Recently, new recording devices, such as the Imaging Plate and a slow scan CCD camera, have come into wide use for digitally recording and storing transmission electron microscope images. A digital image has advantages of transferring, sharing and storing data. Furthermore the improvement of world wide computer network systems, for example, Internet makes it easier to transfer and share digital data among researchers. We have studied the processing and a quantitative analysis of digital high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HREM) images by means of a standard EWS and an SX-3 super-computer on the intelligent computer network system in Tohoku University, which is called Super TAINS (Fig. 1). With the increase of digital HREM images, we are in need of tools to help us store and quickly search these data.

A web site called “EMILIA (Electron Microscope Image Library and Archive)” was established in October 1996 as a database of HREM images. EMILIA is implemented by a WWW server on Super TAINS and HTML documents. Figure 2 shows sample pages from EMILIA.