A preliminary plan is presented for the selection, acquisition, intellectual organization, and storage of the information which will underlie the Information Services Operation of the National Standard Reference Data System, as well as for methods of locating desired information items in storage, retrieving, and displaying or communicating them. Questions of the use of computers for these purposes are discussed, including selection of equipment, arrangement of digital storage, input format, remote access, and the economics of choosing certain functions of the system for mechanization. Also, an interim system, based on conventional and, in the main, manually operated files, is described. (Author)