In this column, my last of 2007, I want to say a little about this past year but mostly look forward to the future.
    In 2007, we had two successful meetings: a Special Topics meeting with the AATCC in Charlotte, NC in February, and our Annual Meeting in Kansas City in April, where Bob Hunt received the Godlove Award for lifetime achievement in color and Dave Wyble received the Nickerson Award as the Council’s webmaster. With sadness, we also noted the passing of several friends of the Council, Ralph Stanziola  and Therese Commerford
among them.
    Let me use the rest of the column to tell you about our 2008 meetings. Meetings remain key to the Council and to the expression of its unique identity. Since my last column, one meeting went away and another has been added. We had originally planned a joint meeting with CMG (Color Marketing Group) in place of the Education Saturday program at their Spring Conference in Montreal. It would have been a very different program than they are used to—perhaps too different after the initial enthusiasm had subsided. Even as we decided to cancel the joint program, interest in doing something together remains high and we have agreed to start discussions about a partnership that will place joint activities on a surer footing.
    We have three meetings planned for next year. First is the Annual Meeting in Baltimore, September 14 and 15. It will follow our usual meeting format: a single-track meeting with sessions organized around the three Interest Groups. It will be followed by a one-day Safety Color Expert Symposium on Tuesday September 16. This meeting will cover the perception, measurement, and standardization of regular, fluorescent and photoluminescent materials, and safety light signaling. Cameron Miller of NIST and Carl Andersen of the Federal Highway Administration will chair the Baltimore meetings. A Call for Papers for the Annual Meeting appears later in this issue of the newsletter.
    What’s new and has been added to our meeting calendar is a Special Topics meeting on the measurement of black and white, following the IS&T/SID Color Imaging Conference in Portland, Oregon next November. It will cap a week of color-related meetings, beginning with ICC DevCon (International Color Consortium Developers Conference) on Monday, followed by the Color Imaging Conference and on Friday the Hunt Symposium, honoring Bob Hunt, before concluding with the ISCC/IS&T Special Topics Meeting on Saturday, November 15. The meetings will be held at the historic Benson Hotel in downtown Portland: “historic” since it was built in 1912.
    The idea for another special topics meeting to build on the success of the one we had following CIC in 2005 had been on my mind for a while. Five of us met and discussed it over breakfast at the CIC in Albuquerque last month. The discussions that started then led eventually to a suggestion by Danny Rich to do something around the print characteristics of paper, which affect whiteness in color reproduction. Ann Laidlaw suggested we consider blackness as well.
Choosing “Black and White” as the special topic for the meeting recognizes them as two of the most important properties of any colored image. Recently there has been renewed interest in these concepts, witness the IDEAlliance Print Properties subcommittee on paper characterization, the SIS Workshop on Paper on optical properties of paper, CIE Publication 163 on the Effect of Fluorescence in the Characterization of Imaging Media, and papers at the Color Imaging Conference. Key topics at the meeting will include the measurement of white papers, three-color overprints versus true black, and the impact of novel light sources on the rendition of colored images.
    With all this planned, I am looking forward to 2008, and on behalf of the ISCC,     I want to wish all of you the very best in the New Year.

Robert Buckley
Xerox Corporation