\N
~J
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 ^