The data, typically obtained by X-ray crystallography and less frequently by electron diffraction or neutron diffraction, and submitted by crystallographers and chemists from around the world, are freely accessible (as deposited by authors) on the Internet via the CSD's parent organization's website (CCDC, Repository[1]).

The CSD is overseen by the not-for-profit incorporated company called the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, CCDC.

[2] 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).

This led to the establishment of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) as an independent company in 1987, with the legal status of a non-profit charitable institution, and with its operations overseen by an international board of governors.

The CCDC established US applications and support operations in the US in October 2013,[6][7] initially at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where it is co-located with the RCSB Protein Data Bank The CSD is updated with about 50,000 new structures each year,[8] and with improvements to existing entries.

From the deposited data, selected information is extracted to prepare the validated and curated CSD entry which was assigned the refcode 'MITGUT'.

[8] The validated and curated entry is included in the CSD System and WebCSD distributions, with availability restricted to those making appropriate contributions.

Each data set in CSD can be openly viewed and retrieved using the free Access Structure service.