Computational Chemistry List (CCL) Mailing List Archive Database

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 primarily by Jan Labanowski, Ph.D. (CV), and comprised many things, including a job board, a software archive, and a document repository. 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 July 8, 2025, Dr. Labanowski announced that he would be shutting down the CCL mailing list. Amid the rush of subsequent messages thanking him 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 Dr. Alexandre Hocquet (ORCID) expressing interest in converting the CCL message archive into a more queryable format. In consultation with Dr. Hocquet and his collaborator, Dr. Frédéric Wieber (ORCID), Dr. Brian Skinn (ORCID) developed (closed-source) Python tooling to ingest the CCL messages into a SQLite database. The entire CCL archive has been imported, and is published in this Zenodo record for use as a research corpus. See INFO.md for more information.