Bringing spectroscopy into the COMCIFS fold

As an expanded dictionary collection has implications for IUCr office workload and workload for those of us involved with dictionary construction and maintenance, I thought I would pass this information out to you for your thoughts on how to proceed. My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that we (COMCIFS/IUCr) can just about handle it, especially if we can bring a few more members up to speed on DDLm.  There is also the broader philosophical question of how involved the IUCr should be in spectroscopy.

Those of you involved with spectroscopy may want to advise on any standards that already exist, whether ad-hoc (e.g. a format accepted by popular software) or from a standards group. I am aware that there are NeXus descriptions for quite a number of facility-based spectroscopic experiments (see http://download.nexusformat.org/doc/html/classes/applications/index.html#application-definitions). The spectroscopic techniques potentially under discussion are raman, drift, IR, UV, visible, electron spin resonance and XRF.