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Re: nexus

Answers and suggestions come in reverse order:

> 
> Do we all agree on this approach?

  Seems fine to me.

> The mirror sites would download everything from Chester.
  This comment has nothing to do with Nexus but I'm starting to get
slight shivers about mirror sites picking up their sources from the site
with the best network connection for them. Lachlan picks up /iucr-top
from www.se.iucr.org, Yves picks up /cww-top from Geneva, etc. If se
starts to pick up iucr-top from za, and za from ch, and ch from se we
will end up in a terrible mess. [If you  wish to comment make a copy and
post with a subject Mirrors]

> We might also
> expect that if the project really took off, individuals would be canvassing
> for the inclusion of their own pages, so some sort of objective criteria for
> inclusion should be drawn up.

  I suggest they could sponsor the production and distribution of a
number of CD-ROMs for distribution in developing countries.

> > The list of institutions has the same limitation: IUCr references are all
> > included as well as a very limited number of crystallographic institutions.
> > I do not know why other are not mentioned. For instance a reference is made
> > towards the Synchrotron facility in Taiwan but not to the other ones.
> 
> In previous correspondence, Howard has raised doubts about the suitability
> of including mirrors of individual institutions (such as the Cuban
> laboratories).

 (1) For CWW I gave up maintaining a list of pointers to individual
institutions for the "big" countries for which someone else maintained
such a list. In general the home list was always more up to date and
more complete than my own. So in CWW I just provided a pointer to the
home list. For the "small" countries I add information into
cww-top/geo.index.html . I had the very strong impression that there
were powerful political forces at work for the maintenance of a national
list for the questions of internal funding and external prestige.

 (2) However in reading Brian's reply it came to my mind that lists of
individual institutions are perhaps more a very useful extension to the
functionalities of World Directory of Crystallographers. LDAP is
hierarchical in the X500 way so it could support information at a
national and regional level. Suitable information would be the name and
address of the national committees of crystallography, the national
crystallographic association, a list of institutions. (Post comments to
this under the heading WDC.)


-- 
Howard Flack        http://www.unige.ch/crystal/ahdf/Howard.Flack.html
Laboratoire de Cristallographie               Phone:(+41 22) 702 62 49
24 quai Ernest-Ansermet             mailto:Howard.Flack@cryst.unige.ch
CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland                   Fax:(+41 22) 781 21 92

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