The concept of making the high brilliance source at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) available for small molecule service crystallography was proposed independently by Richard Harlow (DuPont) and Victor Young (University of Minnesota) at the St. Paul ACA meeting during the summer of 2000. Harlow organized an "orientation" briefing at a beamline of DuPont-Northwestern-Dow Collaborative Access Team (DND CAT) at ANL in fall of 2000, which was attended by numerous service crystallographers. A "call for samples" was announced shortly thereafter, and a request for beamtime honored. Subsequently, two runs were organized in 2001.

At the same time, Jim Vicarro, of The Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources Collaborative Access Team (CARS CAT) at APS and Young organized the first micro-crystallography run. CMC started designing instrumentation around this particular application. During the first several runs and commissioning an array of 2 x 2 1K CCD detector and later a SMART 6000 CCD detector were utilized together with a platform diffractometer with fixed Chi. Already during commissioning of the experiment at ChemMatCARS high throughput was achieved and numerous publication of structures inaccessible with laboratory X-ray sources resulted. During the ACA meeting in 2004 in Chicago, ChemMatCARS hosted onsite workshops that introduced the crystallographic community to new capabilities at their beamlines.

In 2004, the SCrAPS collaboration was formalized and since then IU staff regularly submits beamtime proposals for experimentation at NSF's ChemMatCARS. Setups vary. The most recent includes a Huber goniometer and a Pilatus detector; various wavelengths are accessible. To date, more than 50 institutions and more than 130 research groups have submitted to our program. Four graduate students and one undergraduate student were trained at the beamline through the SCrAPS program. Per year we investigate more than 120 samples.