I would first like to present a little history of this project. I started working at Yerkes Observatory in March of 1972 and found out about the informal meeting in June of that year of observatory and astronomy librarians meeting at Harvard-Smithsonian after the Special Libraries Association meeting in Boston. I arranged to go to that one-day meeting to meet some of the people working in the field; especially in order to know who to call for some good advice once in a while.

My notes from the business meeting that day tell me that “a Union List of Observatory Publications/Astronomy Journals was discussed; no decision.” So I first heard about a union list of astronomy journals in 1972, but it may have been discussed many years before that. The Union List was further discussed at meetings in Pittsburgh in 1973, Toronto in 1974, Chicago in 1975, Denver in 1976, etc., etc.,