Early Digital Chemical Objects

Chemistry was one of the first disciplines to take advantage of the explosive development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Several chemists, particularly in the UK, saw how knowledge could be created, collated and displayed in novel ways. A wide range of applications were explored digitally and virtually including courses, conferences, publications, catalogues, lectures, formal publications, grey literature and collections. These were often mounted on web pages but these have not always been maintained and are in danger of decaying. This collection will recover those digital chemical artefacts that still exist.

Many took advantage of technologies such as Java and HTML to add behaviour and animation to these objects. Some of these may no longer work but it may be possible to restore or simulate their behaviour. Others may depend on commercial software which is no longer supplied or for which licenses are unaffordable.

In many cases precise records of dates and usage are already fuzzy. We shall try to add as much supporting metadata as possible and may revise it later. We regard navigation and annotation as critical, but see preservation as the immediate goal in some cases.