The DEep Near-Infrared Survey of the southern sky (DENIS) will produce
an important by-product: a clean: complete view of the local Universe
to z similar to 0.07 for 10(5) galaxies. We identify the FLAIR multi-
fibre system on the UKST as an extremely competitive facility to under
take follow-up spectroscopy for this sample due to the need to cover w
ide areas of sky and observe thousands of objects to a relatively brig
ht (B less than or equal to 17.5) magnitude.