Search results

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

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.

This article reviews the state of the art in automatic indexing, that is, automatic techniques for analysing and characterising documents, for manipulating their descriptions in searching, and for generating the index language used for these purposes. It concentrates on the literature from 1968 to 1973. Section I defines the topic and its context. Sections II and III consider work in syntax and semantics respectively in detail. Section IV comments on ‘indirect’ indexing. Section V briefly surveys operating mechanized systems. In Section VI major experiments in automatic indexing are reviewed, and Section VII attempts an overall conclusion on the current state of automatic indexing techniques.

The requirements for producing a current database, Chemical Business NewsBase (CBNB), updated weekly, including the data content, are briefly outlined. The use of BASIS for data capture, validation, manipulation, and output of the data is discussed with particular reference to the features which support the human element in production and which are used for quality control. Routine production and distribution of CBNB are further examined.

This paper describes part of the Chemical Abstracts Condensate Evaluation (CAC Evaluation) carried out by the United Kingdom Chemical Information Service (UKCIS).

The choice of a suitable data base for providing an information service is governed by factors of coverage, performance, and cost. The cost of the data base to subscribers is a known quantity, and the coverage is decided by the data base producers. This paper describes an investigation into the relative performance of the four major Chemical Abstracts Service magnetic tape data‐bases, Chemical Titles (CT), which contains the titles of citations only, Chemical Abstracts Condensates (CAC), which contains titles enriched with keyword phrases, Chemical‐Biological Activities (CBAC), and Polymer Science and Technology (POST), both of which contain full digests in addition to titles. The performance was measured in terms of the relative currency of the four data‐bases, and the retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against them. Fifty questions from industrial and government research organizations were used in the experiment. Search profiles corresponding to these questions were constructed for searching against each data‐base, output was assessed for relevance by users, and profile performance figures (precision and recall ratios) were calculated for each profile. The overall retrieval efficiency of profiles searched against data‐bases containing titles only, titles‐plus‐keywords, and titles‐plus‐digests, was calculated, and these results are presented.

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.