Originally the work on the ISC-GEM Catalogue was requested and funded by the GEM Foundation as one of the five GEM Global Hazard Components. Further resources towards this work are provided by the ISC and public and commercial sponsors.

We acknowledge several hundred research and operational institutions around the world for providing on a goodwill basis paper-based seismic bulletins to the ISC and its predecessors regularly over the course of the 20th century.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by all ISC Member Institutions to sustain the operations of the ISC and its predecessors.

We acknowledge the advice and guidance received from the group of IASPEI observers that included G?ran Ekstr?m, Roger Musson, Johannes Schweitzer, Nobuo Hamada and Peter Suhadolc. The group provided invaluable advice on the details of the GCMT Catalogue and the uncertainties of the GCMT magnitude determinations, the availability of historical bulletins as well as documents and details of historical seismographic equipment.

We acknowledge Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and Nobuo Hamada for providing previously unavailable early instrumental (1923-1970) bulletins of earthquakes in Japan. We are grateful to Katsuyuki Abe for providing a digital copy of the Abe and Noguchi Catalogue.

We wish to recognise the initiative of the late Edouard Arnold and Patrick Willmore, former Directors of the ISC, for transferring a large proportion of the ISS paper bulletins onto punch-cards and preparing the Shannon tape, despite the financial difficulties experienced by the ISC at the time. We also acknowledge the effort of Tom Boyd, Colorado School of Mines, for further correction of this data.

We thank Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig from the Black Forest Observatory, Germany, for shipping many bulletins from the University of Stuttgart archive.

We are grateful to Josep Batlló from the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), Spain, for the support given in sourcing several station bulletins in Spain and Marina López Muga from the Observatorio Geofísico de Toledo, Spain, for providing the scans of Toledo bulletins.

We thank Xeni Ambraseys for donating to the ISC printed seismic station bulletins from the private collection of her late husband Nick Ambraseys (Imperial College London).

We thank Aleksey Malovichko, Oleg Starovoit, Irina Gabsatarova, Olga Kamenskaya, Vera Babkina, Raisa Mihailova and Elena Terehova (Geophysical Survey, Russian Academy of Sciences, Obninsk, Russia) for providing digital files and scanned images of the bulletins of the United Backbone Network of Seismic Stations of the Former Soviet Union and individual historical seismic stations of the Russian Empire. We thank Andrey Fedorov (Kola Regional Seismic Centre, Russia) for providing scans of Apatity station bulletins.

We are grateful to Jan Zednik of the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and Michel Cara and Magali Pierrat of EOST of University of Strasbourg in France for helping us with filling gaps in the ISC station bulletin collection.

We are indebted to Roger Musson for sharing with the ISC a collection of station bulletins gathered by him at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh (UK).

We are grateful to Anna Berezina and Kanatbek Abdrahmatov (Institute of Seismology, National Academy of Sciences, Kyrgyzstan) for organizing the scanning of the original operator notepads of the seismic station Frunze.

We are grateful to Siegfried Wendt (Universitaet Leipzig, Germany) for sending us missing bulletins of the Collm Observatory; Jina Gachechiladze (Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia), Arkady Aronov and Vladislav Aronov (Centre of Geophysical Monitoring of the National Academy of Sciences, Belarus) for providing positions of historical sites of seismic stations of former USSR.

We are grateful to USGS for providing digitally scanned and paper based seismic bulletins from its collection and Jon DeBord and Chuck Wenger, USGS Librarians, for their assistance in searching through the scientific literature and arranging inter-library loans.

We are grateful to Boris Dzeboev and Natalia Sergeeva (Geophysical Center of Russian Academy of Sciences) for helping to fill certain gaps in the ISC collection of station and network bulletins from Africa, Asia, Europe and South America.

We thank Robin Adams and David McGregor for providing historical information on the operations in the early years of the ISC.

Several members of the ISC staff were instrumental with a multitude of technical issues: Maureen Aspinwall for dealing with the project finances, Przemys?aw O?go for developing the data entry web browser interfaces originally designed by Oriol Gaspa Rebull, Wayne Richardson for offering advice on historical bulletins and, most importantly, Daniela Olaru, Elizabeth Ball, Natalia Safronova, Rebecca Verney, Rosemary Wylie, Jessica Wilson, Agne Baranauskaite and Hepsi Simpson for their enormous effort of typing relevant arrival time and amplitude data from the historical seismic bulletins available at the ISC.

Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the use of Google Maps and Generic Mapping Tool (GMT) in numerous presentations, posters and scientific articles explaining the nature of the ISC-GEM Catalogue.