The importance of the properties of surfaces is increasingly felt in a wide variety of technologies. Although some surface properties, such as chemical interactions leading to corrosion, have been recognized for many hundreds of years, the use of surfaces for specific applications is a recent phenomenon that is fueled by our increasing understanding of their properties. The technological success of devices and processes involving surfaces has in turn driven the development of increasingly sophisticated instrumentation designed to improve further our understanding of surface properties. This volume attempts to review, in a tutorial fashion, techniques that allow a definition of the major static properties of a surface. These can be classified as chemical or compositional, structural, and electronic. Because this volume is one in a treatise on experimental methods, the emphasis is deliberately on the techniques, their use, and the evaluation of measurements, rather than principally on the surface properties themselves.