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of earlier congresses were generally received in a wide variety of sizes, margins, 
and appearance. The volumes were bulky and inconvenient to handle. For lack of 
sequential page numbers and a subject index, it is often difficult to find a desired 
article. 
Again, there is no cumulative index for past congresses and symposia, so that the 
researcher may miss a valuable paper in his field of interest. 
Conference Proceedings 
  
A number of excellent proceedings publications have been issued for special 
symposia or conferences sponsored by commissions of ISPRS. These publications 
have usually been produced by the host national society, with a note stating that 
the conference was sponsored jointly by the national society and the ISPRS 
commission. In some instances, the proceedings were published in the national 
journal of the host society. This is a good system when it operates, but it does not 
always operate. 
Although ISPRS and its commissions do not themselves produce these conference 
proceedings, there should at least be a set of ISPRS guidelines regarding the 
format, so that the proceedings volumes can fit uniformly on a bookshelf. These 
volumes also suffer from the lack of a comprehensive subject index covering all 
such volumes already published. 
Circulars and announcements 
  
Heads of commissions and congress managers use a variety of procedures for 
announcing meetings, symposia, and congresses. There is also a problem of mailing 
lists. It is often difficult for a meeting manager to know which individuals should 
receive a given announcement. A uniform system of distributing announcements in 
the most efficient manner is needed. 
Language limitations 
For an international scientific society, the problem of language differences is 
always a difficult one. In ISPRS, the language question has two separate facets: 
1. For each major language there is usually a separate body of literature, but 
there is a lack of translations from one major language to the others. 
2. For minority languages, the body of literature in each language may be small 
or non-existent. There is a lack of translations from major languages to 
minority languages. 
Bibliography and general index 
  
It has already been stated that the lack of reference guides can cause valuable 
scientific literature to be "lost" because there is no convenient way to find a given 
article or references to a given subject. The needed reference guides can be 
divided into two aspects: 
Thompson ^