cover visual description of sedimentary cores and smear slides, and include an atlas of sedimentary structures and a comprehensive guide to the microscopic identification of sedimentary components. At the 2000 meeting, Curators agreed that the setting up of a curatorial reference website, with unrestricted access through the World Wide Web, should be the first objective. This would aim at providing a comprehensive series of photographs illustrating megascopic features seen in deep sea cores, together with a wide range of photomicrographs illustrating, not only different microfossil, mineral and mineraloid grain types, but also calibrated slides from different marine environments for comparison purposes. 

The new curatorial reference WWW pages will be located on the BOSCOR website (http://www.boscor.org) but will represent a common curatorial effort, with many images supplied by other repositories. Any institution or individual with suitable pictures, either illustrating megascopic sedimentary features in cores, or photomicrographs illustrating common or rare sedimentary components or other items of interest, and who are willing to release the pictures for instructional/reference purposes, are invited to contribute to the website. All contributions will be acknowledged in the picture captions and contributors will be listed on a contributor's page on the website. Contributions should preferably be emailed as jpeg. attachments to R.G.Rothwell@soc.soton.ac.uk. If digital images are not available, we can photograph original smear slides, if sent to us. Any slides supplied will be quickly returned.

Besides pictures of sedimentary features and photographs of different types of sedimentary components, it is purposed to include a variety of other instructional pictures. It is planned that these will include:

o photomicrographs from oceanic transects showing different sediment types and regimes, for example, a N-S transect across the Pacific Ocean would show images of Southern Ocean polar siliceous/diatom ooze, deep-sea pelagic clay, equatorial calcareous
What are the components here? What is the percentage of carbonate material? What percentage  of the sediment do the components make up? What type of sediment is this? How should I name it? Such questions can be daunting for  inexperienced core describers. The proposed new reference website should help describers to produce more accurate core descriptions
 sediments, subequatorial siliceous/radiolarian-rich sediments, more deep-sea pelagic clay, northern polar siliceous sediments and northern polar terrigenous sediments. 

o photomicrographs of sediments approaching and going through the lysocline and CCD (sediment with complete, uncorroded foraminifers - sediment showing corroded foraminifers - sediments showing a greater proportion of robust foraminifers - sediments showing corroded foraminifer fragments - sediments containing tiny calcareous fragments - and finally, sediment from below the CCD containing no calcareous material).

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