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The roots of Dialog Information Services are traced with a description of the origins and past activities. Discussion describes the organizational groupings which have responsibility for all the services and products offered. The hardware, software and telecommunications resources of the company are also considered. Information about the Dialog customer is mentioned. There have been a number of recent developments such as Dialog Version 2, Dialnet enhancements, ‘Report’ feature, gateway services and menu‐driven files. Dialog also expects future developments to include access to our electronic mail service, more full‐text files, repackaging of the service for use by professionals, personal computer software packages for telecommunications, and more new databases to round out the current offerings.

The directory includes only the major bibliographic databases that are offered by more than one online service; ‘sole suppliers’ have not been listed as no comparison is possible.

This paper examines results of a survey concerning online users' attitudes and perceptions of the ease of use and other factors of Lockheed's DIALOG and SDC's ORBIT command or query languages. Analysis of the results shows that, along with such factors as the number of files and system first learned, perceived ease of use of a command language is an important consideration in user preference for a given system, and therefore is one of the important reasons why most users prefer DIALOG.

This paper describes the availability of databases held on DIALOG, ESA‐IRS and DATA‐STAR. In Section 2 particular attention will be paid to database overlap between hosts. Section 3 will consider the differences between prices and will analyse the relation between prices and database contents. Section 4 analyses the fixed costs of local investments and the variable added costs of online transmission.

NEXIS and DIALOG both offer full‐text online coverage of the magazine Business Week, while ABI/INFORM Global Edition on CDROM provides abstracts. A comparison of all three systems shows mixed results. DIALOG had the most records for two narrow topics, while NEXIS was superior when the search topic was broader. Although retrieving fewer items than the full‐text systems, ABI/INFORM had a considerable amount of material. With the difficulty of choosing between costly full‐text systems, settling for abstracts on CDROM may be an alternative for the researcher.

The decade of the 1970s witnessed a phenomenon in the growing acceptance of online database searching and its integration with more traditional library services. Although accurate statistics on the extent of online use by type of library remain scarce, an estimated 400 academic libraries used online search systems in 1977. Martha Williams' annual surveys of online search volume in the United States and Canada demonstrate an explosive growth in five years from one million searches in 1975 to almost four million in 1980. Of the more than 500 data‐bases available publicly, over 165 are accessible through the big three “supermarket” search services — BRS, Lockheed, and SDC.

The total costs of online searching in four hosts — Data‐Star, Dialog, ESA‐IRS, and STN International — were evaluated in a study conducted at the Information Service of the Technical Research Centre of Finland. To make the comparison as comprehensive as possible, six databases were used, all of which are available in the four hosts. The databases were BIOSIS, Chemical Abstracts, COMPENDEX, FSTA, INSPEC, and NTIS. The costs were analysed separately for the searching phase and for the output phase. For the searching phase, the costs were calculated as a function of the connect time. For the output phase, the cost per displayed record were estimated. The estimates were based on measured output time. The telecommunication costs were included, but their share is shown separately. The effect of transmission rate on the connect time and telecommunication costs was also studied by using two different speeds, 1200 baud and 2400 baud. The results of the study are presented in graphs and in tables. The graphs show the conducted values of the various cost components (connect time, output, telecommunication) for the four hosts and six databases. The comparisons of total costs for various types of online searches are presented in tables. At 1200 baud, the most economic searches are usually made in ESA‐IRS. Data‐Star, Dialog and STN are competitive only in very short searches, and at rather high levels of output. At 2400 baud, the competitiveness of Data‐Star, Dialog and STN is much better, especially if a medium‐length format is used for output. Data‐Star and STN which do not have a data network of their own suffer from higher telecommunication costs.

Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes are a type of controlled vocabulary used by business searchers when searching for corporate and industry data. Two four‐digit versions of the SIC coding scheme are used on business databases available through Dialog. Some Dialog database producers have opted to create a variation of the codes for use in their products. With the impending eight‐digit SIC coding scheme from Dun and Bradstreet, it will become increasingly difficult for the Dialog searcher to know which version of the codes to use when searching a particular database. A survey of the use of SIC codes in business databases on Dialog was undertaken. This paper presents the findings of this survey.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

Online database revenues up 28% Amidon/Litman, a consulting and research firm out of New Jersey, has released a report that states online revenues for 1988 were $1.03 billion for eight business‐to‐business markets. This represents a 28% growth rate over 1987, according to the report Vertical Information Markets & Company Profiles: A Dance Card. It contains lists of interesting information products and players suitable for acquisition, joint venture and product development.