Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books…
Abstract
Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books, periodicals and reports appear at random: ‘The searcher is on a platform just above the belt and as the information material passes underneath he can pick up and read anything that he thinks might be of interest to him. You can imagine his frustration as he realises that for every item he takes time to examine, hundreds of others of possible interest to him have passed by’. Personality and environment will determine whether the individual can find an intelligent compromise between the extremes of neurosis induced by worrying about the material he is missing, or complacency with any system which produces one or two interesting items.
Professor W. Saunders: I have listened with very great interest to the proceedings of the last two and a half days and it seems that a picture has gradually built up during that…
Abstract
Professor W. Saunders: I have listened with very great interest to the proceedings of the last two and a half days and it seems that a picture has gradually built up during that time. We started with Mr. Arnold and Mr. Vickery setting the scene and an attempt by Mr Vickery to indicate some broad guidelines, and then we had what really amounts to a very important series of case studies from various points of view. We finished with snags and problems and a look at the manpower implications. And at the end of it all, I must say that I have a general impression that the state of this particular art that we are concerned with is not unlike that of our own discipline of information science, information studies, or at least what it was a year or two ago. As a professional educationalist I am concerned all the time that I'm attempting to teach library and information science with theoretical frameworks, with general principles. I am trying to find a framework, I am trying to find principles. What one does so often find is empirical evidence, ad hoc studies, and gradually one is conscious that all of these studies are becoming accommodated, becoming built in to some sort of emerg‐ing theoretical framework, not very hard yet, but on its way. And so it is, it seems to me, with this present problem, the problem which is the theme of this conference, except that we are still very much at the stage of ‘ad‐hoc‐ery’.
In listening to Miss Thornton and Mr Whitehall we have considered some of the ways by which the traditional activities of an information service need a modified approach in the…
Abstract
In listening to Miss Thornton and Mr Whitehall we have considered some of the ways by which the traditional activities of an information service need a modified approach in the context of the smaller departments. I now wish to look at certain aspects of these activities and forecast the changes in emphasis that will be required in the light of future developments.
My originalthis paper was to take, from the literature, examples of successful solutions of practical problems found in using external information services. This would have been…
Abstract
My originalthis paper was to take, from the literature, examples of successful solutions of practical problems found in using external information services. This would have been fine if there had been any examples in the literature, but there were none that I found. No one has said in print what happens when tapes are held up for three months in a dock strike, or how much it costs to re‐profile when the thesaurus is revised without consultation with the user, or how much extra work is involved when the record format is changed at short notice. No one has actually stated in public that he allowed two hours per profile and it actually required ten, or that the programming costs were three times as large as his (and his Computer Department Manager's) estimate. These things happen—but one naturally does not admit to them in print, even though by so doing one could be of inestimable value to one's professional colleagues.
During the rest of this decade there will be substantial changes in the type of activities carried out by information workers, both as a result of improvements in technology to…
Abstract
During the rest of this decade there will be substantial changes in the type of activities carried out by information workers, both as a result of improvements in technology to provide more effective information systems and also because the users of information will have more sophisticated requirements. Some of these changes are discussed below.
C.J. GOULD and B.T. STERN
The broad results of surveys on the ways in which Wellcome scientists handle foreign language technical texts are discussed. Areas of co‐operation between organizations leading to…
Abstract
The broad results of surveys on the ways in which Wellcome scientists handle foreign language technical texts are discussed. Areas of co‐operation between organizations leading to a reduction in costs and an increase in coverage are suggested with a view to Aslib acting as co‐ordinator and arranging discussions between interested parties.
Clara M. Chu and Isola Ajiferuke
The study compares the quality of indexing in library and information science databases (Library Literature (LL), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and Information…
Abstract
The study compares the quality of indexing in library and information science databases (Library Literature (LL), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and Information Science Abstracts (ISA)). An alternative method to traditional retrieval effectiveness tests, suggested by White and Griffith in their paper ‘Quality of indexing in online databases’ [13], is adopted to measure the quality of the controlled vocabulary of each database. The method involves identifying clusters of documents that are similar in content, searching for each document from a given cluster in a database, identifying the terms used by the databases to index each document, and calculating certain measures to determine the quality of indexing. Problems found with the White and Griffith discrimination index led the authors to propose an alternative discrimination index which takes into consideration the collection size of a database. Our analysis shows that LISA has the best quality of indexing out of the three databases.
16 queries, performed on the two systems, resulted in 247 unique relevant references from EMCS and 559 from TOXLINE. The overlap varied considerably, from 6 to 50%. It is…
Abstract
16 queries, performed on the two systems, resulted in 247 unique relevant references from EMCS and 559 from TOXLINE. The overlap varied considerably, from 6 to 50%. It is remarkable that TOXLINE, with nine subfiles specially compiled for toxicology can be supplemented by EMCS, which in the present study delivered 31% of all the unique references.
Mr L.J.Anthony, FLA, has been appointed to a new post of Assistant Director (Services) on the staff of Aslib and takes up his appointment at the beginning of October. Mrs Sauvee…
Abstract
Mr L.J.Anthony, FLA, has been appointed to a new post of Assistant Director (Services) on the staff of Aslib and takes up his appointment at the beginning of October. Mrs Sauvee has kindly agreed to remain at work until he takes over. Mr Anthony is well known to the membership as the Librarian and Head of Documentation Services of the Culham Laboratory of the UK Atomic Energy Authority and as the former Deputy Librarian at Harwell; members of longer standing will remember him as Assistant Director at Aslib in 1954–55, when the consultancy service and first research activities were being established, and previously as Information Officer at British Telecom‐munications Research Ltd.