| PRESIDENT: | W. H. PARKINSON |
| VICE PRES.: | F. ROSTAS |
| COMMITTEE: | S. J. Adelman, J. Dubau, N. Grevesse, S. Johansson, |
| U. Jorgenson, H. Mason, F. Rostas, W.-ÜL. Tchang-Brillet, P. L. Smith, and W. L. Wiese |
As a result of the deliberations and discussions during the last General Assembly of the IAU in The Hague, it was recommended that Commission 14 become a commission of the Executive Committee. The special interdisciplinary role and nature of Comm. 14 were in this way recognized and encouraged.
Comm. 14 fulfills its role by informing the astronomical community of new developments in our various fields though specific involvement and support of IAU Symposia and Joint Discussions, and by the Reports of the Working Groups. The symposia and JDs are especially important means by which we acquire and provide information on the needs for, and availability of, atomic and molecular data. The most recent such example, co-supported by Comm. 14, was IAU Symposium 178, Molecules in Astrophysics: Probes & Processes, July 1-5, 1996, Leiden, The Netherlands. During the IAU General Assembly in Kyoto, Japan, August 18-30, 1997, Comm. 14 will co-support Symposium 188, The Hot Universe; JD4, Challenges in Atomic Physics for Cosmic X-Ray Spectroscopy; JD16, Spectroscopy with Large Telescopes on Chemical Pecular Stars; and JD12, Electronic Publishing Now and the Future.
The reports from the Working Groups appear below where the
highlights and triennial references of activities are given. The reference
lists always have added value because of the expert selectivity of WG
Chairs. For these triennial reports, the scope of
the references have been expanded by the Chairs
to include URLs of databases for atomic and molecular
data. In order to make the WG reports more generally accessible, we
have made them available on-line from the Comm. 14 WWW Home Page
(http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/amp/iau14/).
We express very best wishes and encouragement to Dr. Jean Gallagher and I thank Dr. Dave Schultz for preparing and writing, with little notice, the WG3 report.
Jim Esmond has sheparded this report through the various processes of transformation (including LaTeX2HTML) necessary to display it on the www. He thanks the following for their information, assistance, and patient commiseration in accomplishing this task: Angela Brown, Nancy Evans, Alexander Panasyuk, Matt Phelps, Andrea Prestwich, Julie Shaw, Peter L. Smith, and Raid Suleiman.