Elizabeth G. Kraemer and Robert
A. Lodder
College of Pharmacy
University of Kentucky Medical Center
Lexington, KY 40536 0082
Phone: (606) 257-9232
Email: Lodder@pop.uky.edu
Introduction
In the 1990s the use of the internet has expanded dramatically in all areas of science. The World Wide Web (WWW) on the internet is a network through which information can be accessed from millions of computers around the world. The growth of the WWW has been tremendous, increasing from 20,000 to an estimated four million web sites in just one to two years. Countless articles have been published about this virtual explosion in network communication and its effects on different disciplines. This article provides a survey in table form of internet resources of use to infrared and near infrared spectroscopists. This article is mirrored online for the convenience of readers at the Wave of the Future, http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/ASRG/wave/wavehp.html. Table I[caption for Table I], containing the links to various internet and World Wide Web (WWW) resources, is also available at http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/ASRG/cnirs/ir_spec.htm. The Table I links are provided online to enable readers of this article to explore the links with a minimum of typing.
Trends in Internet Content
Recently, a new trend in educational use of the internet and WWW has
begun to appear online. Diverse class projects from different student groups
and schools have begun to appear on the WWW. This is a trend that should
continue for several reasons. Putting term projects on the WWW gives students
a chance to give something of value academically back to the community while
they are still in school. Specifically, it allows students to help other
students as well as the public learn new things in a new and convenient
way. Moreover, students can often learn things from other students that
they cannot seem to learn from their teachers. Both the public and other
students discover these new WWW offerings using search engines, which provide
an online virtual library. Furthermore, WWW term projects give students
a product and goal oriented mind-set, instantaneous feedback via email from
users of the project, and can be used to teach team building, quality control,
and cooperation. For example, multimedia
pages on HPLC are provided on the WWW as a project of University of
Kentucky students in PHR 510, Modern Methods of Pharmaceutical Analysis
(http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/ASRG/HPLC/hplcmytry.html).
Readers of the student project are invited to submit a grade online for
the work of the students as well as provide any additional comments that
they may wish to make on content, presentation, graphics, additional links,
etc. If readers choose to provide their name and email address, students
can respond to the comments and questions as well. The pharmaceutical analysis
class fulfills the following learning objectives for the students:
1. Students learn to perform in groups effectively, manage the quality
of a project and achieve their selected goals.
2. Students publish a peer-reviewed research paper on the WWW using modern
analytical methods to solve a problem of interest to industry or faculty.
Online review papers also become a ready reference for others on campus,
who use Netscape to learn what instrumentation is available for research
use, and how it should be operated.
3. Students become familiar with the state of the art in analytical instruments
and techniques.
This Web-based course in analysis utilizes quality management principles to achieve a problem-based approach to learning. Corporations use these management techniques to make certain that they meet all of the needs of their customers. Major companies (the employers of the students) are now advocating quality management for the academic world to make certain that universities satisfy all of their customers (which includes the students and the future employers). Through the group WWW projects, the students learn how difficult it can be to attempt to involve any person productively in something that person does not believe in. In the corporate environment, these persons are reassigned to other duties, resign to find more appropriate employment, or are terminated. In this way, the corporate entity maintains the unity of purpose necessary to satisfy the customer. Giving students a WWW term project as a product goal ultimately creates a similar unity of purpose. Quality management is geared to meeting customer requirements, which is necessary if universities are to survive and thrive in the modern environment. Quality management makes students better problem solvers and more able to work effectively in groups. The same system works at the undergraduate level, where there is a Home Diagnostic Kits Homepage by the students in PHR 395 Introduction to Home Diagnostic Kits (http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/HomeTest/KitsHP.html). The Home Diagnostic Kits Homepage provides new information annually about test kits available in retail pharmacies (blood glucose for diabetic patients, pregnancy testing, etc.).
