The Computational Chemistry List (CCL) "was established on January 11, 1991, as an independent electronic forum for chemistry researchers and educators from around the world." It was created and operated for three and a half decades by Jan Labanowski, Ph.D., and comprised many things, including a job board, a software archive, and a document repository. But, its most well known component was almost certainly the CCL.NET mailing list, via which researchers and educators around the world discussed countless topics in and adjacent to computational chemistry.
On 8 Jul 2025, Jan announced that he would be shutting down CCL.NET. Amid the rush of subsequent messages thanking Jan for all of his hard work in operating CCL over the years, strong interest was expressed in preserving the CCL archive after its shutdown. Fortunately, such an effort had already been initiated in 2021, downstream of a message posted by Alexandre Hocquet expressing interest in converting the CCL message archive into a more queryable format.
In consultation with Alexandre and his collaborator Frédéric Wieber, I (Brian Skinn) developed Python tooling to ingest the CCL messages into a SQLite database. The entire CCL archive from 1991-2025 has been ingested and the database has been published to Zenodo:
- Umbrella record: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20586358
- Database v1.0 record: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20586359
See the Zenodo record for more information.
Great job! Thank you very much, Brian!