19 
SOME REMARKS ON THE PROGRAMME 
AND THE ARCHIVES 
By the Secretary-General 
An international scientific-technical congress is a highly justifiable event, from 
many points of view. 
It brings together for a short time — for practical and economic reasons often 
all too short — a large number of specialists, giving them an opportunity to get 
to know each other and establish contacts that frequently prove to be very 
valuable in the future. 
At the congress research workers, instrument manufacturers and others can 
report on current or recently completed development work, and the participants 
are offered a very concentrated 'picture of the state of development, which often 
— after certain further consideration — becomes the basis for future work. 
When a congress is imminent, it often has an accelerating effect on research 
workers, instrument manufacturers and others, stimulating them in their activi 
ties and thus hastening development, to some extent by fostering a spirit of 
healthy competition. 
The discussions that take place during the congress — both at the meetings 
and over the luncheon table — are one of the most valuable elements in such 
a congress. At the same time, it is very difficult to arrange during the sessions 
large-scale discussions on subjects of interest to the great majority of participants. 
The preparation of a congress programme to ensure fulfilment of the above 
four functions is associated with great difficulties for several reasons, such as 
the following: 
decisions regarding participation can generally not be given until late, which 
involves great uncertainty as to the number of participants as a whole, and 
as to which active, pre-eminent figures can be expected, 
research and development projects are often completed just before the congress, 
and this leads to lateness in the announcement of papers, the distribution of 
summaries and off-prints etc., 
the extent of the discussions can hardly be foreseen except in a few isolated 
cases, and 
lecturers often greatly exceed the time assigned to them. 
When we began to prepare the programme for the congress, we made certain 
forecasts of the number of participants, papers, off-prints, languages, etc., and 
tried to verify our forecasts by asking for preliminary registrations for the 
Congress. In addition certain dead-lines (with some margins) were fixed for 
announcement of papers, delivery of reports, submission of summaries etc. In 
spite of these measures we found when we came to the final adjustment of the 
programme a week or two before the congress that we were faced with more 
than double the number of papers and off-prints announced before the dead 
line. Since we did not consider we had the right to deny anyone the opportunity 
to present the results of his work at the Congress, we suggested to the com 
mission boards and lecturers to place certain papers in the »read-by-title group». 
Although this was adopted for many papers, we could not avoid having a 
number of simultaneous meetings, and we could only allow very short times 
for presentation of papers in order to ensure that 40 % of the total com 
mission sessions time (about 44h) could be devoted to discussions (about 19h),