In one one part of Davids article, http://www.chemweb.com/alchem/alchem97/catalyst/ct_current_nettamer_full.htm... he writes "It is claimed - although exact figures are hard to come by - that should the whole of the web be erased tomorrow the likes of the AltaVista search engine database could recreate some 95 per cent of it. As long as this kind of storage power exists then maybe fickle or graduating students should not pose a problem to chemical net community at large." I am surprised by that claim. Alta Vista by and large presumably deals with document headers, and I would have thought does not attempt to retrieve the full document structures. It also "expires" its index to documents fairly quickly; I doubt they have a life of more than a month at most. Fro a chemical point of view, it presumably does not even try to have a go at indexing any molfiles or pdb files linked to a document, or associated with eg a Java applet. I would hazard a guess therefore, that for chemists at least, something like Alta Vista is not going to solve the problems alluded to of longer term archival. 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. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (u)nsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)