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, incluing 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 up through June 2025 has been imported at this point. Once the list has stopped accepting new messages, I will ingest the remaining few messages and then publish to Zenodo the database, information about it, and instructions for its use.
Once the record is published, I will update this Gist with a link to the Zenodo record for the database. (I would just publish a message to CCL about where to find the database ... but CCL will have been shut down by that point, making it hard to send messages through it.)
Stay tuned ....
Great job! Thank you very much, Brian!