The University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences operates a number of chemistry classes for their registered students on the WWW (http://dragon.labmed.umn.edu/~lynda/eva/internet-class/). Classes in Ecological Biochemistry and Advanced Biochemistry I: Protein Structure and Function are offered by Dr. Larry Wackett. Dr. Lynda Ellis has placed a class on Computational Analysis of Biological Sequences on the WWW, and Dr. Karin Musier-Forsyth has a course in Chemistry of Nucleic Acids online. Students in these classes learn to make and post their own WWW pages. For example, in one class students examine one incomplete biodegradation pathway, and document what is needed for it to be completed. To do this the students use the University of Minnesota Biocatalysis/Biodegradation Database (UM-BBD) that is available online.
At some institutions, the term projects of multiple classes are brought together to create a scientific zine (1), such as the Notre Dame Science Quarterly on the WWW (http://www.nd.edu:80/%7escienceq/). This journal is published in print four times during the academic year (December, March, April, and May) by the undergraduate students of the College of Science at the University of Notre Dame. The WWW site is a new expansion of the Quarterly, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Readers who stop by the site on the internet are encouraged to comment to the zine home page, and are encouraged to link Notre Dame to their own relevant sites. (Notre Dame asks that webmasters email them when links are made so they can return the courtesy.)
At the University of Kentucky, a zine named Wave of the Future (http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/ASRG/WAVE/wavehp.html) provides online peer review of manuscripts on a Web page as part of a vision of a new scientific publication system, comprising a large number of computer servers linked logically by search engines, with each server storing years of quality articles, graphics, and data from a handful of researchers for easy retrieval (see Fig. 1) [caption for figure 1]. Many complaints are often heard about publishing in the scientific literature. Authors claim that it takes too long to get an article published (posting of articles can be instantaneous on the WWW), there is not enough page space available (available space is limited only by the computing hardware, which grows almost exponentially), page charges are too high (free publication on existing machines on the WWW), anonymous peer review does not allow readers or authors to gauge the quality of the review process (all reviews are signed and published along with the article just as practiced in certain fields, such as in the statistics literature), etc. With this online peer review format, Wave of the Future hopes to address these problems on an experimental basis.
Comments are invited via a forms page on all of the manuscripts provided in Wave of the Future. All comments are posted with the others received, along with the reviewer's name and email address in the page following the manuscript. Authors are encouraged to respond to comments in the same way, making all of the information available in a package for readers to judge the merits of all sides of the issues presented. At some point in the future, zines like Wave of the Future may be used as a feeder for paper journals. Editors may select papers from the zines for print dissemination based on peer review comments and number of accesses as an indication of reader interest, thus increasing the quality of the papers they spend money on publishing as hard copy. Papers could actually be perfected on the Web as a result of the online comments received. In the future (i.e., probably years from now), scientific WWW publication seems likely to increase. Journals may eventually cut the number of pages they print to zero, go to all Web publication (or whatever online equivalent replaces the Web) and move their advertisements to the WWW servers. Until then, filling the journals with papers that review well and attract a lot of reader interest can only increase their readership and advertising revenue.
How the List of Sites was Assembled
The list of IR and near-IR sites was assembled by online searches during the spring of 1996. The search engines used were Webcrawler (http://webcrawler.com/), Metacrawler (http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu/), and Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/). The authors apologize in advance for omitting the many IR and near-IR sites not indexed by these search engines. If your site was omitted and you would like to have it added to the online version, please notify the authors by email to Lodder@pop.uky.edu.
References
1. E-Zine - noun
A publication published either partly or completely through electronic means,
such as a BBS, the Internet, or Usenet. Short form of Electronic Magazine.
Can range from a simple, one- page text document to an elaborate presentation
with graphics and sound. (from
http://www.dakota.net/pwinn/dict/ezine.shtml)
Fig. 1. The future scientific publication system on the internet may comprise a large number of computer servers linked logically by search engines, with each server storing years of articles, graphics, and data from a handful of researchers in the same field for easy retrieval.
Table I. These IR and near-IR links, and a few descriptive lines from each page, were copied directly from the sites for use in this table. This table is available online at http://kerouac.pharm.uky.edu/ASRG/cnirs/ir_spec.htm to enable readers to explore the links with a minimum of typing.
