Dear friends of COM,

Having recently taken over from Kari Kojonen as secretary of COM, I attach the first in a series of semi-regular newsletters that will be sent out to increase communication among COM members. Any comments, feedback or indeed contributions (changed e-mail addresses too!) are welcome.

With kind regards,

Nigel Cook

Secretary COM

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The commission held its BUSINESS MEETING during the IMA General Assembly in Edinburgh on 3rd September 2002. Full minutes of the meeting will be sent out shortly by separate mail to national representatives.

The officers of COM for the period 2002-2006 were elected as follows:

                Chairman                Prof. Roland K.W. Merkle (South Africa)

                Vice-chairman         Dr. Kari Kojonen (Finland)

                Secretary                Dr. Nigel Cook (Norway)

Among the items for discussion at the business meeting were the following (extracted from the minutes):

- The next COM Short Course will be jointly organized by the Mineralogical Societies of Spain and Italy and will be held in Granada, Spain, during 2004. Details and precise dates will be announced later.

- Collections of polished ore mineral specimens in museums and mineralogical institutions should be listed in digital form. This work has been started, for example, at the University of Pretoria and a proper format will be prepared for other collections as well.  The long-term aim is to collect a worldwide data bank of existing specimens.

- The state of the art of systematic classification of selenides, tellurides and sulphosalts follow on the priority list. The persons responsible for organizing working groups are: 1) selenides Werner Paar, 2) tellurides Kari Kojonen, 3) sulphosalts Nigel Cook & Yves Moelo. The classification of selenides and sulphosalts has been practically completed, but nevertheless requires some updating. COM encourages the results to be published as soon as possible e.g. on the COM web pages, or possible as an annotated report in a mineralogical journal.

- COM officers recommended that the commission should consider taking a more active role in ensuring quality control of reported ore mineralogical data in the future. The guidelines and quality criteria (counting statistics, detections limits) of reporting of mineral analyses should be prepared by COM and sent to various parties, e.g. Commission of New Mineral Names. The meeting agreed that it would be worthwhile to draw up sets of guidelines for publishing of microprobe data, which could be circulated to journal editors.

- A list of suggestions for standardized abbreviations of ore minerals will be prepared by the officers of COM for distribution and discussion among COM members. It is planned to submit the result to IMA CNMMN.

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COM have been able to add three sessions to the programme for the 32nd International Geological Congress to be held in Florence, Italy, 20-28 August 2004 (see http://www.32igc.org/home.htm). Note that these sessions were added after publication of the first circular for the IGC.

The sessions are:

SYMPOSIUM G14 'Mineral Deposits' session on 'European gold deposits in diverse geological environments' (co-proposed by COM and IAGOD). Contact Nigel John Cook (Geological Survey of Norway) Nigel.Cook@ngu.no

SYMPOSIUM G14 'Mineral Deposits' session on 'Conventional and unconventional platinum group mineral deposits'. Contact Roland K.W. Merkle (University of Pretoria), rmerkle@postino.up.ac.za

SYMPOSIUM G15 'Mineralogy' session on 'Telluride and selenide minerals related to gold and platinum group element deposits'. Contact Cristiana Ciobanu (Geological Survey of Norway), Cristiana.Ciobanu@ngu.no

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