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Photosynthesis and the Web: 2008 The World Wide Web (WWW) has become a very important resource for public awareness and for educating the world’s population, including its political leaders, students, researchers, teachers and ordinary citizens seeking information. In 1999, we wrote a short survey of the various photosynthesis sites found on the web (Orr and Govindjee 1999). Although many fine sites were found and discussed, the number of sites was rather limited due to the inexperience of scientists with hypertext markup language (HTML), lack of reliable web server hardware, constantly changing web addresses, and difficulty in using the search engines available at the time. Within a few years the web had grown exponentially, many more sites had appeared and were much easier to find as web search engines matured. In fact, in a later review (Orr and Govindjee 2001), we found there were too many sites to list all of them. We decided to highlight only a sample of those sites that we felt presented good, quality information in an interesting manner. We follow the same criteria here. This review presents relevant information on photosynthesis-related web sites grouped into several categories: (1) group sites, (2) sites by subject, (3) individual researcher’s sites, (4) sites for educators and students, and (5) other useful sites. Because of time and length restrictions, as well as the dynamic nature of the Web, it is impossible to include every worthy web site in this review. Thus, we will highlight a few of the sites that we think epitomize the best the Web has to offer. Sites chosen for discussion will usually have a significant amount of information on one or more photosynthesis research areas and may include illustrations, movies and links to other sites of importance. Our sincere apologies to anyone whose site we have overlooked. (If the reader is aware of any good sites that are not mentioned in this article, we (larry.orr@asu.edu and gov@uiuc.edu) would like to be informed so we can include it in our web-based version of this review.) In this review we provide links to many websites and web pages and to a few portable document format (PDF) documents. For the most part, we are concerned primarily with sites that can be easily accessed directly from a browser. PDF files generally have to be downloaded to a local computer and then opened in a secondary program, depending on the browser used and the manner in which the computer is set up, which makes them somewhat inconvenient. Many of the sites we have listed will have links to PDF files, often to journal papers that can be accessed by schools that subscribe to the electronic journals online, but which are not necessarily available to the general public. We have decided that most of those PDF documents are outside the scope of this review, though we have included some which contain information not found elsewhere and which do not require special subscriptions. The contents of this review appear in companion websites which may be found at http://photoscience.la.asu.edu/photosyn/photoweb/ and mirrored at http://www.life.uiuc.edu/govindjee/photoweb/
References Orr L and Govindjee (1999) Photosynthesis and the World Wide Web. In: Garab, G. (ed) Photosynthesis: Mechanisms and Effects, Vol V, pp 4387–4392 Orr L and Govindjee (2001) Photosynthesis and the Web: 2001. Photosynthesis Research 68: 1–28
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Author Contact Information : Larry Orr Govindjee This article is based on a Review published |
| 14 June 2007 |