The National Research Council and the National Bureau of Standards initiated the project on Infrared Bibliography around 1951, but could not complete it due to various reasons. The group at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, took up this task in December 1969 under the Special International Programs of the National Bureau of Standards (Project G-78). The NRC-NBS group had gathered data from selected journals on keysort cards with an average cut-off date of 1956. The IIT Kanpur group, however, decided to make the bibliography as complete as possible up to the end of 1960 although the volume of literature increases very greatly towards the end of 1950's.