Search results

The end of the Cold War and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe has had a profound effect on the political and economic life in those countries. The changes have resulted in cuts in defence spending in both Western and Eastern Europe. The aim of this search was to find out how the defence industry in Eastern Europe is adapting to the new political climate and to look in particular at how production facilities and military installations are now being used.

Within some areas of the pharmaceutical industry, a view persists that certain types of software packages are unique to marketing/sales departments and that there are other quite different systems peculiar to medical departments. Spreadsheets are associated with data processing by marketing personnel while it is supposed that a medical department uses only text retrieval software or database management systems. Such an assumption is not totally unjustified. The type of data and the manner in which they are to be processed dictate which software package is the most appropriate for a given situation. The bulk of the information handled by medical departments usually contains long strings of text whereas marketing data tends to be mostly numerical. Nevertheless, there are areas within both environments where it is expedient to consider alternative strategies for information management.

What is it that makes an Intranet work? How do you get members of the organisation to use it? With apologies to Estate Agents, the answer can probably be summed up as ‘Planning, Planning and Planning.’ That is, planning Who the Intranet is for, planning What it is intended to achieve; and planning How it is to be achieved.

Although their “best‐by” date (14 December 1990) has passed I can't really avoid some mention of The Library Charges (England and Wales) Regulations 1990. As is usual with government documents of this ilk, it follows a long‐standing tradition of unreadability. (Is this a ploy to discourage comment, one sometimes wonders?) Persevere with it, though, and a number of worrying proposals and implications reveal themselves. These include:

This paper is a practical introduction to searching for bibliographic information on engineering materials. It is not intended as a ‘how‐to’ guide; rather, its aim is to open a window on the databases that are available and illustrate the all‐encompassing nature of the study of materials science and technology. Databases in languages other than English, full‐text sources and purely numeric databanks are not included.

This is the tenth article on business and law (BSL) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles have appeared, one covering science, technology and medicine (STM) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 4 and the other covering social science, humanities, news and general (SSH) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 5. The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).