IMA database & Mineralogical Properties - Membership

The duties of the IMA Database on Mineral Properties include managing the content of the website at www.rruff.info/ima, that interactively displays the list of all the IMA CNMNC minerals recognized as valid species with accessory information and links and its functions. It is actually a database and JAVA program that is downloaded and used through a browser. A professional programmer is funded by the RRUFF project to write the computer code for the website.

The main items are as follows:

1. Managing the definitive list of mineral names and their chemical compositions. Our highest priority is to ensure that this information is perfect. The effort primarily involves two components, a) identifying new mineral information, from the CNMNC website b) keeping track of changes to the existing minerals.
2. A goal of the committee is to identify the original descriptive articles for each mineral, and obtain and post the associated.
3. The ability to group minerals into various classification schemes is important. To this end the website has invoked the web-design concept of tags.

Additional goals for 2009 include:

1. Get others involved! especially from the IMA Commissions and Working groups
2. Streamline the access to the database so that other websites and individuals can make optimal use of it.