Search results

In 1964 Herbert Coblans wrote that the development of photo‐effect lithography, the invention and evolution of photographic techniques, had profoundly affected the ‘recording of knowledge, the making of libraries and all that that means’. He went on to ask if ‘two other lines of technical development, Hollerith's punched cards… and the electronic computer … [which] represent a third revolution, comparable to the other two’, had had the same significance for libraries and documentation. When originally asked, this question could not be answered with any clarity. Fourteen years later it should be possible to answer the question with some authority and to identify the other areas of technical development that form an integral part of the mechanized documentation services of today and those which are under development for tomorrow.

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.

We have recently been concerned with devising a search tool for a group of geographically spread workers, concerned with searching through records of sone 10,000 items. The data base is held on computer and we considered both the use of an output punched tape to create feature cards and of an output dual dictionary. The arguments against each were, however, not inconsiderable.

This paper describes a suite of programs designed to produce subject indexes and current awareness bulletins. Output can be by line printer or by photo‐typesetting. Cumulative subject and author indexes can be prepared and the input data can be stored as a data base for information retrieval. An SDI facility, based on the same input, is being planned.

The type of search programme we can use depends on the way in which the information is stored within the computer. There are two principle techniques for arranging the files of information about your documents—the item file, in which the record is the document, its identity, its title, etc., and all its descriptors; and the inverted file, in which the record is the descriptor followed by the identities of all the documents to which it applies. Generally speaking, an item file is usually held serially, most commonly on magnetic tape, whereas an inverted file is usually held in a random access device. The reasons for this will become clear later when we discuss the programs.

There are seven major problem areas in this field, one of which has been treated extensively and will get no attention from me today—the language problem. I do not propose to go into the minutiae of pre‐ or post‐co‐ordinating, of the merits of role relations, interfixing, weighting and the like, though there are some points which merit consideration in the context of this paper, whose aim is to consider some of the practical problems likely to be met. The seven problem areas are:

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

February WED.4. Aslib Engineering Group. One‐day Conference. Newcastle. Aslib Transport Group/Motor Industries Information Group joint meeting. Plans for a new system of business statistics. Speaker: M. C. Fessey (Business Statistics Office). University of Aston. 2.30 p.m.

Now that so many current awareness services are available from outside the industrial special library, and internal SDI via computer is a reality in many companies, it seems likely that attitudes to the use of the ‘information bulletin’ concept as a means of dissemination will have changed. To get some idea of the trend, facts and opinions were solicited from librarians and information officers.

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.’