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One of the most successful information services on the Internet today is the Computational Chemistry Electronic Mailing List (CCL). Operated since 1991 by one of the authors (JKL), it is an electronic-mail-based discussion forum for issues related to computational chemistry and similar topics. It is also read by means of the World-Wide Web (WWW). The CCL has grown to over 2300 subscribers and 400 messages per month. Further, its Web page receives over 200 hits and its gopher site 1,000 per day.
The purpose of this article is to describe the impact the list has had and is having on the way its readers work in chemical research and teaching, as a well-studied example of the various forms in which the Internet is changing academic and professional practice. Among other recognitions, it was the subject of a recent talk at the Collaboratory session of the American Chemical Society Meeting in Chicago, 1995.
In order to assess the List's impact, a survey was made among the users of the List in June 1994. A set of questions was sent out through the list itself, and through a form on the WWW which made it much easier to enter answers to the questions. The survey attempted to characterize the users by country, field of work, type of employment, etc., and then went into patterns of usage, research-related questions like types of impact and value of the List, contacts made and collaborations started through the List, etc. The teaching impact of the List was also assessed in a set of questions. An important part of the survey explored the "memorable moments" (pleasant or useful as well as unpleasant); the open form of this question allowed us to glean information and opinions valuable for understanding and guiding the future use of the Internet.
Some of our results have been published [1]. This note will focus on the impact of the List on chemical research and teaching as a model of the overarching effects the Internet will have on academic and professional work in general. Also, in this note other instances of electronic communication are taken into account which were not available at the time of the previous publication. In the previous paper, we gave information on chemically relevant electronic mailing lists and on the workings of electronic mail, which will be left out here.
The CCL operates through "mail exploder" software, which automatically sends the mail it receives to all subscribers. It is unmoderated in the sense that the List's coordinator (JKL) does not intervene to select the messages sent out to the subscribers; they receive the exact contents sent by the originator of each message. Messages are typically 10 to 20 lines, i.e. a screenful of text. All subscribers, or anyone else who reads the messages, can comment or reply by sending a message to the "exploder", whereupon this message itself will be read by all subscribers. Also, mail can be sent directly to the originator of the message by ordinary means; in this case, it will only be read by this person.
The subjects of the messages are mostly requests for literature, opinions or help related to research being performed by the sender. The help requested is mostly for running specific computer programs.
About half of the List readers and subscribers reside in the United States. As of June 1994, they worked in 43 countries. More than half of the List members work in academic institutions; only a sixth work in "for profit", non-academic organizations (this number is growing). Most of the academic institutions represented are universities. Three-fourths of the List members have been on for more than a year.
Almost all subscribers of the CCL read it once a day or more frequently. Many of them are "hooked" to their computers. The picture of a person constantly reading the arriving mail is consistent for our readers, who work heavily with computers. Maybe in other fields the providers of Internet services will have to be geared to a different usage pattern, where people turn on their Internet connections less frequently.
It is important that even people who do not actively send postings to the list or reply to them may obtain important benefits from being active readers [2].
The sole fact that more than a fourth of the list members are graduate students should make clear the impact of such an Internet resource on education. About 8% of the List members hold senior positions, an indication of the opportunity the List provides for lively interaction between junior scientists and their mentors. Further, many members of the List have extracted valuable information and tools for their teaching. Many of us are able to bring updated, critical digests of chemical information and opinion to our students by just relaying to them our readings of the List.
Computational chemistry has become, pervasively, a tool for many chemists. This is proven in fact by our survey: although the List, by name alone, is oriented to Computational Chemistry, fully one-half of its members are not specialists in this field. Instead, they work in physical chemistry, polymer science, drug design, organic chemistry, etc. Almost a fifth of the users perform experimental work.
On reviewing this paper, the editor [3] has questioned the penetration of the list since there must be over 10,000 copies of molecular modeling software packages in use; in comparison, the number of CCL subscribers may seem low. We believe that the growth in subscribers is at least parallel to the number of such copies, that many of the software suppliers provide their own electronic help desks used by their clients, and that in many research and teaching groups CCL access is performed by one or a few participants on behalf of all others, particularly due to the information overload of the more senior members.
How is research activity changing in an "Internetted" world? Are "virtual communities" emerging which effectively perform the tasks of "face-to-face" communities? Our answer has to be an unqualified yes, since half of our respondents value positively the impact of the list on their research.
This positive impact of the List is seen as: awareness of issues relevant for the computational chemistry community, general, updated knowledge of the field, following and participating in interesting discussions on specific theories and methods. The CCL substitutes, in many instances, for attendance at scientific meetings, and allows researchers away from the mainstream (working in remote locations or being the only computational chemist in an organization) to keep in touch with their colleagues.
