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FACS Newsletter 2/2001
The New Web Site of FACS
Xiaoxia Li
Laboratory of Computer Chemistry (LCC),
Institute of Process Engineering(Formerly: Institute of Chemical
Metallurgy), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China
1. Introduction
With the popularity of Internet in the past years, a web site is becoming a necessity for an academic organization. A well design and maintained FACS web page can be served as a basic window for FACS to be publicized in the chemistry community in the global scale and to facilitate communications among its member societies. The FACS web page can also be used as an effective means for archiving FACS activities.
To follow the 38th EXCO of FACS approval for a completely new web home for the FACS, I submitted a proposal that outlined the major contents which should be available on the FACS web site to FACS EXCO members and Secretariat on Mar. 8, 2001. The construction of FACS Web started after my proposal was quickly accepted by the FACS EXCO members and Secretariat. Now, the new FACS web is available at a new domain name for FACS:
http://www.facs-as.org/
as shown in Fig. 1.
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Fig. 1 The new home for FACS web page
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2. The Contents of FACS Web Page
2.1 Overview
The new web site of FACS has been carefully designed and implemented. The site has been structured for easy browsing of information. The new FACS web page covers different aspects about FACS, the major contents are grouped into the following categories:
- About FACS
- FACS Projects
- Meetings & Events
- Member Societies
- Membership
- FACS Newsletter
- FACS Awards
- Phone Book
- Links
The news release page is the major content of the home page (the first page) of FACS, which may contain news release of FACS, announcement of the coming FACS activities and other information about any events that might interest FACS/chemistry community. For example, the call for paper brochures, abstract guide lines etc. for the coming FACS major event, the 9ACC in Brisbane and the FACS 2001 Awardees' lectures that will be announced and presented in the coming 9ACC are listed as the top item, please see Fig.
1.
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Fig. 2 Example of category index page on FACS web site
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To facilitate the access to the information listed under different categories, each web page consists of three parts, the FACS logo at the top, the category index with green background on the left and the page content on the right. You may jump to any category simply by clicking the category name as listed in the index area while on any page within the FACS web site.
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Fig. 3 Long document decomposition helps easy reading of the FACS web site
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An index page has been created for each category. Fig. 2 is the index page for the category " Member Societies". The category name is set not underlined while that index page is displayed, which might be helpful in reminding where you are in the web site. Long document has been decomposed into different parts for easy reading. The FACS Statutes is such an example, as shown in Fig. 3. A red link at the bottom of each part has been created which can go back directly to the main document that containing links to different parts of the document.
2.2 Brief introduction to each category
To help give a general picture what can be found from the FACS web site, brief introductions to each category can be outlined as the following:
FACS Home: It is the first page displayed when you open the FACS web site. The major contents are news releases of
FACS.
About FACS: This is a category of what FACS is about. An article by Prof. Hitoshi Ohtaki can help you know more about the history of FACS. The FACS Statutes and the FACS Executive Council (1999/2001) can be found under this category.
FACS Projects: To keep the unity style of the FACS web site, all the web pages of FACS projects started running from early of year 2000 have been totally revised and made available. You can find introductions, web sites, events archives and reports for all FACS projects under this category.
Meetings & Events: This category is for the coming events and archive of the past activities of FACS. You can find information about the major FACS event, the Asian Chemical Congress and minutes of the past General Assembly and EXCO meetings. Information about the coming 9ACC is available. It is hoped to link the web sites of past ACCs. Unfortunately, both the web sites of 7ACC and 8ACC were found not available any more. By contacting Dr. ITO, Masato M., he expressed that as a member of an executive subcommittee for 7ACC he would like to keep 7ACC web site reopened. Many thanks for Dr. ITO's effort that now you can access to the 7ACC site through the link of FACS site. Dr. Huey Huey Lo has tried to find back the archive of 8ACC's web site but failed.
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Fig. 4 A web page for FACS member society on FACS web site
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Member Societies: A page with president or other major contact information has been created for all member societies. Link to the web site of member societies has been added. For societies with no web site, an introduction page should be found in case information has been provided by the society.
Membership: This category is about membership benefits and how to become a member of FACS. This information will be made available when provided by FACS Treasurer Mr. Lim Teck Thai. This page is temporarily redirected to the membership page of FACS Statutes.
FACS Newsletter: This category is for the electronic version of the FACS newsletter. To implement this goal, a great deal of job needs to be done. Hopefully, the No.1/2000 , No. 1/2001 and No.2/2001 issues will be made available soon.
FACS Awards: This category currently contains information about the FACS awards and list of past awardees. The award lectures that will be presented in the coming 9ACC in Brisbane can be found.
Phone Book: This category is intended to facilitate communications among chemists in Asian Pacific region. Now the contact information of the FACS Life Members can be found. It links also to the member societies contact information.
Links of Interest: This category is to provide a starting point to the Internet chemistry world. Currently it contains selected links to chemistry web guide or Internet chemistry directories, links to chemical virtual community sites, links to major chemical organizations and search engines. Links to other organizations in Asian Pacific region will be added later.
3. Future Update of FACS Web Page
The FACS web page should be a virtual place to publicize FACS as an organization for chemical professional and for fast communication. Member societies that wish to publish anything on the site, please send the information to me. The site will be updated as soon as possible when new updates sent to me. The e-mail address to contact me is
xxia@home.ipe.ac.cn
Any suggestions and comments for the web site of FACS are welcome.
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Dr. Huey Huey Lo for her careful preparation of the electronic archives about FACS and close communication during the construction of the FACS web site. Thanks to Dr. Jer-Young Chen for his helps in the FACS domain registration. Thanks for
Mr. Hongwei Yang's hard work to reconstruct the old FACS projects web page and to make two issues of FACS newsletter online. Thanks to Prof. Li Guo for network technical support. I'm also grateful to our lab LCC, the network facilities of LCC makes it possible that the FACS new web page runs on Internet 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
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