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General message to all ECA Senior Crystallographers
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Dear Councillors, Dear Colleagues,
The GIG-SC wishes to announce its meeting at ECM29 in Warwick and to establish a mailing list of people who are interested in the (future) activities of the ECA GIG for Senior Crystallographers. The meeting will be on the final day, Thursday 29 August 2013 in the second hour of the lunch break in the Committee Room 2. There is not a webpage yet for this group so there is background information given at the bottom of this email.
Please circulate this mail in your National Association and among your colleagues, as soon as possible. The ECA will be delighted to have many of our senior crystallographers joining the General Interest Group for Senior Crystallographers.
Thank you,
Georgina Rosair, ECA Secretary on behalf of Paul Beurskens, Co-chair GIG-SC
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Message to all ECA Senior Crystallographers.
Dear colleagues,
Please, find an announcement of the GIG-SC Meeting at ECM28 in Warwick,
And a request to let me know your email-address so I can send you future news about our GIG.
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About GIG-SC
The second General Interest Group of ECA, GIG for Senior Crystallographers (GIG-SC) was organised and inaugurated last year in Bergen. Please find the “Report on the establishment of GIG-SC” ( by S. E. Rasmussen) as well as the “Inauguration Document” at the end of this email-text.
This GIG comes together to preserve the history of crystallography, the archive of materials, to play a part in teaching, consider special requirements of Senior Scientists etc. A researcher who is over 65 and retired could be recognised as in the category of ‘senior crystallographer’.
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Invitation to the GIG-SC Meeting at ECM28 in Warwick
The Senior Crystallographers General Interest Group shall meet on the final day, Thursday 29 August 2013
in the second hour of the lunch break in the Committee Room 2 which is a lecture room very near the Arts Centre with 30 seats and a projector .
Concept Agenda
– Opening
– Activity Report GIG-SC 2012/2013 => see “Report on the establishment of GIG-SC” ( by S. E. Rasmussen)
given at the end of this email-text.
– Short discussion about the purpose of our GIG => see “Inauguration Document GIG-SC 2012” )
given at the end of this email-text.
– Mailing list of GIG-SC “members”. See email-reply-request given below.
We have to maintain a mailing list of people who have shown interest in GIG-SC.
[ For simplicity we shall call these people the members of our GIG-SC .]
We shall also keep a list of people who have stated not to be interested in our mail.
– We urgently need a page on the internet.
– Election of officers for GIG-SC.
Chaiman Hans-Beat B�rgi cannot come to Warwick.
The co-chair will be chairing this meeting, but does not take another term.
We can expecte time-problems with elderly people, therefore it is suggested to elect at least four officers who can share the work to be done.
– Future plans ?
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Special GIG-SC lectures?
Anybody interested to give a short lecture on a GIG-SC related topic is encouraged to write to me !
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Email-reply-request> Mailing list
Please, help me to get started with the establishment of a mailing list of people who have shown interest in GIG-SC.
Do so also if you cannot come to Warwick.
And, please, sent that mail to:
BEURS34@KPNMAIL.NL
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Report on the establishment of a General Interest Group for Senior Crystallographers
At the 25th ECM in Istanbul, 2009, Theo Hahn and I discussed the idea of setting up an Interest Group for old crystallographers. The then President, John Helliwell, suggested that a proposal to the Executive Committee should be submitted, which I did, by making the following observations:
The proposed GIG might as a beginning discuss the following matters:
Readability of conference Programme and Abstract Books should be improved by the use of bigger Font sizes and by avoiding the use of low contrasts such as using black print on grey or red backgrounds.
Audibility of oral presentations would be facilitated by making sure that equipment for Tele coils and FM in auditoria are activated if available. Ideally, such facilities should be standard equipment.
Conference buildings with as few stairs as possible should be chosen for future meetings.
Formal and informal sessions on the history of crystallography should be established while some old crystallographers are still around. Few are left who have actually met P. P. Ewald, Lawrence Bragg, P.W.J. Debye, Ivar Waller etc.
Some of the disabilities that inevitably follow with increasing age may also strike younger people and it might be of interest to know if young colleagues are actually prevented from attending meetings because of disabilities.
As the average life expectancy is increasing and as the EU has banned age discrimination it may not be unreasonable to expect that the number of old crystallographers may increase at future conferences.
Further activity was a bit slow but at the IUCr meeting in Madrid in 2011 the Executive Committee of the ECA appointed me as an interim chairman and Paul Beurskens as co-chairman for the establishment of a General Interest Group for Senior Crystallographers.
Thanks to the dedicated help from the then Secretary, Petra Bombics, the formalities of establishing the GIG were completed and the Group was formally established by the Executive Committee at the ECA meeting in Bergen in2012.
The main event organized by this GIG was a lecture By Theo Hahn on the history of successive editions of International Tables for Crystallography.
At the Bergen Meeting I resigned as chairman and Hans- Beat B�rgi was elected chairman and Paul Beurskens continued as co-chairman.
Svend Erik Rasmussen
Department of Geology, University of Aarhus, Denmark. ser@geo.au.dk
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INAUGURATION DOCUMENT GIG # 2
General Interest Group Senior Crystallographers
1. Name of the Group
The name of this group shall be: General Interest Group for Senior Crystallographers (GIG-SC)
2. Promotors
Paul T. Beurskens: PTBeurskens@HetNet.nl
Theo Hahn: hahn@xtal.rwth-aachen.de
Svend Erik Rasmussen: ser@geo.au.dk
3. Proponents (Councillors)
Andersen, Gregers Rom: gra@mb.au.dk
G�rbitz, Carl Henrik: c.h.gorbitz@kjemi.uio.no
H�m�lainen, Keijo: keijo.hamalainen@helsinki.fi
Sauer-Eriksson, Elisabeth: Elisabeth.Sauer-Eriksson@chem.umu.se
4. Purpose
This GIG comes together to preserve the history of crystallography, the archive of materials, to play
a part in teaching, consider special requiremen