Basically, MUDPIE represents a network, at present held to¬ 
gether by its newsletter. The plan has been, since the inception 
of MUDPIE, to take advantage of commercial time-sharing computer 
facilities for direct exchange of ideas and uses of the computer 
as designed and implemented by the participants. There are at 
the present time many users of commercial facilities among 
museums, with fewer, perhaps, in the universities. The latter 
is due to the fact that universities have moved more strongly 
in the direction of in-house availability of computer laborato¬ 
ries for use by the professional staff in their research. Museum 
scientists, however, found commercial time-sharing a blessing, 
since it provided them with access to computers in a fashion 
usually not previously available to them. In many cases, museums 
have been exchanging programs and data files which are stored 
in local facilities, creating a considerable duplication and 
added expense that could easily be eliminated through the use 
of common availability to all museum users of a centralized 
memory storage capability, as would be provided by a commercial 
contractor with nationwide access to his central computer. This 
is, of course, presently possible, since many contractors offer 
whole or partial service to the nation, and on several occasions 
participants in MUDPIE have already taken advantage of this 
potential. The American Museum of Natural History and the United 
States National Museum had mutual access to each other's stored 
data and programs for a considerable period while both were 
contracting with the company CEIR, located in Washington, D.C., 
and the arrangement was discontinued only when the company re¬ 
vised its corporate structure, and both museums moved to new 
contractors. The National Museum and Michigan State University 
have had mutual storage access through the GE time-sharing sys¬ 
tem, which is national in scope, but rather expensive for most 
museum users. Demonstrations of the capacity and potential 
of time-sharing in museum work have been made in all parts of 
the country, using either the connection of the Smithsonian 
with Dialcom, a D.C. company, or with GE, through Michigan State 
University. 
It has been a basic assumption for MUDPIE that the only 
material stored for full-time, mutual access in the network would 
be that for which use is highly repetitive. There are many collec 
tions of facts or organized sets of data that are constantly used 
by biologists in their day-to-day work or research, and most of 
these are amenable to computerization and on-line storage, given 
sufficient storage space. Among these are programs which permit 
standard calculations of biometric parameters and statistical 
correlations; taxonomic data matrices and programs for processing 
them; standard tables of biological data; answers to repetitive 
queries from the public; and many others. Progress in several 
of these areas has already been made by workers participating 
in MUDPIE, and functional programs, matrices, and answering 
services have been tested and are working. To take them up 
in turn, and in detail 
