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.
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:
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