About the new web site

Early history

The IUCr took an early interest in Internet systems for disseminating information, and was already experimenting with gopher and wide-area information systems (WAIS) servers in the early 1990s. An early experimental participation in the CONCISE European information server project had demonstrated the benefits and power of the Internet as a means of distributing information, and for some time journal tables of contents were published via gopher. We therefore were early adopters of the world wide web, and launched our first web site in 1994 (Fig. 1). By 1997, a number of contributors were helping to build content on the web site, and to make it an essential reference site for the crystallographic community. The most substantial of these contributions came from Howard Flack at the University of Geneva, who built the 'Crystallography World Wide' set of pages based on experience with CONCISE; and Yves Epelboin in Paris, whose SinCris site provided information about the relationship between crystallography and other fields of science, and, most importantly, hosted a major database of crystallographic software packages. These components were maintained initially on web servers in Geneva and Paris, and mirrored by the IUCr server in Chester, UK. The different components were brought within a common structure by locating them at the root nodes iucr-top, cww-top and sincris-top of the unified service. It was intended that his model could be extended to accommodate additional major components, and indeed the journals and International Tables web sites, which are now quite separate entities, are still referenced by journals-top and it-top identifiers within the local file management framework in Chester.

At this time, network bandwidth was still a sparse commodity, and so a number of mirrors of the unified IUCr web site were established in other locations to provide greater accessibility to the site from other regions and countries. At one point, there were mirrors in Australia, Switzerland, France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, the UK, USA and South Africa (Fig. 2).

Other slightly smaller components, such as Commission web sites, continued to be maintained on other servers and mirrored onto the central Chester server, which acted as a distribution hub for the federation of mirror sites.

Need for change

By the early years of the 21st century, the Internet was ubiquitous and the web had become an essential tool rather than an experimental novelty. There was less need for mirroring sites to make most efficient use of limited bandwidth, and changes at the various hosting institutions (of policy or of computer system) meant that fewer and fewer mirrors were required. In practice the mirroring process, once set up, was very simple to maintain and required little or no active maintenance. However, as the need for separate mirrors diminished, so it became feasible to consider re-engineering the central web services to allow greater functionality. A dynamic web server driven by a content management system could be envisaged, that would allow richer interlinking of the information that we wanted to provide.

There was also a need for a system that would make it easier for different people to add content. The original web site was largely marked up in HTML by hand - a technique that provided compact files, but needed a certain level of skill in HTML coding on the part of the content providers. As contributors (such as Commission webmasters) began to use a variety of web authoring tools and content management systems on their own sites, so it became increasingly difficult to mirror their content on the central server, and many Commission web sites became separate from the main IUCr system, with a consequent loss of uniformity in presentation.

Many of the most useful resources established in the early years of the service became more difficult to maintain up to date, and parts of the site became stagnant as there was no-one with the time or ability to renew and maintain the content.

In 2008, we considered a number of candidate content management systems to allow us to relaunch the web site on a stronger footing. The package chosen for the job is MySource Matrix, an open-source sytem developed by the Australian company Squiz. There are many excellent systems available, but this one seemed to offer the greatest possibilities for retaining the existing richness of content on the site, while providing tools for authoring and editing that could be used by a variety of users, both internal and external to the IUCr offices.

Migrating to the new web site

Among the most important requirements for a new content management system was that it should support the full set of published and bookmarked URLs from the old site. This is something that MySource Matrix can do, although the process of migrating from the old web platform to the new one may cause some broken links in the short term. We would be grateful to hear of any such cases in order to fix them.

Content on the new site is distinguished by the lack of the component iucr-top (or cww-top or sincris-top) in the document URL, as we are able to combine all the previous sections into one. It will take time to transfer all the old content, and in the interim that content is still available, but will be served from the host ww1.iucr.org. There is no need to adjust any URLs that you have recorded; requests for URLs of the type http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/... will be automatically redirected to the ww1 server during this interim period, and in the longer term should automatically lead to the relevant content on the new server. However, it is a complex process to manage this seamlessly for the thousands of pages on the site, so we again repeat our invitation to let us know directly of any broken URLs that you find, so that we can reset the necessary mappings on an individual basis.

The promise of the new

The new site offers rich navigation from any page (see here for more details of navigating the site). You will be able to understand where the current page fits into the overall structure of the site, and transfer immediately to many of the most important pages in other sections of the site (and, indeed, on Crystallography Journals Online, International  Tables Online and other IUCr web sites). Where a document fits logically into the structure of more than one section of the site, we will provide different navigational routes that take you to the same content. We plan to develop this feature to provide you with more ways to appreciate the richly interlinking content of the site.

The new software allows us to provide multiple indexes to parts of the site arranged according to different criteria. In some cases these multiple indexes are already familiar, since they have been maintained by hand (e.g. the listings of forthcoming meetings by  topic, place or date), but the new site will have more such examples, and they will be more robust as they are managed automatically.

We plan to develop the site in new and exciting ways. The content of the IUCr Newsletter will be posted online, and linked into the collections of meetings reports, biographical notes and book reviews. We have organised an entire section of the site for 'education', and invite the community to supply content that will advance the teaching of crystallography in the classroom and laboratory. We hope to increase  the amount of content covering the history of the subject, and we welcome suggestions for other areas to develop.

The new front page allows us to present comment and articles addressing major topics of interest in the world of crystallography, and we are looking at ways to make it easier for the crystallographic community to post contributions to the site. We shall try to include more topical content; but we shall also try to ensure that anything of value is properly archived, indexed, and made available into the future.

The web site of the IUCr exists, as does the Union itself, to serve the community. Please let us know how we can continue to do better in meeting that objective.

IUCr Webmaster
8 August 2008