I enclose a portion of a message received from Sweden. I wonder who pays for this to happen? This is however an interesting contrast with say Chemical Abstracts, who abstract only a very tiny proportion of the chemical Web, by the expedient of printing the document first, and abstracting that rather than the "e-version". The resultant quality is no doubt very much better than the Swedes would achieve. Still, it raises an issue that if an entire country (and 5.6M URLS) can be archived, no doubt the whole of chemistry (which is perhaps 25% the size of this) could also be done. The big difference is that one cannot tell it is chemistry simply by inspecting the URL! I have thought in the past that any site that considers itself chemical in nature might wish to identify this (ie by an expedient similar to the robots.txt file which controls whether you allow robots to visit you, ie chembot.txt). I wonder if on the whole, readers of this list feel that someone somewhere should be thinking about how to do it, or whether the Web, like phone calls, may just not be worth "snapshoting" in this way. Arguably, already so much of the chemical Web lurks behind passwords, or is generated just-in-time from databases, that an archive would be so incomplete as to be not worth doing. Anyone with strong views on this? *********************** The National Library of Sweden (KB) archives the whole "Swedish web", within *.se (today about 5.6M URL's), because we hope KB will not go broke, for a few more centuries at least. We are the only National Library in the world to do so. We hope for international collaboration though. Will British Library join us? Finland will. Norway, Denmark and Iceland probably too. Some links do cross over borders!(-; Best regards, Frans Frans Lettenstrom, Ph.D, Executive Officer, Information Technology BIBSAM (Department for National Coordination and Development) The Royal Library, National Library of Sweden *********************** Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)