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Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Dialog Information Services, Inc., Roger Summit is an expert in systems design and information systems and has experience in many areas of computer application. His pioneering work on development of the DIALOG system began in 1962 at the Lockheed Corporation. He was the designer and project manager for the first‐of‐its‐kind DIALOG online information retrieval system at its inception in the early 1960s and continued as Manager, Director, and is now President and CEO. He has received many awards, has held several positions in professional associations and advisory boards, and has published over 100 papers and journal articles.

The results of the DIALIB project are described. This three‐year experiment of on‐line bibliographic search in the public library had as major participants four public libraries in the San Francisco Bay area. Five other public libraries in other parts of the USA participated to a lesser extent. Evaluation results were obtained concerning the users of the system and their characteristics, the use of the data bases, and librarian reactions to the system. In addition, interesting data were gathered concerning the time and cost of on‐line search, both in a free and fee‐for‐service environment.

Some of you will remember a search system called Leadermart which was developed at Lehigh University in the early 1970s under the direction of Don Hillman. Don viewed Leadermart as one of the few early systems designed for end users rather than information specialists. He attributed its lack of acceptance by information specialists to the marriage of librarians to Boolean searching and their unwillingness to try anything new. Leadermart, however, was not particularly popular with end users either. In my opinion Leadermart's lack of acceptance was primarily due to the quality of results it produced. Also this is important in evaluating current ‘expert systems’ approaches to searching. With Leadermart, if you didn't get good results you had no way of knowing how to change your request to improve the results. Some people pursuing the end user today feel simpler interfaces of the Leadermart type are the single answer to capturing this vast market. In what follows I hope to show that the problem is substantially more complex than suggested by this simple solution.

Information retrieval as a concept or a technique is not generally recognized beyond the profession as a societal need or even necessarily as a useful tool. It has often been said of online that it is an expensive way of doing much faster what you could otherwise do manually in a library. I have long been perplexed by this misunderstanding of the power of online. Let me offer one possible explanation.

From diverse users' points of view, contextual frameworks are elaborated for the nature of the information technology, the information universe, and the information search. Within these conceptual parameters, established theories on search strategy are reviewed and cognitive models of information‐seeking are highlighted. Future directions for research on users' search processes are discussed in terms of the role for online retrieval in the future information environment.

Downloading and uploading offer labour‐saving advantages and are now accepted as useful options in online searching. All aspects are here considered, from recent technical advances, applications and legal attitudes. There is also a review of current software for downloading. Recent developments mean a trend to higher internal memory and storage capacity, and greater transmission speeds. Packages now offer access to more than one host, give maximum assistance to the user without being menu‐driven and incorporate the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Disadvantages are in the length of time involved in the process and the fact that the legal issue of copyright has not yet been finalised. Database producers have turned to licensing under contract law, but there is still need to rely on user ethics, and the need for a standard permissions form is highlighted.

Knowledge Industry, ASIS team up to produce database user service. Knowledge Industry Publications Inc., and the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) have joined forces to create a four‐faceted Database User Service. The new service will provide an annual print directory, an online directory, a monthly newsletter, and a database hotline.

Analyses of the on‐line search market have been subject to several serious misconceptions concerning the service retailers, i.e. the information search services (ISS). One of the consequences of this is that the ISS growth potential has been overestimated. The paper points out that, even if there is an overall growth in on‐line searching, the individual ISSs will typically show a stagnation after just over two years. Since the average operative age of an ISS is about two years, it is possible that even the aggregate growth in the next few years will be less than the present. This decline in growth rate is not inevitable but likely.

The following paper discusses the costs involved when a library adds online bibliographic searching to the services it offers to its patrons. Reviewed in the study are total online costs, comparisons of manual and online search results, various pricing policy alternatives, and some probable future changes for online bibliographic searching.

New Derwent representation in North America. Effective mid July, 1981, Derwent Publications Limited will be represented in the USA and Canada by a new company: