Britain" and can be viewed at http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/vrml. With apparent decreasing supportby Silicon Graphics, who are closing down their CosmoSoftware operation, the future of VRML as a widely deployed standard must be somewhat uncertain.

1.3

"To develop a programme for integrating electronic delivery mechanisms with other scientific activities of the members of the CLIC consortium and chemical industry, including international conferences and workshops, teaching and training courses."

1.3.1 This had been widely achieved with the ECTOC series of Electronic conferences. At the close of the CLIC project, four highly successful conferences in the area of organic chemistry had been organised, and in each case, full proceedings and extensive documentation, examples, training materials and programs had been included on a CD-ROM produced with the help of the RSC. A total distribution of around 8000 had been achieved via inclusion via specific journal issues, and distribution to conference delegates. The organisation of future electronic conferences is anticipated, both by the RSC, and by Imperial.

1.3.2 The International Symposia on Gas Kinetics based at Leeds had catalysed many similar examples and had in fact been adopted by the RSC for Faraday Discussions. The RSC's Chemsocsite was implementing a conference database, which was adopting some of the characteristics of the Leeds symposium.

1.3.3 CLIC had also hosted four "Chemistry Webmaster" meetings, which were half conference and half training workshop, each of which was attended by around 70-80 delegates from the UK, and on occasion from other parts of Europe. It is the intention that these meetings continue to be organised.

"To investigate to what extent the cost of delivery of molecular, and other similarly specialised, information can be reduced through electronic publishing with the objective of helping to reverse the increasing expense of supporting the physical sciences in the area of libraries, publishing and informational retrieval."

1.4.1 As a result of the CLIC focus, the Leeds Chemical library became totally electronic. This conversion had saved approximately thirty thousand pounds since two subscriptions for each journal were no longer needed (one for the Departmental Library and one for the university's Central Library). Both Imperial and Cambridge are now highly focused on the requirements to use electronic mechanisms, and via other projects such as ATHENS3, to deploy campus-wide authentication procedures.

1.4