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At the time of investigating the amount of noise in a peek‐a‐boo co‐ordinate indexing system, I produced some peripheral data concerning punching errors and would like to comment on the figure of 27 per cent which was quoted in the published results. This figure, however, was only a percentage of total noise and the actual percentage of punching errors was 089 per cent which was calculated on the basis that sixty‐six erroneously punched documents were retrieved out of a total retrieval figure in one hundred searches of 1,781 documents. Now this 089 per cent figure does not mean that in the punching of every hundred documents there was only approximately one error, what it does mean is that in one hundred searches only about one error per hundred retrieved documents was revealed.

Traditionally special libraries have developed collections of technical literature concerned with the products that are manufactured by the company or organization with which the library is associated. Until recently, if one went into the average special library—if there is such a thing—one would have found very few publications on the shelves on how to manage the company, how to evaluate the personnel and how to market the products. This restriction of special libraries to primarily technical information is in my view a short‐sighted approach, as many of the important decisions which will affect, for example, research and development environment will be taken outside the r and d environment. It is obviously important for the library to ensure that a company is effectively managed so that such decisions prove to be correct. Librarians too rarely seem to be involved with internally generated information, and this also seems to militate against the concept of the special library as the memory of the firm. The librarian's skills of handling and disseminating information could also be applied to wider areas such as desk market research and personnel records.

IThis review has been sponsored by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information and the end product of the complete research will be a thesaurus of management terms. Parallel research in the business management area and also supported by OSTI is being conducted by David Dews, Librarian of the Manchester Business School, and K. D. C. Vernon, Librarian of the London Graduate School of Business Studies. As Mr Vernon is at present engaged in the construction of a faceted classification scheme for management, this investigation has concentrated on the possibility of utilizing faceted techniques to construct such a thesaurus.

This conference session is to be devoted to the value of information as seen by the customer, but ironically all of the session's speakers are in fact intermediaries in the information transfer process. We cannot therefore speak from first hand experience, but what we can do is to talk about our experience based on the systematic analysis of customer contacts.

A study of the number of irrelevant documents retrieved in a co‐ordinate indexing system that does not employ either roles or links. These tests were based on one hundred actual inquiries received in the library and therefore an evaluation of recall efficiency is not included. Over half the inquiries produced no noise, but the mean average percentage noise figure was approximately 33 per cent based on a total average retrieval figure of eighteen documents per search. Details of the size of the indexed collection, methods of indexing, and an analysis of the reasons for the retrieval of irrelevant documents are discussed, thereby providing information officers who are thinking of installing such a system with some evidence on which to base a decision as to whether or not to utilize these devices.

I first met punched feature cards in 1956. I was working as an assistant to E. G. Brisch, whose company classified the materials and components used in industry. His method brought similar articles together, both notionally in classified codebooks and practically when the classified items were stored in their code number order. The result was an excellent aid to variety reduction, standardization, and stock control. E. G. gave me a good grounding in analytical classification; but his office held other secrets too. One of these was a sort of punched card representing a property or quality, not an object or event as with all other punched cards I had met. On these other cards, notched or slotted for hand‐sorting with needles, or punched and verified in thousands for reading by machine, the holes stood for characteristics possessed by the item concerned. The new cards were different. Since they represented properties, the items possessing these had to be shown by the holes, and so they were. E. G. named them ‘Brisch‐a‐boo’: this I found was his special variant of ‘peek‐a‐boo’, a title by which they are still occasionally known. To stack some of them in exact register with each other is to find, as a set of through holes in numbered positions, the reference numbers of all the items recorded on them which have the qualities concerned.

September TUE.8. Aslib Chemical Group/Technical Translation Group Joint Evening Meeting. ‘Technical translations: meeting the need’, by Paul H. Scott (BP Research). Aslib. 5 for 5.30 p.m.

Explores how the national aspiration of “universal access” to information compares with what is actually happening in practice. Outlines some of the issues which emerge in the debate over access versus holdings, and presents some data from Cranfield University to shed some light on it.

Explores how the national aspiration of “universal access” to information compares with what is actually happening in practice. Outlines some of the issues which emerge in the debate over access versus holdings, and presents some data from Cranfield University to shed some light on it.