Minutes of the ACA General Interest Group Meeting of August 14, 1996

The General Interest Group (GIG) met in Seattle, Washington in
conjunction with the XVII IUCr Congress.  The GIG Chairman, Carroll
Johnson, presided.

(1) Carroll opened the meeting by informing the group of the GIG WWW
home page located at http://www.ornl.gov/ortep/acagig.html.

(2) David Brown agreed to chair the nominating committee to select
candidates for GIG Chairman and Member-at-Large.  David will complete
the nominating committee by choosing two additional members from the
GIG membership list.

(3) GIG Chair-Elect, David Templeton, reported that three GIG-sponsored
sessions (listed below) for the 1997 St. Louis ACA meeting have been
proposed to the Program Chairman.  Speakers will be chosen from the
submitted abstracts.  A contact person for each session will be needed.

	General Interest: Theory
	General Interest: Experiment
	General Interest: Techniques and Apparatus

(4) ACA Small Molecule SIG Chair-Elect Jeanette Krause Bauer reported
that her group would like to cosponsor with the GIG a session on the
History of Small Molecule Crystallography Apparatus at the next ACA
meeting.

(5) Carroll suggested that the GIG WWW home page should provide
pointers to the home pages of crystallographers with general interests
outside those of the established ACA SIGs.  Bev Robertson will look
into this.

(6) Carroll also suggested that the GIG WWW home page could become a
free-access repository of crystallographic papers and a noncommercial
database of crystal structures.  Discussion on the first of these
suggested there are a number of problems associated with electronic
publishing and this was beyond the realm of the GIG.  David Templeton
suggested that a discussion group might be a more reasonable task.
Regarding the second topic, Jeanette Krause Bauer said the Small
Molecule SIG and the IUCr have already begun discussions on making the
University of Indiana Crystal Database (John Huffman) available to the
public.

(7) Bev Robertson announced that Sagamore XII (12th meeting of the
Commission on Charge, Spin and Momentum Densities of the International
Union for Crystallography) will meet in Waskesiu, in Prince Albert
National Park, Saskatchewan, Canada July 27 (Sunday) to August 1
(Friday), 1997 (immediately following the 1997 ACA meeting).

Respectfully submitted,
Michael N. Burnett
Acting Secretary for this meeting