2 
* 
practicality of such automation, however, the challenges as to its 
wisdom persist. These challenges include problems of reliability of 
taxonomic determinations, accuracy of data in the catalogues, fre¬ 
quency of demand by users, the non-repetiLive nature of the data, 
and others. It is clear that these challenges will not be answered 
until the supporters of the second approach have supplied acceptable 
answers to some of the day-to-day queries concerning the collections 
of a museum, and have given the scientific community accurate, detailed, 
and non-ambiguous data on costs. 
3. It is apparent that a considerable amount of duplication of effort is 
taking place in the area of storage and retrieval of museum data. Many 
different institutions or individual workers are preparing methods for 
encoding locality data, scientific names, bibliographic information, 
and in many cases the methods will not be compatible with each other in 
the future. Worse still, errors are made again and again that have been 
experienced and solved by earlier workers, but require repeated laborious 
solutions by the next generation. Close coordination of work on mutual 
problems is mandatory. 
In the hopes that the abstracts of the program might prove of interest 
and perhaps of use to the readers of MUDPIE, they are reproduced in part on 
the following pages. The rest will be included with a later issue. 
4 
* 
Smithsonian Institution 
January 10, 1968 
