[Nmrshiftdb-users] Regular Status Update for NMRShiftDB

[Christoph S. <ste...@ic...>]

Dear NMRShiftDB Registrant,

with a slowly growing community of registered users, while still being 
in beta status, we are going to post status updates for NMRShiftDB a 
little more frequently than it will be happening in the future when 
NMRShiftDB is stable.

These postings, like this one, are preceded by a news update, followed 
by a general section, which will be updated and reposted on a regular 
basis, as soon as this is justified by a certain number of new 
registrants or an important update of NMRShiftDB.

CURRENT UPDATE

This week we will be receiving the new hardware for NMRShiftDB.
As soon as the move has been performed, NMRShiftDB will be running on a 
high-availability cluster of initially two servers which can be easily 
extended later. We should see a significant performance boost once this 
has been completed.


GENERAL REMARKS, CAVEATS, HINTS

- NMRShiftDB is an open-source, open-content database for organic 
molecule and their NMR data. Currently we support proton and carbon 1D 
NMR spectra. Support for proton spectra is incomplete, however, due to 
missing possibility for entering multiplicities and coupling constants.

- Up to date, NMRShiftDB is not complete, not comprehensive and not 
stable. Within the next weeks the system will be moved to a reasonable 
hardware platform and stress-testing can begin. We hope that the system 
will be reasonably stable within the next half year.

- We feel dedicated to the ideas of the open-source movement and we thus 
need your support but even more we need your patience with the initial 
imperfections of NMRShiftDB.

- NMRShiftDB will only grow through contributions by the community. If 
you are interested in contributing spectral assignments, either from 
your own work or from the literature, please contact me or the 
NMRShiftDB administrator to organize the reviewing process.
We urge you to consider contributing. One structure + spectrum + 
assignment per month is better than nothing, one per week is better than 
one per month, etc. :-)


USAGE

General usage of NMRShiftDB should be straight forward for everyone 
familiar with other spectral databases.

Two important points should be stressed here:

- Please send comments, bug reports, feature requests or just a "hello" 
to the nmr...@li... mailing list  (The lists 
homepage with archive is 
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nmrshiftdb-users).

- Please consider using the bug tracker and feature tracker at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmrshiftdb to file feature requests and 
bug reports.


CONTRIBUTIONS

With a growing number of people willing to contribute structures and 
spectra, we need a better organization of the reviewing process.
NMRShiftDB's architecture provides support for so called "review 
groups". Theses groups are to organize contributors in small clusters, 
whose member review each other's contributions.

If a workgroup in an academic or industrial environment decides to 
contribute to NMRShiftDB, the members of this group could, after 
registration on NMRShiftDB, form a review group to facilitate the 
exchange of data neccessary for reviewing.

Please be aware of the fact that anonymous peer review is no issue in 
NMRShiftDB - instead, reviewer and submitter need to work closely 
together in order to ensure data quality.
This can, for example, be done by faxing or e-mailing each other the 
original data (for example copies of the paper from which the data was 
taken).
The reviewing will become even easier if you augment your source with 
handwritten notes, marks, etc., that highlight the data which have been 
entered. Often, measurement conditions, solvents, and other interesting 
data are nastily hidden within the text. :-)
So, as soon as you contribute your first few data sets, you will be 
assigned to a review group. If you want to form a review group with 
colleagues from your laboratory, in order to facilitate the exchange of 
the underlying material, that's fine. Just send us an email.


SPONSORING

Last but not least we would like to point your attention to the 
possibility of sponsoring NMRShiftDB by either

* providing money for people entering data from the literature in order 
to keep NMRShiftDB growing - any amount is welcome -

or

* providing money for new hardware, which will be used for installing 
NMRShiftDB mirrors. These mirrors will be installed in institutions, 
which are willing to collaborate with us and which should be 
geographically and network-topologically distinct from our institut in 
order to provide the highest possible availability of NMRShiftDB.

If you consider sponsoring the project please contact us.

Best regards,

Christoph Steinbeck

-- 
Dr. Christoph Steinbeck (http://www.ice.mpg.de/departments/ChemInf)
MPI of Chemical Ecology, Winzerlaer Str. 10, Beutenberg Campus, 07745 
Jena, Germany
Tel: +49(0)3641 571263 - Fax: +49(0)3641 571202

What is man but that lofty spirit - that sense of enterprise.
... Kirk, "I, Mudd," stardate 4513.3..