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Durham University Library's first automation venture arose from the decision in 1967 to establish a Short Loan Collection of books and periodicals in heavy demand. The collection, divided between the Main Library and the at present separate Science Section, may eventually grow to something like 10, 000 items. While it was initially to be drawn in large part from existing stock, and administration was to be integrated with the library's other operations, the project presented an opportunity to try new methods.

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well‐defined discourse‐level structure, which is revealed by lexical clues. Two methods of detecting the structure automatically are presented: (i) a Bayesian probabilistic analysis; and (ii) a neural network model. Both methods show promise in preliminary implementations. A study of users' oral problem statements indicates that they are not amenable to the same kind of processing. However, from in‐depth interviews with users and search intermediaries, the following conclusions are drawn: (i) the notion of a generic research script is meaningful to both users and intermediaries as a high‐level description of situation; (ii) a researcher's position in the script is a predictor of the relevance of documents; and (iii) currently, intermediaries can make very little use of situational information. The implications of these findings for system design are discussed, and a system structure presented to serve as a framework for future experimental work on the factors identified in this paper. The design calls for a dialogue with the user on his or her position in a research script and incorporates features permitting discourse‐level components of abstracts to be specified in search strategies.

The following paper discusses the costs involved when a library adds online bibliographic searching to the services it offers to its patrons. Reviewed in the study are total online costs, comparisons of manual and online search results, various pricing policy alternatives, and some probable future changes for online bibliographic searching.

In The Changing Body (Cambridge University Press and NBER, 2011), we presented a series of estimates showing the number of calories available for human consumption in England and Wales at various points in time between 1700 and 1909/1913. We now seek to correct an error in our original figures and to compare the corrected figures with those published by a range of other authors. We also include new estimates showing the calorific value of meat and grains imported from Ireland. Disagreements with other authors reflect differences over a number of issues, including the amount of land under cultivation, the extraction and wastage rates for cereals and pulses and the number of animals supplying meat and dairy products. We consider recent attempts to achieve a compromise between these estimates and challenge claims that there was a dramatic reduction in either food availability or the average height of birth cohorts in the late-eighteenth century.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new method of information retrieval by man‐machine interaction. The dialogue supported has more symmetry than most interactive computer systems in that the machine forms an image (rather as a man does) of the view of the human enquirer, without requiring him to ask a precise question, and responds with references according to its image. Initial tests with a prototype program indicate that a performance equal to that obtainable from a more conventional on‐line retrieval system is possible without obliging the user to formulate his query.

A discussion of the nature of information is undertaken by bringing together the views of Brenda Dervin and Karl Popper on subjectivity and objectivity as these relate to information use. It is shown that while they take different routes, they come to similar positions. From the historical development of information science, some work on the problem of information management is selected to show the relevance of the philosophical discussion to the practice. The overall purpose is to establish information as an existent with which librarians and information scientists work in a peculiar way, resulting in the acts of classification and indexing as applied in information retrieval systems (or libraries). The nature of information and its relationship to human activities is seen to be fundamental to the practice and principles of the profession as well as the science. I use the word ‘librarian’ to indicate the intermediary since the word ‘intermediary’ can carry the meaning ‘human and/or non‐human’. Here we are concerned with human problems.

Knowledge of conversation theory and speech acts assists us to understand how people search for information. Dialogue embodies meanings and intentionalities, and represents epistemic inquiry. There are implications for the information‐processing model of cognitive psychology. Question formulation (erotetics) and turn‐taking play important roles in eliciting information, while discourse analysis furnishes us with information about people's categorising, recall, and semantic skills.

This article presents a theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘subject’ or ‘subject matter’ in library and information science. Most conceptions of ‘subject’ in the literature are not explicit but implicit. Various indexing and classification theories, including automatic indexing and citation indexing, have their own more or less implicit concepts of subject. This fact puts the emphasis on making the implicit theories of ‘subject matter’ explicit as the first step. A very close connection exists between what subjects are, and how we are to know them. Those researchers who place the subjects in the minds of the users have a conception of ‘subject’ different to that possessed by those who regard the subject as a fixed property of the documents. The key to the definition of the concept of ‘subject’ lies in the epistemological investigation of how we are going to know what we need to know about documents in order to describe them in a way which facilitates information retrieval. The second step therefore is an analysis of the implicit epistemological conceptions in the major existing conceptions of ‘subject’. The different conceptions of ‘subject’ can therefore be classified into epistemological positions, e.g. ‘subjective idealism’ (or the empiric/positivistic viewpoint), ‘objective idealism’ (the rationalistic viewpoint), ‘pragmatism’ and ‘materialism/ realism’. The third and final step is to propose a new theory of subject matter based on an explicit theory of knowledge. In this article this is done from the point of view of a realistic/materialistic epistemology. From this standpoint the subject of a document is defined as the epistemological potentials of that document.