Generally stamp show Organising Committees had to start virtually from scratch for each exhibition as the experience from previous exhibitions was not necessarily retained and carried forward to the next exhibition. People involved in running a show changed as those previously involved often shied away from getting involved again in the hectic, time-consuming task of running a show. So the wheel was re-invented each time by the next organising committee and, despite the best intentions, precious little of any information, procedures, or documentation was re-usable or re-used.
Recording of exhibitors, exhibits and results is labour-intensive and prone to the human errors of transcription and other mistakes. Discrepancies often arose because the sources of the data were not always the same: the catalogue editor transcribed the information from the entry forms, the Jury secretary received the information from the same source but prepared by a different person, and the judging results had to be copied to the Awards List, the Critique sheets and the Certificates, with small transcription errors creeping in. There were never any serious problems; however, the exhibitor whose results were wrongly transcribed would not have been happy.
Results were transcribed to a central APF database in a format provided by FIP for World Exhibitions, and this too produced its own types of errors, such as transcription errors in printed awards list as well as the idiosyncrasies of the FIP database format.