The preceding pages have been devoted to the presentation of our sources of basic information: the data sent in by the authors themselves and the systematic analysis of different blocks of bibliographic information proper. Clearly, however, neither the data in the curricula we received, nor those we ourselves extracted from already published sources, had the slightest uniformity. To overcome this problem, we built up our own handmade card index and, with a level of efficiency that left much to be desired, spend two years slowly and laboriously filling in hundreds of cards which, as they multiplied, became more and more difficult to manipulate and process in any coherent way.