Book excerpt: DEFECTS AND TRANSPORT IN OXIDES is the proceedings of the eighth Battelle Colloquium in the Materials Sciences, held in Columbus and Salt Fork, Ohio, September 17-22, 1973. It took as its theme the relationship between defects and transport of both mass and charge in oxides. Applications of defect-controlled transport to a number of important processes in oxides also were covered. In selecting this topic, the Organizing Committee thought that 1973 was timely to bring together the leading theoretical and experimental researchers in the oxide transport field to review its status in a critical way, and to consider current major research directions and how research in the future might be guided into fruitful areas. The meeting was highlighted by the presentation of several papers which suggest that major advances in our understanding of transport in oxides appear to be imminent. These papers dealt with the results of new theoretical approaches whereby the energies and configurations of defects may be calculated, and with new experimental techniques for indirectly observing these defects, previously thought to be below the limits of experimental resolving power. Other papers, dealing with the application of defect chemistry to technological processes, served to demonstrate the successes and to point out yet unresolved problems associated with ix x PREFACE understanding the chemistry of imperfect crystals.