Perhaps it is a sign of growth in any field when "Best of ..." lists begin to appear. That happened recently for the chemical domain on the World Wide Web. The selections took the form of a poster at a session held last August during the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Chicago. The poster session was part of a symposium on "Chemistry on the Infobahn," sponsored by the Division of Computers in Chemistry.
"Chemistry on the Internet: The Best of the Web 1995" was the work of Steven M. Bachrach, an associate professor of chemistry at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb; Thomas H. Pierce, a computational chemist at Rohm and Haas, Philadelphia; and Henry S. Rzepa, a reader in organic chemistry at Imperial College, London. Each has been exploring the Internet's implications for chemistry for at least several years.
The three chemists stress that the 1995 list is based on their own judgments and does not involve their organizations. However, they hope to make the list an annual event featuring user-selected chemical Internet services introduced during the year preceding the list's publication. To that end, they are soliciting votes from the chemical community. A voting form (as well as the 1995 listing) can be found at the web address http:// hackberry.chem.niu.edu:80/Infobahn/Paper38. The authors also have ideas for an "Editor's Choice" selection as well.
As the trio stated in its poster presentation, "In compiling this selection, we have focused on the work of key individuals who we believe have shown a vision of the future in creating innovative and original chemistry Internet resources for us all."
The following list has been slightly modified by C&EN from the original, partly for clarity and partly to reflect changes or deletions at a few of the sites since the list was first compiled. In general, the site entries include the title of the page for the site, with the citation by the compilers in parentheses.
Virtual Chemistry Library at the University of California, Los Angeles (Max Kopelevich's original global collection) http://www.chem.ucla.edu/chempointers.html
ChemDex List at the University of Sheffield, England (Mark Winter's global collection) http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/ chem/chemistry-www-sites.html
Internet Chemistry Resources (Gary Wiggins and Joseph Warden's collection of chemistry resources) http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem/cheminfo/chemres.html
Australian Chemistry Network (Alan Arnold's collection of chemistry resources) http://apamac.ch.adfa.oz.au/
Overview of Chemistry Mailing Lists (Kris Boulez's collection of e-mail lists) http://bionmr1.rug.ac.be/chemistry/overview.html
Yahoo Collection of Chemical Pointers (an edited collection of chemistry highlights) http://www.yahoo.com/Science/Chemistry
ChemEd: Chemistry Education Resources (Alan Cairns' collection) http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/scied/chemistry.html
Chemical Engineering Virtual Library (Dale Kirmse's collection of chemical engineering resources) http://www.che.ufl.edu/WWW-CHE/index.html
NIH GenoBase Database Gateway (Ron Taylor and Adam Ginsburg's molecular biology collection) http://specter.dcrt.nih.gov:8004/
Poly-Links (index of polymer and plastics resources from World Wide WebLabs) http://www.polymers.com
Chemical MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Project and
Discussions (chemical Internet standards project by Peter Murray-Rust, Henry
Rzepa, and Ben Whitaker) http://chem.leeds.ac.uk/Project/MIME.html
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemime/
2-D to 3-D Coordinate Conversions (Project CORINA) http://schiele.organik.uni-erlangen.de/services/3d.html
SCOP: Structural Classification of Proteins (Alexey G. Murzin, Steven E. Brenner, Tim J. P. Hubbard, and Cyrus Chothia's protein exploratorium) http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/scop
KLOTHO: Biochemical Compounds Declarative Database (Toni Kazic's innovative work on web-based databases) http://ibc.wustl.edu/klotho/
The Principles of Protein Structure (groundbreaking courseware edited by Peter Murray-Rust and Alan Mills) http://www.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/PPS/index.html
Molecular Hyperglossary (Peter Murray-Rust and Christopher J. Leach's hyperlinked database concept) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc/glossary/
Molecular Modeling and Protein Database (pdb) Search (Peter Fitzgerald's" Molecules R Us" service) http://www.nih.gov/molecular_modeling/ pdb_at_a_glance.html
Gaussian Basis Set Library from Environmental and Molecular Sciences Laboratory (Karen Schuchardt and David Feller's basis set database) http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/
WebSpirs (a web interface to a major database collection) http://www.silverplatter.com/sampler/webspirs.html
