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It is, of course, unusual for an author to begin his paper with acknowledgements but I have elected to do so because, although this paper has only one named author, it is in fact the work of a group of people, namely the Committee of the Aslib Co‐ordinate Indexing Group. The idea for the project, the style and format of the questionnaire and the basic method of processing were all arrived at in committee. My contribution was to distribute the questionnaires, process the returns and to agree to publish the results. I offer to the other members of the Committee my sincere thanks for all the work that went into this project.

In the current atmosphere of concern with costs, both of need to reduce expenditure and also to justify that which is being spent, it would seem to be a good idea to try to determine the cost‐benefits of some of the services offered by an information unit, a view expressed by Mr C. G. Giles at the 1972 Aslib Annual Conference. Kramer covered one aspect by estimating how much time non‐library staff spent on searching and comparing this with that spent by library staff. Unfortunately he was forced to rely on pure estimates, no actual tests being carried out. If, however, one looks at the current awareness bulletin aspect of a service it would seem possible to obtain a more exact measure by determining how many journals the staff themselves would need to scan if no current awareness bulletin were available. Accordingly, it was decided to try to obtain this information by means of a questionnaire survey of the readers of one of British Petroleum's technical information bulletins.

This paper is concerned with the purpose of functions of abstracting and abstracting services, touching on indexing only in relation to the indexing of abstracts, and concentrating mainly on ‘hard copy’ printed services. It is presented from the viewpoint of both a producer of an abstracting service and a user of other peoples' abstracting services.

Being able to show a benefit for information services to balance against their cost, and knowing what criteria to use for choice among the options for their provision—these are needs which loom large for information people. This paper reviews what techniques have been found useful, and tries to show how valuations from the clients of information services can be brought into the equation.

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.

The title raises at least four questions:

The subject of this paper is two‐fold, in that I have been asked to consider the availability and the practical use of software packages for information retrieval with a microcomputer. From the outset, it can be said that the microcomputer is capable of handling many aspects of library work, not least information retrieval. This is particularly true now that most of the earlier constraints on memory and storage capacity have been overcome. The widespread availability of hard disks capable of storing up to 100 million characters, and the advent of the faster and more powerful 16‐bit systems have already brought the microcomputer to a point where it can rival some minicomputer systems: promised technical developments suggest that this progress will continue in the forseeable future.

Planningof any kind can be motivated by a pressing practical problem which has to be solved—for example, an increasing number of people may have to be housed in the same area; or by a long‐term idealistic vision; or by both (the idealist seeing the long‐term implications of an immediate problem). In short‐term planning, the danger exists that the more technical problems may be solved, without attention to their implications for human beings; to take my housing example, higher and higher flats may be built, without considering the possible effects (e.g. the effect on social groupings). In long‐term planning, Utopian or ideological blueprints may be produced.

When I was asked to give this paper, I was unaware that the title of the Conference was ‘Words and Meaning’. While I warmly welcome this theme, I must admit that it gave me rather abruptly a feeling of nervous awareness of the problem of associating words with meaning. I began to read things twice and look for alternative interpretations; and when I received the registration form for this conference I experienced a feeling of near panic when I was asked to answer the question ‘Will you be eating lunch on Wednesday the 12th of April?’ How difficult it is to verbalize concepts, especially in subject areas such as ours which contain so many abstract notions that one is sometimes guilty of trying to avoid being too precise. I am reminded of the professor, who when asked the question ‘What is electricity?’ replied ‘It all depends what you mean by “is”.’

In this paper the value of secondary information services is discussed from the viewpoints of service‐providers and a small group of scientists as users of current awareness services. A selection of earlier studies on the subject is briefly reviewed. The exchange value of secondary information services is demonstrated from the viewpoint of a service‐provider. Users usually see the services in the light of their value‐in‐use though the services often have exchange values as well. In conclusions the problem of assessing the value of secondary information is discussed.