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Abstract. Low temperature detectors necessarily require low temperature instruments. Constructing good low temperature instruments requires information on the properties of materials used in their construction, in particular the thermal conductivity. Unfortunately, this is poorly known for many materials. Collections of data in text books tend to be incomplete and in the worst cases are misleading. For most materials, what information is known is scattered through the literature. Searching out this data is time consuming, and in any case often results in conflicting information. We have started a programme to locate, consolidate and critically analyse thermal conductivity measurements from the literature, particularly for the challenging temperature range below 1 K. This has already produced useful results. We present some preliminary results here.

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