AMBER Home Page (Thomas Cheatham and Bill Ross's information pages for Amber-assisted model building with energy refinement) http://www.amber.ucsf.edu/amber/amber.html/P>
Biosym/MSI Life Sciences (help for Quanta users) http://www.msi.com/marketing/ls/ls.html
Fullerene Database and Information http://www.susx.ac.uk/Users/kroto /
Nanotechnology on the WWW (Sean Morgan's nanotechnology archives) http://www.arc.ab.ca/~sean/Nano.html
Computer Simulation of Condensed Phases (M. Leslie's project pages for CCP5, a collaborative computational project) http://www.dl.ac.uk/CCP/CCP5/main.html
Fisher Scientific's Internet Catalog (on-line chemical catalog information) http://www.fisher1.com/
University of Texas Medical Branch NMR Center (Bruce Luxon's links to NMR on the Internet) http://www.nmr.utmb.edu/
WebElements Periodic Table (Mark Winter's project, operating since 1993) http://www.shef.ac.uk:80/~chem/web-elements/
Chemists Address/Phone Book (Steven Bachrach's global directory of chemists) http://hackberry.chem.niu.edu:70/0/ChemDir/index.html
Academic Chemistry Employment Clearinghouse (Steven Bachrach's global project for chemists) http://hackberry.chem.niu.edu:70/1/ChemJob
Instability Dynamics of Fracture (multimedia reprint from IBM Almaden Research Center by Farid F. Abraham, Dominique Brodbeck, R. A. Rafey, and W. E. Rudge) http://www-i.almaden.ibm.com/vis/fracture/prl_4.html
Second Electronic Computational Chemistry Conference - ECCC2 (second in series of web-based computational chemistry conferences, edited by Steven Bachrach) http://hackberry.chem.niu.edu/ECCC2/
Electronic Conference on Trends in Organic Chemistry - ECTOC-1 (first web-based organic chemistry conference, edited by Henry Rzepa) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc
Ohio Supercomputer Center home page; Computational Chemistry List archive (Jan Labanowski's preeminent chemical discussion forum) http://www.osc.edu/chemistry.html
NMR '95 Poster Session (June 12 - 16) (Barry J. Hardy's NMR posters) http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/nmr/poster.html
First Electronic Glycoscience Conference - EGC-1 (Sept. 18 - Oct. 13) (a globally edited glycoscience collaboratory) http://bellatrix.pcl.ox.ac.uk/people/barry_spring95/barry.gig_econf.htm l
Virtual Reality Modeling Language (Omer Casher's pioneering work in chemistry) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/VRML/
Representation of Molecular Models and Rendering Techniques (François Savary's visual guide) http://scsg9.unige.ch/eng/toc.html
The NIH Molecular Modeling Home Page (high-quality modeling archive) http://www.nih.gov/molecular_modeling/quick_finder.html
Chemistry at the Center for Scientific Computing (Finland) and Chemist's Art Gallery (Leif Laaksonen's pioneering work in chemical art) http://www.csc.fi/lul/csc_chem.html http://www.csc.fi/lul/chem/graphics.html
Hyperactive Molecules (Benjamin Whitaker, who had the first operating chemistry web server in December 1992, and Henry Rzepa's hyperactive chemistry) http://ch.ic.ac.uk/chemical_mime.html http://chem.leeds.ac.uk/Project/MIME.html
MDL Information System's ISIS/Draw offer (a personal Macintosh/Windows chemical drawing package) http://www.mdli.com/ioffer.html
RasMol (Roger Sayle's free PC/Macintosh/Unix viewer) ttp://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rasmol.html
XMol information (X-Window viewing program from the Minnesota Supercomputer Center) http://www.msc.edu/msc/docs/xmol/XMol.html
GC/MS of Jamaican Coffee and Pimento (Robert Lancashire's project at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica) http://www.chem.uwimona.edu.jm:1104/lectures/pimento.html
Multimedia Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego (Kent Wilson's physical chemistry course) http://www-wilson.ucsd.edu/education/samplegateway.html
Chemistry Hypermedia Project at Virginia Tech (Brian Tissue's teaching collection) http://www.chem.vt.edu/chem-ed/vt-chem-ed.html
Global Instructional Chemistry (Henry Rzepa's collection of teaching materials) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/GIC/
Journal of Molecular Modeling (edited by Tim Clark) http://derioc1.organik.uni-erlangen.de/info/JMOLMOD/jmolinfo.html
Elsevier WWW Publications (including Stephen R. Heller's Trends in Analytical Chemistry TrAC/Internet Column) http://www.elsevier.nl.
Network Science http://www.awod.com/netsci
Journal of Biological Chemistry http://wucmd.wustl.edu/jcamd/jcamd.html
Protein Science, a publication of the Protein Society http://www.prosci.uci.edu/
Journal of Chemical Physics (JCP Express) http://jcp.uchicago.edui
ACSWeb http://www.acs.org
Chemical Abstracts Service http://info.cas.org/welcome.html
Royal Society of Chemistry http://chemistry.rsc.org/rsc/
[ACS Home Page]
[ACS Publications Division Page]