Search

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the content and format of seven machine-readable bibliographic data bases: Chemical Abstracts Service Condensates, Chemical and Biological Activities, and Polymer Science and Technology, Biosciences Information Service's BA Previews including Biological Abstracts and BioResearch Index, Institute for Science Information Source Tape, and Engineering Index COMPENDEX. Selected issue test tapes of each data base were printed and checked for the types of data that were contained in the issue and the methods in which the data were formatted. This paper compares the physical formats of the tapes and describes the varied treatments given to such data elements as authors, titles, abstracts, etc. Comparison of data bases requires common use of terms. All terms are defined at the beginning of the paper. The authors found great discrepancies in the presentation of essentially similar bibliographic data, and they offer some suggestions for mitigating the discrepancies by use of standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The materials of a library, exemplified by books, have traditionally been viewed as presenting two aspects involving two distinct problems: their description and control as unique items and their treatment as sources of information on various subjects. But this view has tended to overlook a third fundamental aspect: that of the works which are embodied in the materials and in turn embody the information. The paper discusses the meaning of this aspect and its implications in the control of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey of the bibliographic data bases used in satisfying some of the information requests received by the Bell Laboratories literature searching service was made. Fifty-eight information sources were used 305 times; four major sources accounted for 155 (51 %) of the uses. Approximately half of the literature searches performed used only one data base; about 70% used either one or two. Machine searching is growing and is becoming more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Geological Survey's extensive bibliographic contributions to the earth sciences began in 1887 with the publication of the Bibliography of North American Geology. The back-of-the-book indexing system for this and other serials is a partially controlled, 3-level hierarchical scheme of subject headings. Beginning in 1962 computer compatible electronic typesetting equipment was used for bibliographic and abstracts publications with an eye to eventual automated storage and retrieval. A search for an existing retrieval system that could be integrated with the existing publishing program without re-indexing and would also meet the myriad operational and hardware constraints of the Survey's computer center resulted, in 1968, in the adoption of GIPSY (Generalized Information Processing System) developed by the University of Oklahoma. A particularly noteworthy feature of GIPSY is the ability to search variable-field, variable-length records for words, word stems, and prefixes or suffixes. Moreover, retrieved records may be printed in pre-defined formats or formatted is fixed-field, fixed-length records for direct input to other programs, which facilitates exchange of data with other systems. Initial user resistance to automated literature searching was partially overcome by reducing the unwieldy printout to conventional page size and presenting the output in a bibliographic format very similar to the published bibliographies. It was generally felt by the users that more than 10 years of coverage are needed in order for earth scientists to consider that their searches have a reasonable chance of being useful because of the relatively long half-life of geologic literature. Searches of abstracts provided better recall of relevant documents than search of index terms alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a bibliography of documentation. It involves abstracts of various books and articles. One of the abstracts provides that the concept of documentation is based upon the following procedures: (1) analyzing the document for subject content, (2) characterizing the document from its content of ideas, (3) normalizing the ideas to the area of documentation under consideration, (4) precise localization of information by multiplying points of view and by characterizing ideas, and (5) hierarchical classification of ideas.

The article discusses the fundamentals of bibliographic organizations. Most writers in this field agree that they are interested in information and not all nature. However, no clear cut definition of either term exists. The bibliographic organizer is concerned with all nature as the basic source of the materials from which he draws. In particular, he is concerned with the unique identification of all of its elements. The boundary of a continuous subset of nature is that subset of elements that completely enclose the subset of nature.

This article focuses on various abstracts related to documentation. The article "Kostenersparnis in der Dokumentation," by Sigrid Barlen, states that the financial success of documentation activities is difficulty to assess. Consequently it is useful to calculate the costs incurred by an information center to obtain the true financial requirements and to bring about consistency in operating practices. The article "Bibliography on the Mechanization of Information Retrieval," by Charles B. Bourne, presents a near-print list of some 400 references emphasizing mechanization techniques, coding, input-output, and mechanical translation.

The article focuses on the evaluation of methods for systematically abbreviating English words. The method of evaluation used was to determine the conditions under which and to what extent each of the methods preserved the distinctions which exist between the words in the data base. If we speak in terms of the type-token distinction between word forms and word occurrences, then the abbreviation methods were judged on the basis of the size of the ratio between word types and word tokens after a method was applied.