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M U D P I E n o. ] 2 
J 
Muse um and University Data, Program and Information Exchange 
THE INFORMATION BAZAAR 
The sixth annual national colloquium on information retrieval, held 
in Philadelphia May 8-9, 1969, has just been published under the above 
title, by the Medical Documentation Service, The College of Physicians, 
Philadelphia, Pa. As a complete outsider, I might be excused for wonder¬ 
ing, after reading half dozen such symposia and summary volumes in the 
past year or so, whether any of the attendees ever listen to or read the 
other guy ! s paper. One would hope that a single tangible result to spring 
forth from these efforts might be a coordinated effort to work out some of 
the basic problems, but there seems to be just as much duplication of effort 
here as that noted in MUDPXE no. 3 (p. 2) at the Mexico City Symposium. The 
'‘network 11 concept is getting more and more common, and gets quite a workout 
in this volume. 
Perhaps of greatest interest to MUDPIE readers are the two papers 
mentioned in MUDPIE no. 8 as available in mimeo from the Smithsonian, which 
are now published in full in this volume. Reginald Creighton and Richard 
King present a summary of the SIIR system for biological and petrographic 
data retrieval, and D. Piacesi joins with Creighton in writing about their 
solution to geographical coding of collection data. * AP 
WILL NUMERICAL TAXONOMY EVER SETTLE DOWN AND FIND HAPPINESS 
WITH MERCY HUMPP? 
A recent book seems to indicate yes, if one substitutes classical system- 
atics for the good Miss Humpp. "Numerical Taxonomy," the proceedings of a 
colloquium in numerical taxonomy held in the University of St. Andrews, Sep¬ 
tember, 1968, was edited by A. J. Cole, and published by the Academic Press, 
1969, xv + 324. The group that got together for this conference appears to 
have been composed of individuals who think numerical taxonomy might have 
something to offer to the practicing taxonomist as an aid to understanding 
what is going on with his organisms. There are no wild, extravagant claims 
here concerning the solution of all of taxonomy's problems, no urging of the 
mossbacks to throw off their millstones and join the taxonomic revolution, and 
little or no derision, implicit or explicit, of the taxonomist who genuinely 
prefers to continue to do things his own way. Several of the participants 
were not taxonomists, and in at least one paper, the deficiency was painfully 
evident. In others, the authors were attempting to utilize some of the 
techniques of numerical taxonomy in completely different fields, such as 
social geography or economics. There are eighteen papers in all, plus an 
appendix on the computer programs used by the various authors.dAP 
