the ccdc grew out of the activities of the crystallography group led by olga kennard obe frs in the department of organic, inorganic and theoretical chemistry of the university of cambridge. from 1965, the group began to collect published bibliographic, chemical and crystal structure data for all small molecules studied by x-ray or neutron diffraction. with the rapid developments in computing taking place at this time, this collection was encoded in electronic form and became known as the cambridge structural database (csd).