text: In 1969, Bidelman was a professor in the astronomy department at Austin. By the end of the 1960s, astronomers had begun to discuss the possibility of creating astronomical data centers. In a letter in 1969, Luboš Perek wrote that an astronomer who wanted a star's MK classification might search through 5 to 100 papers "according to his temperament" then give up, or take a plate to determine the type, or choose another star. Astronomers might observe the same star under different names. Catalogs, though useful, were often created as personal endeavors by astronomers near retirement and usually published only once, and while astronomical data increased rapidly, there were few making catalogs. In 1969, Bidelman became one of the six astronomers funded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific to study the feasibility of a computerized data center.
  In 1970, the first official IAU debate on astronomical data centers took place. After a temporary IAU working group held meetings, and representatives from 16 countries showed interest, the IAU established the first permanent Working Group on Numerical Data, and Bidelman became one of its "main data center leaders" to plan centers to make data more reliable and accessible. Their first goal was to distribute information on existing Data Centers as well as lists of data errors. The Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center, NASA Astrophysics Data System, and data centers in Japan and by the Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Science were among the first centers developed, and said many goals in creating data centers were eventually met and, as A. Heck noted, "sometimes largely facilitated by not-so-quickly-expected technologies such as the electronic networking of the planet".
  While at Austin in 1970, Bidelman, MacConnell and Frye published findings on six new stars showing strong neutral helium lines whose spectra appeared different from other "hydrogen deficient" stars, on objective prism plates from Cerro Tololo, Chile.
  By the end of the school year, Bidelman resigned to accept the position of Director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory and Chairman of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Ohio.