An important positive point is that questions get answered and problems are solved fast. A query on how to solve a problem with a computer program was solved within an hour, whereas the (very well-known) expert who posed it would have needed a week of work to do so alone. In another instance, the sole feasibility of a research project was assessed promptly through the information gleaned from the CCL (incidentally, the project was not feasible when first attempted; two years later, the CCL showed that the tools required for it were available and the project was reactivated).
The Internet is becoming an outstanding means for communications between human beings. Even though personal contact is lost in many senses, and electronic communication should not be proposed to substitute for the subtleties of voice intonations, body language, or the warming up of a conversation with a shot of tequila, modern networks make it possible to keep those conversations running between trips. In this sense they not only make communications and work happen faster, they also may make them more continuous and pleasant. Also, the networks now allow the collaboration and contact between people who would otherwise never meet. As a measure of this, more than a tenth of the respondents pointed out that they had started collaborations through the CCL; many others have made links, though in a looser fashion.
Under the light of human communications in general, we would like to emphasize a few episodes which were selected by survey respondents as most memorable. In one of them, a discussion on how the list should be run to avoid some waste of time and bandwidth, gave place to an overwhelming vote for freedom of speech. As a result, the List has kept running unmoderated, and has become a strongly self-regulated social body where opinions are expressed freely and there is rarely a "flame war" any more.
Most of the positive evaluations of the List refer to learning. List members have learned theory, scientific and methodological principles, often from the originators of the theories, methods and insights themselves, in an informal, accessible language. Students have sparked heated discussions among renowned experts after posting apparently naïve questions.
Some of the strongest debates that have taken place on the List, attracting a wide participation with great variety of arguments, have been those on the widely used semiempirical methods in quantum chemistry (discussing the relative merits of methods and parametrizations), and what almost amounts to a religious war (in cyberspace!) on the relative merits of the Fortran and C programming languages.
Also, the List allowed for quick response to a distress call: a chemical disaster in Pakistan, in the Fall of 1993, evoked prompt aid from trained chemists.
We should not ignore the growing presence of commercial interests in the international computer networks. The CCL has a "thread" of questions and discussions related to commercially available chemistry software. Often, readers seem to find more help in using this software from their colleagues than they get from the supplier. New releases of such software result in veritable tidal waves of complaints and pointers to troubles with them which are not being addressed by the suppliers. In the future, this trend will have to be reversed, either by a more active and capable response from the suppliers, or by a market shift away from them.
What do more than four years of CCL teach us for the use of networked resources? Where do they lead? Electronic mailing lists are an extremely useful form of communication. Their asynchronous character, coupled with ease of use and the relatively low technology required (once an Internet connection is reached!) make them accessible to many kinds of people with diverse professional backgrounds and levels of training.
A more recent instance which made this patently clear was the on-line International Council for Distance Education meeting of June, 1995, where not only computer professionals participated. Altogether, over 500 education professionals from some 40 countries spent three weeks discussing several basic aspects of distance education, its practice, and the related research. Except for one subject, which required logging in to MOOs, MUDs and similar tools for participation, the whole on-line meeting took place using electronic mail tools.
From these, and related experiences, we can first say that a successful electronic resource need have a well-defined subject, with enough room for a diversified participant base. The level of discussion can be established from the start by the coordinators, and it should be high enough to attract the participation of the "best" experts on the subject, while staying relevant to students, beginners, and people in related fields. In a hypothetical Analytical Chemistry resource, the subject matter should attract questions and answers not only by practising analytical chemists, but also by the many users of chemical analysis in inorganic, biological, physical and organic chemistry, as well as by physicists, biologists, clinical chemists, etc.
The establishment of a "netiquette" is important to induce a good signal-to-noise ratio. Participants should adhere to rules which make them focus on appropriate subjects, avoid nagging or irrelevant postings, and so on. For this purpose, it is healthy that list coordinators help users to reach archived information, obtain people's electronic addresses, and find lists for related interests.
Thus, although electronic resources more sophisticated than electronic mail are becoming widely available, the mailing lists and discussion forums will be important for many years since they allow for the basic human communications to take place in a "virtual" community.
The key for the success of any network resource will be for it to engage the intellect of its best readers, to make the readers come out as writers, and to induce everyone involved to share knowledge and opinion with participants who are met electronically but are always perceived as actual human beings.
[1] J. K. Labanowski, C.F. Bender and A. Pisanty, "Electronic Mail and Electronic Lists", in S. Bacharach, ed., Chemistry on the Internet, Am. Chem. Soc. 1995 (in press)
[2] G. Jacobs and V. DiMauro, "Active readers -
what benefits do they gain from an educational telecommunications network?",
in The Twelfth Conference on Technology in Education, Vol. I, Leadership for
creating educational change: Integrating the power of technology, 379-381,
University of Texas, Austin, TX, 1995.
http://hub.terc.edu/terc/LabNet/Articles/active.html
[3] S. R. Heller, personal (e-mail!) communication, 1995.
© 1996 Elsevier Science