Colleagues, Henry's "Needle in a Chemical Haystack" Webmasters4 paper http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/talks/wm4/ and recent discussions here about search engine performance have prompted me to introduce myself and a project that I hope may be of interest to many of you. Among other things, I am principal investigator for an Australian Research Council (ARC) project "ChemInfo/MetaChem" whose primary aim is to create an internationally accessible electronic gateway to chemistry information resources of all kinds. As a consequence of widespread concerns in the Australian academic chemical community about the high costs of a number of the major sources of chemistry related information, both print and electronic, and the effect on ability of users of chemistry information to have convenient and reliable access to these resources, representatives of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI), Professors and Heads of Departments of Chemistry (PHoDs), CSIRO and CAUL (Council of Australian University Librarians) met some time ago to discuss ways of improving the chemical information research infrastructure in Australia. The outcome of this meeting was the development of a range of strategies designed to improve access to both print and electronic information sources. One of the strategies identified was the development of a chemistry gateway on the web which would provide access to a diverse range of evaluated information sources and services. The ChemInfo/MetaChem gateway will provide access to Internet information such as electronic chemistry publications and databases, research projects, data sources, software, online teaching modules, directories, conferences etc. In addition, the gateway will provide links, through library catalogues and document delivery services, to print information. Similar gateway initiatives have emerged from similarly concerned chemical communities in the US and UK and elsewhere. Some excellent ones that come to mind are ChemPort http://www.chemport.org/, ChemCenter http://www.Chemcenter.org/, ChemSoc http://www.chemsoc.org, ChemDex http://www.shef.ac.uk/chemistry/chemdex/ and it's 'commercial' development ChemDex+ http://chemweb.com/databases/chemdex/chemdex.exe, and the ChemWeb http://www.chemweb.com/ projects. We do not wish to reinvent these excellent wheels. However, we believe that a distinguishing feature of the ChemInfo/MetaChem gateway will be that each resource will be evaluated, described, classified and indexed by subject specialists - thus providing the element of trust that is crucial to efficient resource discovery in these times. The final result will be a database of metadata records providing information about, and links to, the resources and also their level of validity and authority as a basis for research and teaching activity. Discussions are underway to ensure that the metadata database will be mirrored in at least the US and UK. At the moment, the project is a collaborative effort involving 9 Australian university libraries and we expect that this number will increase as the utility of the gateway is recognised. Subject specialist librarians currently donate their time as an "in-kind" contribution to the $ provided by the ARC. Over the few 6 months, our librarians plan to produce metadata for up to 10000 records, using the MetaWeb suite of tools http://purl.nla.gov.au/metaweb/home developed by the Distributed Systems Technology Center (DSTC) - another of the project partners. As our primary aim is efficient resource discovery, Dublin Core http://128.253.70.110/DC5/UserGuide5.html has been chosen as our primary metadata schema, but as many resources out there are educational, these can also be well described by the EdNA (Education Network of Australia) metadata schema http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/owa/info.getpage?sp=auto&pagecode=5210. We are also very interested in the development of metadata that can be used to describe resources peculiar to the chemical community. Henry's prototype DC-Chem schema http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/talks/wm4/9.html looks like it would be a good place to start. At the moment I have to confess that we do not have a fully developed web site for the gateway, but some background info can be found at http://www.ch.adfa.oz.au/metachem/ A more comprehensive and useable site is on the virtual drawing board. I would very much appreciate your comments, particularly in the areas of evaluation criteria, chemically-specific metadata elements, whose metadata will you trust, identifying our initial 10000 resources, etc. Please also do not hesitate to let me know if you can see anything we can do down-under to create productive international alliances and provide better access to information for the global chemical community. ___________________________________________________________________ Alan Arnold, School of Chemistry and Director of Flexible Education, University College (UNSW) Australian Defence Force Academy, CANBERRA ACT 2600 Australia voice:+61 2 6268 8080 fax:+61 2 6268 8002 web: http://www.ch.adfa.oz.au/apa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. 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