Search results

This forms the basic theme of this presentation. I am sure that this is evident to everybody who has any concern in this field at all. Most of the increasing power of microcomputer information retrieval systems comes from two developments: the developments of the information retrieval engine itself and the development of the user interface. The basic parameters of text retrieval remain much the same i.e. select your index terms, create an inverted file, provide very rapid search facilities and Boolean operands to limit your searches. The basic flaw in all text retrieval is the heavy investment in processing of the inverted file which makes most text retrieval unsatisfactory for transaction based processing such as stock control.

Ladies and gentlemen. Unlike our previous speaker I believe that the subject we are discussing this morning is so important that I intend to be perfectly serious and not attempt to entertain you with spurious humour.

Inmagic is a powerful and popular information storage and retrieval package from Head Computers that runs on a number of microcomputer systems. It is relatively easy to use for retrieval as the search language is based on plain English and the construction of search and output statements is based on English sentence construction.

A study of 1,696 loan requests satisfied by the British Library Lending Division showed that approximately 3% are for journals that used to be taken by the borrowing library but are not now being acquired. In the light of a survey of the way librarians in the UK make decisions on journal subscriptions and cancellations it appears that they very rarely replace subscriptions by interlibrary borrowing.

There are striking similarities between publicly-held government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and investor-owned public utilities. Each firm enjoys large scale economies that give a significant competitive advantage over other companies, possesses a dominant market position that it may be able to exploit to earn profits above competitive levels, and has a strong incentive to enter new markets when the life cycle of its core markets constrain its ability to increase profits. The recent behavior of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac indicates that the government must impose more stringent economic regulation on those GSEs in order to be sure that they achieve their public purposes.

The British Computer Society is a professional body representing the computing profession in the UK. Within the Society are a number of specialist groups, two of which are the Specialist Group for Developing Countries (Chairman, Dr Y. Paker) and the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (Chairman, Mr A.S. Pollitt). Informal contacts between members of these two groups have recognised:

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

I remember an occasion a few years ago when I needed some advice on questionnaire design and a colleague suggested that I get in touch with the Centre for Research on User Studies at Sheffield University. ‘But of course’, I replied, quick as a flash, not wishing to betray the fact that I had never heard of the Centre for Research on User Studies, still less that I had absolutely no idea just what was meant by a Centre for Research on User Studies.

Orbit adds new databases. The following new databases have been added to the Orbit Search Service:

Imagine a meeting among up to eighty people, all participating from different places in the world at a time convenient to them. Everything any participant of the meeting says is stored in computer memory, numbered and indexed so that people joining the meeting later can scan, skip or study the proceedings according to their particular interests. Comments on any issue are typed into a computer, and can be changed if the ‘speaker’ changes his or her mind or makes a mistake, then entered into the meeting record. For the duration of the conference, a computer keeps track of all the details such as who has read what, which discussion a user is making a comment on and so forth.