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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.

ARIES, PHILIPPE. Un lexique par phrases descriptives. Bulletin de l'A.I.D., vol. 5, no. 4, 1966, p. 99–101.

This approach to co‐operation between libraries and information centres considers the use of switching languages. These can be employed in situations where several centres with a common interest wish to co‐operate in the collection and indexing of information bearing material, yet prefer to retain the systems often developed and tailored to their individual requirements. To facilitate the exchange of subject information between the centres, a series of concordances are constructed between each of the indexing languages and the switching language. Thus the translation of subject indexing expressed in the indexing languages of the other participating centres can then proceed automatically. Among the possible benefits are the economic saving due to the sharing by several centres in the collection and indexing of material, and the increase in coverage enjoyed by all the centres. To determine the feasibility of such devices, a switching language, the Intermediate Lexicon for Information Science, has been developed and is under test at the Polytechnic of North London School of Librarianship. The work is supported by a grant from British Library Research and Development Department.

In 1966, the Government's Office for Scientific and Technical Information offered to increase its support for Aslib specifically to encourage it to build up a viable research department, to undertake systematic programmes of research into scientific and technical information systems, and to provide consultancy services in this field. In response to an appeal from Lord Kings Norton, then President of Aslib, some twenty member organizations agreed to share with OSTI the cost of this new development during its first three years. The three‐year development period ended in December 1969, and an account of the progress made during this period was published in Aslib Proceedings for May 1970.

My research over the last few years has been concerned with the use of automatically‐obtained keyword classifications for information retrieval. Such a classification can be described as a thesaurus, but those classifications which have been most successful in my experiments do not resemble the normal kind of manually‐constructed thesaurus, and the bases on which automatic and manual thesauri are constructed are quite different. Human beings explicitly consider the meanings of words in grouping them, but word meanings are not accessible to computers. Automatic word classification is therefore based on information about the distributional behaviour of words in documents, on the assumption that words which behave in similar ways in terms of document occurrences are semantically related. That is to say, groups of words which are based on the statistical associations of their members in documents should reflect their meaning relations, at least sufficiently for the purposes of retrieval.

Aslib Library holds a collection of thesauri, subject headings and classification schemes which are used to answer members' enquiries about the existence of schemes for particular subject fields and many of which are available on loan for two weeks. Our policy is to acquire all significant English language publications and bilingual or multilingual items with English as one of the languages.