DATA PROCESSING IN BIOLOGY AND GEOLOGY 
A book with the title above has just been published by the 
Academic Press in cooperation with the Systematics Association 
of England, as their special volume no. 3. It is edited by J. L. 
Cutbill, and includes the proceedings of a symposium held at the 
University of Cambridge, 24-26 Sept., 1969. As is invariably true 
of symposium volumes, this one contains its share of pot-boilers 
that probably should not have been presented and certainly should 
not have been published. It is still a a very useful summary of th 
state of the art in the application of computers to museum work, 
however, and I think everyone who reads MUDPIE should also read 
this volume. I had thought of listing the titles and summing up 
some of the work here, but I decided against this, feeling that 
it would be wiser to persuade all of you to examine the book criti¬ 
cally. At least in part this is because there were 135 people 
who attended the symposium, and practically none of them are people 
who currently receive MUDPIE. There clearly exist at least two 
large groups of people interested in the same thing--the handling 
of data and information in luseums—and who knows how many more 
such groups there may be? The painful consequence of this, of 
course, is the continued proliferation of duplicative effort re¬ 
marked upon in MUDPIE no. 3, way back in January, 1968. We don't 
seem to have come too far in coordinating our efforts since then, 
MUDPIE not withstandingJAP. 
KEEPING UP WITH ARPA-I 
In MUDPIE no. 14 there is a short introduction to ARPA-- 
the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of 
Defense—and its Computer Network. I remarked at that time that 
it will not hurt to keep up with their activities, even though 
museums cannot afford their high-priced action. This is the 
first installment of "keeping up." 
A news story in Datamation, May, 1971, says that ARPA 
Computer Network plans to have access by 1974 to an on-line infor¬ 
mation storage and retrieval system with a trillion-bit memory. 
The system will be located with and on-line to the ILLIAC IV at 
NASA in Ames, California. Computer Corporation of America, in 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, will begin immediately to assemble a 
facility to store large files at the minimum expense, to provide 
a community of users with file-sharing ability, a uni form method 
of accessing remote files, and advanced data management services. 
The system will store such files as a 100 billion-bit data 
base of historical meteorological information. It will have little 
or no computational ability, because it will be set up to pass 
on data to the user's computer for manipulation. Eventually, 
the data will be passed on to the ILLIAC IV over high-speed 
lines, if the amount of computation is too much for a local 
machine.--JAP. 
