Services available include access to preparative areas, access to instrumentation, loan of equipment, laboratory support, technical advice and technical support (setting up instrumentation and/or running samples). Most major items of equipment will normally only be operated by MAGU personnel or by intensively trained users where appropriate. Unless alternative arrangements are agreed beforehand, users will be provided with raw instrumental data. In house data-reduction software, DBSCORR & CHEMCAL, is available to users to assess the adequacy of blanks, drift and calibration for their own particular purposes. There are also commerical packages available to carry out similar tasks. Given the wide variety of compositions of geological materials, matrix effects can lead to significant inaccuracies for some techniques and although calibration standards and some CRMs are routinely used, MAGU has neither the funds nor the human resources to purchase standards to cover all eventualities.

We strongly advise users to include their own carefully selected standards to ensure the accuracy of the data provided. By all means provide such standards blind, so that we can identify systemic analytical problems. We are of course happy to discuss analytical programmes with users.