Crystallography Source Code Museum


Any interest for that Museum ?

Back from the IUCr XIXth Congress, Geneva, August 2002, I was not sure that Fortran archaeology (refers to Howard Flack talk at the open meeting of the Commission on Crystallographic Computing) had any real interest. The question was about installing an official Museum, requiring some IUCr money, as suggested by David Watkin, Chairman (the present Museum is unofficial and opens its doors for free - note that I never asked for help ;-). So that I had a look at the museum visitors. You may too :

2000 : 5645 requests processed
2001 : 4527 requests processed (note a shutdown in October-November)
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2000 + 2001 : 10172 requests processed

Most requested antiquities (more than 100 times in 2 years):
Crystal 1996, Xtal 2000, Ortep 2000, Tracer 1965, Espoir 2000, Babel 1994.

You may see the whole log file (quite big, but zipped). Well, many requests are probably from Google, Altavista, Inktome, Excite (etc) scooters, but the large majority is from university IP numbers, all over the World. Moreover, these statistics cover only the http://sdpd.univ-lemans.fr/ Web site, not many mirrors at http://www.cristal.org/ and at CCP14.

Are commercial companies or large scale facilities interested ? Here are links to the result of searches in the log file on their names : Bruker (ex-Siemens), Accelrys, MSI, Rigaku, Philips, ESRF, LANL.

Not sure what the Museum visitors are doing with the antiquities downloaded. But the act of downloading requires some willing at least.

September 2002 - A. Le Bail

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