For sev­er­al years the NACS has been con­tin­u­al­ly enhanc­ing a part of its web­site to include his­tor­i­cal items of inter­est to the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty. We have some white papers post­ed on key cat­alyt­ic tech­nolo­gies, as well as news items on many of the past lead­ers in the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty. Much of the slides that Heinz Heine­mann pre­sent­ed at the 2005 NAM ban­quet are already post­ed on this site. More recent­ly, I’ve added some new pho­tos to the biogra­phies that we have and added some more biographies.

Now the NACS has ini­ti­at­ed a brand new fea­ture to enhance the his­tor­i­cal con­tent of its pop­u­lar web­site. We have begun to pro­vide a his­tor­i­cal col­lec­tion of video clips of pop­u­lar fig­ures in catal­y­sis. We hope these first 7 video clips will grow to a large col­lec­tion of such video clips pro­vid­ing a glimpse of some of the notable speak­ers in catal­y­sis over the past decades. The pur­pose of these post­ings is to give the mem­ber­ship, the pub­lic, and new entrants into the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty a glimpse of high pro­file speak­ers and pop­u­lar top­ics in catalysis. 

Sev­er­al years ago, the NACS began to record videos at NACS events as a means of col­lect­ing a video his­to­ry of nota­bles in the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty. This effort by Pro­fes­sor Burt Davis (our vol­un­teer, ded­i­cat­ed video­g­ra­ph­er) was often lim­it­ed by poor audio or light­ing in large con­fer­ence rooms and was not eas­i­ly shared with the mem­ber­ship. New­er video record­ing tech­nol­o­gy and stor­age of video on the WWW, now allows these video clips to be shared with the world­wide community. 

We chose the recent 20th NAM meet­ing in Hous­ton as the first fea­tured set of clips. The first five min­utes of the five ple­nary lec­tures and por­tions of the ban­quet acknowl­edge­ments are now post­ed on the web­site. While each, entire pre­sen­ta­tion was record­ed, these would be too long for post­ing on the WWW. Some­times the video qual­i­ty is sub par (due to light­ing or audio lim­i­ta­tions), but it is a begin­ning of what we hope will be a mem­o­rable post­ing of lead­ers among the catal­y­sis com­mu­ni­ty, and I am sure new tech­nol­o­gy will improve the qual­i­ty of the videos in the years to come. I’ve asked Burt Davis to find oth­er good qual­i­ty video clips for addi­tion­al post­ings. If some of the mem­ber­ship have good, video qual­i­ty clips that they might wish to have post­ed on the NACS web­site, please con­tact me, John Armor (nacatsoc@verizon.net). Ini­tial­ly, we will offer these as ~ 5 minute seg­ments of the full lectures/interviews.

To review a video clip, go to the NACS video page. Speak­ers are list­ed with the title of their lec­ture. Start the video clip by click­ing on the but­ton to the low­er left below each photo.

Let me have any sug­ges­tions or com­ments which might improve this new web­site fea­ture. Burt Davis has done a great deal of vol­un­tary work to record, com­pile, edit, and con­sol­i­date these videos, and we thank him for his efforts. Thanks also go to Ray Buch­ta who has been invalu­able in set­ting up and design­ing the graph­ics of our website.
 
John Armor
Pres­i­dent NACS