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I am going to describe in general terms a research project which has been established to explore some of the problems of the use of the literature, particularly in the field of Biomedical Engineering. Work started on 13th September 1965 in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the National Institute for Medical Research (Hampstead Laboratories). The project is scheduled to last for three years, and like most research, consists of a number of overlapping stages. We have reached the stage now of having acquired sufficient equipment and data to start trying out some of our ideas.

The title raises at least four questions:

In the previous paper, presented at a meeting of the Co‐ordinate Indexing Group on 19th November 1970, K. P. Jones (NRPRA) had concluded that subcodes were likely to be a hindrance rather than a help in a co‐ordinate indexing system. At a meeting of the Group held on 14th December 1970, discussion and experience were invited on this topic. The following are contributions submitted to the meeting.

The history of post‐co‐ordinate indexing is one of trial and error in the face of poor results … Most thesauri seem very arbitrary in word selection and the extent of classification is equally arbitrary. FARRADANE The lack of semantic understanding, not even of a highly sophisticated level, by many other‐wise thoughtful workers in information retrieval is distressing… It may be hoped that the somewhat mystical aura which has been spread around the use of thesauri in literature searching, whether on purpose or by misunderstandings, will be dispersed in order to make room for a sober and down‐to‐earth discussion of the issue. BAR‐HILLEL

The first point that I would like to make about the differences between a structured and unstructured vocabulary is that the question is very much related to vocabulary size and this has certainly in the past generated a good deal of controversy in Aslib co‐ordinate indexing circles. Mr Snel and Mr Boyd have been two of the leading advocates of a restricted vocabulary and they argue that this keeps both indexing and searching simple. They also argue that it allows for human intelligence to play a much bigger part in the search process by allowing the sifting of search output to be done by the inquirer and not the system. It is also assumed, probably correctly, that the bigger the vocabulary the more noise a system will produce. The reason that I believe that the question of structured vocabularies and vocabulary's size are related is simply that if one does employ structure, i.e. a classificatory element of some sort, then the practical result of this is a bigger vocabulary. May I interject with a quotation from Cyril Cleverdon, who, to my way of thinking, summed up the question of vocabulary size in a conference that the Co‐ordinate Indexing Group organized some considerable while ago: ‘Much of the disagreement has been due to the fact that speakers were arguing from different view points. If it was found that a particular system operated satisfactorily for a certain organization, then obviously there was no need to find fault with it. However, it was unjustifiable to make claim as speakers had done that the same system would necessarily operate satisfactorily in all other situations. There were obvious differences when one organization was more interested in having a good recall ratio and was relatively unconcerned about relevance, whilst another organization was more interested in having a good relevance ratio. Certain indexing devices were available which could bring about either of these situations but it was unlikely that any of the operating systems discussed would satisfactorily meet both requirements.’

I first met punched feature cards in 1956. I was working as an assistant to E. G. Brisch, whose company classified the materials and components used in industry. His method brought similar articles together, both notionally in classified codebooks and practically when the classified items were stored in their code number order. The result was an excellent aid to variety reduction, standardization, and stock control. E. G. gave me a good grounding in analytical classification; but his office held other secrets too. One of these was a sort of punched card representing a property or quality, not an object or event as with all other punched cards I had met. On these other cards, notched or slotted for hand‐sorting with needles, or punched and verified in thousands for reading by machine, the holes stood for characteristics possessed by the item concerned. The new cards were different. Since they represented properties, the items possessing these had to be shown by the holes, and so they were. E. G. named them ‘Brisch‐a‐boo’: this I found was his special variant of ‘peek‐a‐boo’, a title by which they are still occasionally known. To stack some of them in exact register with each other is to find, as a set of through holes in numbered positions, the reference numbers of all the items recorded on them which have the qualities concerned.

This is the first annual cumulation of a new indexing service attempting world coverage in geography for periodicals, serials, conference proceedings, and reports. The Institut in Bad Godesberg working with the Zentralstelle für maschinelle Dokumentation (ZMD) records references on a tape typewriter and publishes two‐monthly lists which give the following elements for each entry; UDC number, a set of descriptors, author (both personal and corporate), title, scource, and type of publication.

IThis review has been sponsored by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information and the end product of the complete research will be a thesaurus of management terms. Parallel research in the business management area and also supported by OSTI is being conducted by David Dews, Librarian of the Manchester Business School, and K. D. C. Vernon, Librarian of the London Graduate School of Business Studies. As Mr Vernon is at present engaged in the construction of a faceted classification scheme for management, this investigation has concentrated on the possibility of utilizing faceted techniques to construct such a thesaurus.

Feature card systems are particularly suited to dealing with information pertaining to drugs, diseases, anatomical terms and biological species, for which elements of vocabulary control and hierarchy are useful for information retrieval. In the biomedical field some feature card systems in the UK have been described in some detail; the McClelland system for anaesthesia literature used a deck of about 500 feature cards of 5,000‐hole capacity, and the Project FAIR index to biomedical engineering literature now has sis decks of 1,280 hole capacity feature cards each containing around 300 cards.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.