99 million hits and still going….

Did you know that ChemWeb was the first website in the Caribbean? Pioneered and developed by FST, on the 27^th September 1994, http://wwwchem.uwimona.edu.jm joined a small (less than ~30) but growing (now over 2000) band of Chemistry Department websites worldwide; it was the first website to operate in the Caribbean.

The site hosts thousands of files, including web pages, pictures, spectra data files and molecular graphics files.  Initially pages were developed to provide information about the academic staff and their research programmes.  When it became clear that the Internet would play a major role in future communications and offer a mechanism for widespread publicity, this approach broadened to include the chemistry of Jamaican bauxite, fruit, spices, coffee, sugar and rum to attract attention and return visits.

The introduction of teaching material related to taught courses followed a project that was initiated to investigate the delivery of a number of aspects of Chemistry, including “live” spectra.  It was felt that straight conversion of lecture notes to the web would have limited impact and that on-line course material must provide “value-added” substance, i.e. take advantage of web technology.  Otherwise students would probably be better off with a handout!  For Inorganic chemistry lecture and laboratory courses, JAVA applets were developed and these together with extensive use of the plugin CHIME ™ enabled rich interactive web page development.

In 2006, the contract with MDL, California on CHIME finished and soon after the source code for a JAVA version of the spectroscopy viewer was released as Open Source. This was subsequently merged with Jmol (a molecular graphics Open-Source project) and has now been released as an HTML5/javascript version named JSmol due to collaboration with Prof Bob Hanson, a regular visitor to Mona over the last 10 years.

Hear the full ChemWeb story and how it transformed internet access in the region (click here for details).