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the field, complete with the authors’ addresses so that interested 
persons can contact them directly, but of course we could not even 
attempt to include all the applications disciplines, such as geology, 
soils, vegetation, etc. In a subsequent reader survey, I discovered 
that exactly one-third of our alumni were cut off from all other pro 
fessional publications, and that while several hundred of them used 
the journal abstracts as I had hoped they would, most of them did 
not. 
About two years ago--after writing a stack of rejection letters to 
Third World authors—I decided that this had to stop, and I hit on the 
idea of starting an "adoption agency" for journals and books. It 
seemed simple enough: find out who needed what, who had what and get 
the two together. Since the ITC Journal is also sent free to many 
remote sensing centers in the Third World, I even knew where most of 
the likely recipients were. I could simply canvas their librarians, 
put a small notice in PE&RS that we were looking for "orphans" and 
everything would fall-into place. 
Then I thought perhaps I should see if anyone in Holland had any expe 
rience in this sort of thing, and I discovered the "Netherlands Peri 
odicals Project" in which the various Dutch universities donate sur 
plus publications to selected universities in Third World countries. 
The problem is that the recipient universities are in what are called 
"target countries"—a list of eight to 10 countries that the Dutch 
government singles out ea.ch year for an especially heavy concentration 
of development aid (the Dutch really do donate a bit more than 1 per 
cent of GNP to development assistance) . The administration of the 
project requires one full-time person, and his annual budget is some 
thing on the order of US$ 70,0 00. I wasn't awfully keen about the 
target country part of it, there was no possibility of hiring anyone 
to work even part-time, and hopes for a budget of any consequence were 
nil. 
I then learned of the work of AGID—The Association of Geoscientists 
for international Development--an international organization that 
operates a journal adoption agency from Canada. By this time, I was 
asking a better class of questions, and of course I got a better class 
of answers. I contacted Tony Berger (who was administering the pro 
ject), who is also active in the ICSU Press--an arm of the Interna 
tional Council of Scientific Unions, of which I believe ISPRS is a 
member. ICSU Press operates its own publication service, and it also 
tries to obtain extra copies from journal publishers for distribution 
to the developing countries. I 
I learned from Dr Berger that many of my apprehensions about setting 
up this adoption agency were well-founded. With a finite supply of 
materials, how do you decide who gets what? ' How do you ensure that 
the materials sent actually remain in an open library and not on the 
director's shelves? Do the donors send the materials directly to the 
recipients or are they better sent to some intermediate point and 
shipped from there. If so, where is this intermediate point? Where 
do you get the money for postage? Are there problems with customs?