An overview will be given of almost four decades of work at NBS/NIST in which different phenomena associated with electron emission from surfaces and electron scattering by surfaces were investigated. These investigations, made with many coworkers, range from analyses of energy-loss spectra from liquid metals to studies of different Auger-electron lineshapes, reviews of electron attenuation lengths and inner-shell ionization cross sections, interlaboratory comparisons of AES and XPS peak energies and intensities, investigations of correlation effects in inner-shell excitations, calculations of electron inelastic mean free paths, investigations of elastic-electron scattering effects in AES and XPS, measurements of electron attenuation lengths, development of improved procedures for the calibration of binding-energy scales of XPS instruments, development of standard test data for XPS, and development of NIST databases for applications in XPS and AES.