CI Green is back, online

doi:10.1515/ci-2020-0415

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CI Green is back, online

Published/Copyright: October 1, 2020

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From the journal Chemistry International Volume 42 Issue 4

For about 24 years, from 1979 to 2003, Chemistry International was print only and easily recognizable with its glossy green cover. It was so green that it stained the readers fingers! Today, the early volumes of CI are freely available online, and without stains.

Working with the Internet Archive, the project of digitizing the print collection has been recently completed. The scanning and processing were managed by Tim Bigelow in Boston. For each volume, high quality, text-searchable PDF files have been created. The collection is part of Internet Archive search and each volume is displayed via their open source Book Reader.

Making the collection available online is a CI present to IUPAC100 and a gift to the community of scientists and historians interested in the stories surrounding the Union in the '80s and '90s. In the Epilogue of the CI Special IUPAC 100 issue (July 2019, p. 58), Brigitte Van Tiggelen issued a call to arms and asked anyone who has historical materials to share it. She and her colleagues, who contributed to that special issue, have presented fascinating accounts of specific aspects or point-in-time in the early years of the Union. A closer look at the last decades of the 20^th century will no doubt be equally interesting. Therefore it became evident to this CI editor that one small step forward was to make CI archives digital and broadly available online.

Curious wonderers will rejoice flipping through these pages, discovering the Union's recent past. Over the years, the styles evolved and each successive editors left their marks. To start, it was Martin Gellender until 1982, followed by Roger Fennell until 1985, and Michael Freemantle for about 10 years until July 1994. Following that longer steady period Michael Ward appeared as acting editor for a couple of years untill John Jost took the baton in 1997. Then, Alan Senzel managed CI from 1999 to 2001 and at last, starting in 2002, Fabienne Meyers morphed CI into the magazine you still receive today, implementing colors and an online version in 2003.

Fictional characters have made regular appearances in CI during Michael Freemantle’s tenure as editor. The cartoons were drawn by Steve Johnston (JS), an art teacher and former colleague of Freemantle from Basingstoke. This cartoon appeared in CI March 1988 (Vol. 10, No. 2), along with the announcement of the successful completion of a pilot project computerizing records of solubility data.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. It began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself. Today they have 20+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and they work with 625+ library and other partners through their Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

https://archive.org/details/chemistryinternational

Online erschienen: 2020-10-01

Erschienen im Druck: 2020-10-01

©2020 IUPAC & De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For more information, please visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2020-0415