Navigating the Crystallographic Web

The Home Page
Mirror sites

Welcome to the crystallographic information services of the International Union of Crystallography, incorporating: the IUCr web pages generated by the editorial office at Chester; the Crystallography World Wide service maintained by Howard Flack at Geneva; and the SINCRIS information service of Yves Epelboin in Paris.

The Home Page

The home page is the starting point for exploring the variety of information available. Every page carries at its top a small icon which acts as a hot link back to the home page. It looks like this:

Click on the icon to travel to the home page. Use the Back feature of your browser (usually a button on a menubar, or a right mouse-button click against the page background, or a hot-key combination such as Alt-LeftArrow) to return here.

The canonical address for the IUCr Home Page is http://www.iucr.org/welcome.html
However, you may also see it written sometimes as http://www.iucr.org/iucr-top/welcome.html
This should work equally well. The iucr-top component permits more consistent naming of pages across the various mirror sites that exist (see below).

If your browser supports frames, you may obtain a possibly more useful view of the available pages by replacing the welcome.html in the above URLs by index.html, or deleting it altogether.

The Home Page contains the following components:

The logo and title of the IUCr
A welcome message
A list of mirror sites. You should select (and bookmark) the site which you can reach most effectively.
An index of the major components of the information available, categorised by
- The Union and its Components
- Journals and Other Publications
- Services
A set of links:
- Frames on adds a side-bar containing useful bookmarks to every page, if your browser is capable of displaying frames.
- Frames off removes the side bar
- What's New is a link to recent additions to the web pages
- Directory is a more detailed tables of services available
- Help produces the present page. The page is presented in a separate window on frames-capable browsers, so that you can keep it available as a handy reference. (Note, however, that under some windowing systems the help frame will sit on top of the existing browser window, and so may need to be moved to one side to allow both to be consulted.)

Mirror sites

As mentioned above, mirror sites are located in a number of countries to improve access across crowded networks. Each mirror has a customised logo linking to the home page; examples of the logos at the Swedish, French, US and South African mirrors are shown below.

The home page address for a mirror site in a country whose two-letter ISO code is xx is generally http://www.xx.iucr.org/welcome.html

It is useful to familiarise yourself with the custom logo of your favourite mirror site. Hot links should always take you to another page on the same site, but occasionally you may find yourself transferred to a different location.

Note that every URL of the form http://a.mirror.host/iucr-top/something should be equivalent to a URL of the form http://another.mirror.host/iucr-top/something, permitting you to deduce the location of any page on your favourite mirror host.

This is also true for pages in the Crystallography World Wide and Sincris collections, which contain references to cww-top and sincris-top, respectively.

Many of the forms which allow you to search for further information send your request to the database servers in Chester or Paris, irrespective of which mirror you are using. However, hot links in any response to such a query should point to pages on the mirror you are using.

Updated 11 November 1997

IUCr Webmaster