoot this down; I am still trying to get a clearer picture of how I would benefit from spending time there and of why funding dollars should go there at the expense of (well there is *always* something else...). __ M. Dominic Ryan (610)-270-6529 SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals Internet: ryanmd@mms.sbphrd.com King of Prussia, PA ----- 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)