Archiving the entire chemical Web

[Rzepa, Henry]

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 at ic.ac.uk; Tel  (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804.
URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ 



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