Open Access Crystallography

The goal of this project is to provide interactive 3D visualizations of crystal structures and morphologies in order to help educate future materials scientists and engineers worldwide. This website is maintained by Portland State's Nano-Crystallography Group and utilized for classroom demonstrations in introductory materials science and engineering as well as in introductory nano-science and nano-technology courses. All of our crystallographic data are in open access, i.e. freely available to anybody.

A link to the old frames-based open access crystallography site will be available at this position (on this page) in the future for backward compatibility.

Milestones:

• February 2013: 500 small molecule organic CIFs from the free Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre Teaching Database were added to the local educational subset of the COD. (Acknowledgements of this source are in each individual CIF.) Manual cleaning of data sets. 
• November 2012: New site interface using Django CMS, an open source Python based content management framework. The old site has been depreciated, but will be available for backward compatibility in the future.
• June 2012: Development of new Jmol display menu interface.
• May 2012: Updated PyCifRW to version 3.3 and CIF dictionary to IUCr version 2.1.6. (CIF validation tools).
• June 2008: Wikipedia entry 'crystallographic database' written.
• July-August 2007: New version of Jmol supports stereo viewing, Wiki Crystallography Database and Crystal Morphology Database created.
• July-August 2006: General cleaning up of data, Nano-Crystallography Database created.
• July 2005-December 2006: Some 500 CIFs of simple crystal structures with educational relevance created and uploaded.
• July 2004: Project started, entries from subset of COD can be displayed in 3D interactively using Jmol. 

Contributors: