text: Bidelman became a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan in Fall 1963.
  At the University of Michigan, Freeman D. Miller and Bidelman began to direct the complete reactivation of the Curtis Schmidt telescope, to search for stars with spectra that showed unusual chemical compositions. After the University of Michigan agreed in 1966 to transfer the telescope to South America, the telescope was moved to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, for astronomical viewing in the Southern Hemisphere which was completed in 1967. Under a National Science Foundation grant to Bidelman, Darrell Jack MacConnell moved the telescope, and the two later conducted research using objective-prism plates taken with by the Curtis Schmidt.
  In the early 1960s Bidelman gave a colloquium at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, where Bidelman suggested it would be feasible to reclassify all stars listed in the Henry Draper Catalogue on the MK system. Graduate student, Nancy Houk heard Bidelman's colloquium and became interested in classifying. Only about 23,000 of the HD stars had Morgan-Keenan classifications, and those had been classified by different people using different standards and sometimes chosen out of interest, creating a biased sample.
  Reclassifying all HD stars the same way would create a vast data set that could be used as a teaching data set for a computer to encourage automated classifications which would be as better telescopes looked at for fainter stars. Houk eventually led the Michigan Survey and because it was anticipated that the work which she began in 1970 would not be completed until 2004, Bidelman used the same Curtis Schmidt objective-prism lens plates to begin an "early results" program. Bidelman recalled:
  By 1964, Bidelman reported finding ~150 peculiar stars, about 80% were believed to be new discoveries. In 1966, Bidelman reported finding Praseodymium III in χ Lupi and with the Curtis Schmidt telescope, Bidelman and Robert Victor made provisional identifications of 23 peculiar stars including 3 new metallic line stars. By 1969, Bidelman and his assistants discovered ~90 new, mainly F- and G-type supergiant stars, 33 new B-type emission (Be) stars, ~75 new metallic-line stars, over 150 new peculiar A-type stars, and other astronomical objects of interest.
  With the help of MacConnell and research assistants Bond, Frye and Humphreys, Bidelman discovered 53 new Barium (Ba II) stars, 26 new late-type giants which had strong Ca II emission lines, new supergiants of various spectral classes and G- and K-type stars with very weak CH absorption in their spectra.
  The first worldwide milestone in creating one or more astronomical data centers was the first discussion in 1966 at a National Science Foundation event in Maryland. The second was when Bidelman was president of the International Astronomical Union's Commission 45 and they discussed the issue at the 1967 IAU meeting in Prague Czechoslovakia. At this meeting in Prague: "W.P. Bidelman spoke of the need for a general reference catalogue giving full bibliographic data for individual stars". Bidelman said it would include about a million stars and require the resources of an organization like NASA, and some members of the Commission supported the proposal.