The Henry Draper stars are being systematically classified on the MK System, using the Curtis and Burrell Schmidt telescopes with photographic spectra having a dispersion of 108 Å/mm. Over 156,000 stars south of δ = +5°, have been classified leaving about 69,000 yet to do. The project is expected to be completed around the year 2004. This all-sky network of consistently classified spectra of very good quality should serve as a basis for future deep surveys. Such surveys will almost certainly be automated because of the huge number of stars to be dealt with. Von Hippel et al. at Cambridge plan to scan at least 150,000 of the spectra classified by Houk, using her plates to serve as a ‘training’ set for automatic classification using artificial neural networks. The same data can also be utilized for other methods of automatic classification including the metric-distance methods used by Kurtz and La Sala (Kurtz 1983). Even at lower dispersions, significantly more information can be obtained from Schmidt spectra than by doing Schmidt photometric colour surveys alone, though these are also valuable, especially when used in conjunction with spectra. We urge that large Schmidts not currently having prisms or other dispersive elements consider adding this equipment.