The Interplay Between Spectrometer Development and Professional Spectroscopic Societies

Published in Applied Spectroscopy (online first, March 2024)

At the 2023 SCIX Meeting, Professor Mike George (University of Nottingham) organized a session entitled “140 Years of the Coblentz Society and the Infrared and Raman Discussion Group (IRDG)”, and invited me to give the first talk, which I called, “The Interplay Between Spectrometer Development and Professional Spectroscopic Societies”. This is a summary of that talk.

The post-war availability of commercial spectrometers spurred the development of professional spectroscopic societies: the Infrared and Raman Discussion Group (IRDG) in the UK, and the Coblentz Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy in the USA. There was a desire to ensure that customers understood the instrumentation and techniques, became part of a community, and had access to the latest subject matter knowledge.  With the advent of low-cost routine instruments, and portable instruments in the field, the professional societies have a distinct role to play in education and training, especially as libraries deaccession (withdraw) even comparatively recent books on practical spectroscopy.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00037028241233307

Featured on the cover of the May 2024 Applied Spectroscopy.