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The following letter was addressed to Daniel Bobrow, editor of Artificial Intelligence Many of us felt that the issue raised is a very important one for the AAAI and deserved wide exposure It is printed here, along with Bobrow's reply, for your interest. The intervening three centuries have proven Oldenburg's invention to be a priceless vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge. It is, therefore, ironic indeed that artificial intelligence, a field whose very essence is knowledge, has developed a literature that is extraordinarily difficult and inefficient to use. Effective use of the literature of AI is frustrated by two fundamental deficiencies: (a) there is no central index to the field's published works, and (b) not only are far too many original works not published in journals, but a shockingly high percentage of these are "published" in sources that may be generously described as inaccessible. As an example of a field that does not have these problems, consider medicine.