2 DOCUMENTATION OF LITERATURE COMMISSION VI 
‘cal engineer reads the pages of this magazine, he learns 
something about the thousands of articles which appear in 
some 4,300 periodicals published in 31 different languages. 
Even if he knew these 31 languages, it is doubtful if he 
could afford to subscribe to all of these journals, much less 
find time to read them. Because of this condition, many sci- 
entists use abstracts as a means of discovering information 
of special interest to them that might not otherwise become 
available, 
Nearly one thousand organizations throughout the world 
produce abstracts of periodicals covering various fields of 
scientific interest. Nevertheless, a recent UNESCO survey 
of scientific articles published in the Middle East revealed 
dozens of technicals magazines that were unknown to the 8ci- 
entists of Europe and the Americas. In order to overcome 
these gaps in our knowledge caused by differences of time, 
location, and language, UNESCO recently held a world confer- 
ence in Paris. Nearly 150 scientists and librarians from 28 
countries attended this meeting. They decided that world wide 
abstracting services, similar to those now existing for chem- 
istry and medicine, should be set up for the other sciences, 
The Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) has 
also devoted considerable effort to improve the exchange of 
technical and scientific information by the use of document 
catalogue cards which contain abstracts of the original docu- 
ments. In this connection a number of Europen experts made 
an extensive tour of the United States searvhing for new and 
useful techniques in the field of documentation. 
The author of this paper has carefully studied the sub- 
ject of documentation as it is practised in both the United 
States and Europe. .As a result of these studies, it has been 
concluded that all organizations concerned with the continuous 
improvement of photogrammetric procedures and equipment re- - 
quire the use of a suitable abstracting and indexing service. 
Furthermore, it appears that the International Society of 
Photogrammetry is the logical organization for promoting the 
development of a world wide abstracting and indexing service. 
It is believed that such a service would be financially self- 
supporting and would contribute a great deal to the steady im- 
provement of our photogrammetric equipment and procedures. 
C, THE DOCUMENT CATALOGUE CARD 
Figure 1 illustrates a typical document catalogue card of 
the type that is prepared and published by the Navy Research 
Section of the Library of Congress and the Central Air Docu-