Building the American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database: A recipe for construction of a small Internet database

Crystal structure data represent one of the most important resources for developing scientific knowledge and should be archived in ways that make them easy to access and preserve. The American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database currently contains every crystal structure published in American Mineralogist, The Canadian Mineralogist, European Journal of Mineralogy, and Physics and Chemistry of Minerals. It is maintained by the American and Canadian mineralogical societies and is freely accessible through the Internet. The database consists of the data, server-side search and retrieval software and user-side analysis software. It is managed through a partnership of PHP and MySQL programming that provide dynamic construction of Web pages and search procedures. The purpose of this paper is to describe the database and its implementation and to illustrate how to construct similar small, interactive Internet databases.