Search results

The phenomenon of a rapidly increasing volume of technical literature is well known. The cost and time involved in the intellectual indexing and classification of much of this literature is uneconomic. A lowering of indexing standards and free text searching is being forced upon us. Computer applications and techniques are being devised to turn cheap and crude input into an acceptable level of output. This paper describes the application of such a technique and evaluates the search results. The search was conducted on the Uniterm Index to US Chemical Patents, issued by Information for Industry Incorporated, known as IFI.

Communication is really the essence of information science. The best information service in the world has no meaning unless it is used. So the information scientists and librarians must communicate with their users and sell their service.

The ICI Pharmaceuticals Division is responsible for the discovery, development, production and marketing of drugs for human and veterinary medicine. The Division is highly research‐orientated with nearly 40 per cent of the employees engaged in research and development. The Division's total payroll is just over 4,000. Of these, 800 are graduates, nearly a third of whom have a doctorate.

This paper concentrates on the journal literature and the need to maintain a steady state library within ICI Pharmaceuticals Division. Reference is made to library management policy opposite the journal holdings and the reliance and importance of the supply of additional papers from the British Library Document Supply Centre. The paper includes an account of interlibrary lending changes and statistics covering the last thirty years.

The pharmaceutical industry is a high‐technology, high‐investment and high‐risk industry. It is also a highly competitive research‐based industry and a dedicated and demanding user of information. It follows that the industry is in the forefront of information science and information handling techniques which use the new information technologies, both with respect to handling internally generated data and externally published materials.

If you were a scholar at Merton College, Oxford, in mediaeval times, then for your BA degree you read the books down one side of the College Library and for your MA, the books on the other side. This was no mean task but those who accomplished it, had read virtually all the books that mattered. How different from today! The scholars of today suffer from the frustration described by the cliché ‘information explosion’. Both the providers of secondary services and information units work to cure this frustration. However, from the morass, some messages can be distilled.

Online use of external databases by Australian manufacturing companies has been growing rapidly since 1979. A survey of online users in some chemical and food companies found that in one‐third of the companies scientists and technologists performed searches. They did not search as many databases as the librarians in the other companies. They are, however, obtaining more information than before. All companies considered online searching cost effective, citing the rapid retrieval of information and the fact that searches need only be conducted when information is wanted, as evidence of cost‐effectiveness. Implications for manufacturing industry in Australia of current trends in the online industry are discussed and the potential of the new technology for equalising access to information among companies of all sizes is noted.

Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books, periodicals and reports appear at random: ‘The searcher is on a platform just above the belt and as the information material passes underneath he can pick up and read anything that he thinks might be of interest to him. You can imagine his frustration as he realises that for every item he takes time to examine, hundreds of others of possible interest to him have passed by’. Personality and environment will determine whether the individual can find an intelligent compromise between the extremes of neurosis induced by worrying about the material he is missing, or complacency with any system which produces one or two interesting items.

Coming into the information world with a background of scientific research, it is very easy to become confused not only by the jargon of information science but also by the seeming complexity of the information business. My reaction has been to apply the same guiding principle to the information business as I did to my field research, namely to search for the underlying pattern in the belief that the simplest explanation of natural phenomena is probably the right one. This approach has enabled me to take a fresh look at the fundamental purposes of the business in which this meeting is involved. The result may appear to be a statement of the obvious, but I make no apology for this; it is very often the obvious that is overlooked and can bear repeating.

The purpose of this paper is to provide some of the institutional and operational context of the University College Dublin (UCD) School of Information and Library Studies (SILS) prior to 2000.

The history of the School, its predecessor, and the context in which it operated after 1977 is briefly outlined, using contemporary published and in‐house archival evidence, from the 1960s to the late 1990s.

Areas of convergence with UK library information science (LIS) education are identified, but also some key differences regarding LIS workforce recruitment, and third level educational provision in Ireland. Factors which influenced the curricular development of the school are cited, in particular the role of the UK Institute of Information Scientists, founded in 1958.

The study is based on contemporary published sources, and a preliminary examination of SILS archival evidence which has survived from the decades in question. Valuable records concerning the education and training role of the Library Association of Ireland, founded in 1928, have been recently analysed by Ellis‐King. A proposal for research funding to enable further exploration has been submitted.

Owing to its focus on Ireland (ROI) the paper expands recent coverage of UK professional education for librarianship prior to 2000.