The IUCr Information Web Goes International

Since 1990, the International Union of Crystallography has been connected to the Internet as part of the UK academic etwork JANET at the iucr.ac.uk address. In recent weeks, the address has changed to iucr.org. This article explains what the change means, why it has happened, and what it allows us to do in the future.

The IUCr has acquired for its sole use the second-level domain name iucr.org. This name is more representative of the Union's nature (as an international non governmental organisation) and dissociates the Union from any particular national network and provides greater stability for network names in the future, if the Union should use different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Because the quality of service that we have enjoyed within JANET has been excellent, there are no plans to move to another ISP; consequently, previous iucr.ac.uk addresses should continue to work. However, any changes that you do make should then be stable into the distant future.

Brian McMahon

We can assign similar names to the machines on other networks that mirror the IUCr services. Hence the mirror web servers in France and the United States are known as www.fr.iucr.org and www.us.iucr.org respectively, and new mirrors established at the request of National Committees will have similar addresses where the 'fr' or 'us' is replaced by the two-letter ISO abbreviation for the country concerned. Several mirrors now exist of the IUCr web services (they are listed on the IUCr home page at http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/welcome.html), and more are expected to come on stream in the near future. Users may select the most convenient server, in an attempt to bypass the network bottlenecks. All National Committees have been invited to participate in this mirroring scheme. The resources needed are modest (a few hundred Mb of disk storage on a computer capable of running a web server over the Internet). If you feel that your country would benefit from its own mirror, please encourage your National Committee to follow up this option!

Howard Flack

The hub of the information service, at the IUCr Chester offices in England, collects and integrates information on the world of crystallography from a number of contributors, and integrates the material from these different sources into a uniform collection that is redistributed to all the mirror servers. The main information providers at present are the Crystallography World-Wide (CWW) notice board managed by Howard Flack at the U. of Geneva in Switzerland, the SinCris collection of software, organisations and thematic links managed by Yves Epelboin of the U. P. et M. Curie in Paris, France, and several webmasters of IUCr commissions located in the USA, Austria, Sweden, Israel and the UK. In addition, the Chester staff provides information on the Union itself and on its publications.

Yves Epelboin

The service is already familiar to crystallographers world wide; and its modularity and structure allow the seamless integration of new topics and components. There are two ways in which you, as users of the service, can help to improve it.

First, be aware of the existence of the service and of its usefulness to the community as a whole. If you are advertising a job, post a copy of the advertisement directly in CWW, or have it indexed if posted on another server. Have publishing houses send interesting books to the book review editor so they can be reviewed. Have conferences posted or indexed in the IUCr list. Send information on new software packages to the SinCris editor.

Second, consider putting forward your own services as an information provider. If there is some element of the existing system that you find useful, but that you feel you could manage better yourself, please contact the relevant editor to explore the possibility of taking over that section. The more enthusiasts we have who take responsibility for areas in which they have particular expertise or enthusiasm, the more truly distributed the service will become, and the more valuable the resource as a whole.

The IUCr information web is maintained by the Committee for the Electronic Publishing, Dissemination and Storage of Information, chaired by Howard Flack, and coordinated by the Union's Research & Development Dept in Chester. Contact information: Chair of the Electronic Publishing Committee - Howard.Flack@cryst.unige.ch; Editor, Crystallography World Wide - CWW.Editor@iucr.org; Editor, SinCris - SinCris.Editor@iucr.org, IUCr Webmaster - bm@iucr.org.