The Use of Extracts in Information Services.

It is the purpose of this paper to explore the use of extracts by reporting the results of a survey of the current acceptability and use of extracts, by a literature review and by suggesting guidelines for selecting extract material. The survey shows that extracts are currently being used in information services, especially for current awareness. Most consider extracting a time-saver. The methods for selecting material from a document are not well defined. A search of the literature produced only thirteen documents which deal with manually produced extracts. As reported in the literature, materials extracted include the author summaries, first and/or last paragraphs, selected sentences, the first page, and material selected by subject specialists from the entire text. The value of extracts as measured by whether they lead the user to relevant documents was experimentally demonstrated. The purpose of the guidelines is to help the librarian and information specialist produce an informative extract. There was no substantial evidence that extracting is less costly than abstracting. The main criteria considers whether to spend the money to resay what the author has said or get a better understanding of the paper and use the author's words to describe it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]