A new version of the biblio is ready for pickup via anonymous ftp, from as usual. Thanks are due to Pankaj Agarwal, Boris Aronov, Ken Clarkson, Karen Daniels, Olivier Devillers, Bernd Gaertner, Martin Held, Christian Icking, Scott Mitchell, T. M. Murali, Joe O'Rourke, Michel Pocchiola, Guenter Rote, Neil Rowe, Stefan Salinger, Otfried Schwarzkopf, Michiel Smid, Roberto Tamassia, and Barbara Wolfers for their contributions this round. About 1600 entries were new or changed this time, for a new total of 8454 entries. The number of entries changed arises in large part from cleanup work. A common theme in correspondence lately is how the bibliography is not as useful as it might be when typesetting papers, because of inconsistencies in data entry. The most popular examples are how conference booktitles will sometimes be entered with a nickname like STOC and sometimes without, and about the use of conference cities in the address field (which is intended for city of publication). In an ideal world, we would all do our data entry with software capable of gently regularizing whatever was provided, and entries would immediately assume a final perfect form. As things stand, there is no such software (please feel free to write some); I use at merge time some cleanup scripts too baroque to distribute from attempts to keep up with creative and error-prone data entry, and still incapable of perfecting things, especially since the root cause of these dramatic conflicts seems to be that the limited field types supported by the bibtex standard styles are inadequate to contain our varying bibliographic urges. Thus in this round, I have introduced two new fields site and nickname, with relevant changes to the README as follows: address: city of publication [...] - for @inproceedings items, an address without publisher will be presumed by the merging software to be the conference city, and rewritten into the site field booktitle: title of book or proceedings containing item [...] - abbreviations for some popular conferences are in the authority file. The merging software will recognize modest variations in abbreviation and convert them to standard form, but it cannot work miracles. In particular, please avoid including, via parentheses or otherwise, nicknames like SODA, or material like locations and dates that should appear elsewhere or not at all. The merging software will automatically move into the nickname field trailing strings of the form ([A-Z]+[~ ']*[0-9]*), and this pattern may be extended in future. nickname: short name of conference, distinct from booktitle - e.g. "ISAAC '94" - best used on an entry for the proceedings itself, where years of publication and conference differ, or where connection between conference and booktitle is obscure; discouraged otherwise site: city of conference - available for those who prefer to record it, but generally discouraged for individual papers (if you like, make a separate entry for the proceedings itself) The intent has been to enforce a greater consistency for typesetting while preserving for searching the data already entered. I have also instituted cleanup for the series and publisher fields. Conversion has been done on all entries existing or incoming, and while I think the results are good I have no doubt managed to introduce a few errors nonetheless. I ask gentle users to bear in mind that there is no effort without error, and hope the result will facilitate further use and improvement. Updates for the next round should please be sent by the week of Monday 14 July 1997.