A history of the development and certification of NIST glass SRMs 610-617

The National Bureau of Standards [NBS, now The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)] certified eight glass Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) in the early 1970s. The work was undertaken jointly with Coming Glass Works and the American Society for Testing and Materials. The materials were intended to be used for calibration and control of techniques for the bulk analysis of glass only. In the absence of any CRMs designed for use in microanalysis, many laboratories are using SRMs 610-617 as though the certification included this use. This manuscript reviews the early certification effort, with attention to those aspects of the original work that have particular relevance to current use of SRMs 610-617 by microanalytical laboratories.