Graduate students seldom have money to buy software, books, or nice clothes. Why? 
   (Note:  be sure to review the screen captures at the bottom.)

Because Professors and their Universities do not have enough money to pay them much money even though many graduate students work 10-12 hours training young undergraduates in chemistry or physics laboratories.  Graduate students often work 20-40 hours per week on research projects for their professors.  I know because I was a Graduate Student.

Professors do not pay much money to graduate students because they need their grant money to buy supplies for the XPS instrument, repairs for the XPS instrument, chemicals, single crystals, heating tapes, heating and cooling costs which they forgot to include in the grant.  Professors think that they are paying enough to graduate students and that graduate students should be happy to be learning advanced materials characterization methods.

For these reasons and more, graduate students have very little money to buy specialty software or to attend special classes or to buy memberships to XPS websites that supply them with reference spectra, reference information and provide many tables that help them to learn about XPS and surface science.

As a result, graduate students visit The XPS Library and The International XPS Spectra-Base of Monochromatic XPS Reference Spectra hoping to learn more about XPS and to find information that will help them in their research projects. I was a graduate student many years before the internet existed. I used the library and read many journals.  No computers.  No laptops.

I made both websites and 2 others because I want to help graduate students to learn XPS and how to produce reliable XPS BEs and reliable peak-fitting and reliable information.

For 5 years while I was collecting reference grade XPS spectra from a Thermo K-alpha, I was building The XPS Library website. I was the main author of the XPS page on Wikipedia until many students and professors modified what I provided.  

After The XPS Library was finished, I began to make the website I call “The International XPS Spectra-Base of Monochromatic XPS Reference Spectra”.  I gave it that name because I stopped writing books on XPS that few people would buy or read because publishing companies are not so good at advertising. 

And also, I wanted my 30 years of knowledge to be available to all students and young professors and lab managers around the world.  The only way to make that happen, was to learn to build websites like The XPS Library. Building a XPS Spectra website was more challenging, and it is not complete.  I have only displayed half of my collection of reference grade XPS spectra.  I need more support both financially and mentally .

For this reason I converted both websites into On-Line stores with very low prices that even poor professors and poor graduate students can afford. 

After finalizing both On-Line stores, I discovered a software that allows me to see what is happening on each of my stores.  I can see visitors move their mouse in Real-Time and watch them click on tables, element names, and the links.  I see visitors click on chemical element abbreviations that have no links and the 4 that have links to demo pages.  I see students frustrated because most of the links in the Periodic Table are now turned off. The same for The XPS Library.

I now provide images of pages and short memberships at very low cost.

But still graduate students need help to visit my websites which are clearly designed to take the place of training by professors and to provide reference grade spectra and to provide good vs bad peak-fitting examples to help students and professors to publish more reliable XPS peak-fits and interpretations which will help every one involved in engineering and materials development around the world.

I write this in the hopes that Professors and Universities will provide small money to buy memberships for 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, or more so that graduate students can learn and have the spectra they need to help their professors to publish more reliable information and to become famous!  That would be nice!

Best wishes,

B. Vincent Crist
Founder, Owner
sales@xpslibrary.com
+1-650-919-3940