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-
