Search results

The search for an easily installed, practicable and inexpensive information retrieval system continues unabated. This is reflected in the Aslib Library almost daily by requests for advice on the feasibility of installing this or that system, or for information on what systems are available in Great Britain. Study of the following bibliography, which covers only a narrow selection of information retrieval systems, will reveal that much original thought has been producing concrete results in this country. In fact, one of the earliest references is to a paper given at the twenty‐second Aslib Conference in 1947 by W. E. Batten, in which he describes his development of an ‘aspect’ card system—more often referred to today as ‘Peek‐a‐boo’ or ‘feature’ cards. Mr C. W. Cleverdon's Cranfield project is also adding considerable knowledge on the use of various indexing methods, including Uniterm.

The chemist enjoys a richness of means of expression that is not to be found in all activities. When I say ‘enjoys’, of course, I do not imply that nature has been copiously generous and bountiful; the semantics of chemistry are as much a tribute to succeeding generations of chemists as is the theory and practice of the subject itself. To a great extent, I suppose, the nature of the subject demanded an exceedingly informative and definitive language, and progress would have been the slower without it. But few other activities, it seems to me, have been at such conscious and scholarly pains to provide and to cherish both vocabularies and notations for the recording and exposition of their aims and achievements. Musicians and mathematicians, for example, have both evolved highly specialized notations for the embodiment of their creative thought. Both notations are highly informative—in the Shannon sense; i.e. they are packed full of information and have very little redundancy. But neither vocation, it seems to me, is satisfactorily articulate in ordinary language; they are in much the same difficulty as the wine merchant, whose English can perhaps be enjoyed for its quaint whimsiness but not for its ability to convey a useful description to the palate.

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.

Professor W. Saunders: I have listened with very great interest to the proceedings of the last two and a half days and it seems that a picture has gradually built up during that time. We started with Mr. Arnold and Mr. Vickery setting the scene and an attempt by Mr Vickery to indicate some broad guidelines, and then we had what really amounts to a very important series of case studies from various points of view. We finished with snags and problems and a look at the manpower implications. And at the end of it all, I must say that I have a general impression that the state of this particular art that we are concerned with is not unlike that of our own discipline of information science, information studies, or at least what it was a year or two ago. As a professional educationalist I am concerned all the time that I'm attempting to teach library and information science with theoretical frameworks, with general principles. I am trying to find a framework, I am trying to find principles. What one does so often find is empirical evidence, ad hoc studies, and gradually one is conscious that all of these studies are becoming accommodated, becoming built in to some sort of emerg‐ing theoretical framework, not very hard yet, but on its way. And so it is, it seems to me, with this present problem, the problem which is the theme of this conference, except that we are still very much at the stage of ‘ad‐hoc‐ery’.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

The first Aslib Annual Lecture will be given at 6 p.m. on Wednesday 5th April at the Lecture theatre of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albermarle Street, London W1 by Dr W. E. Batten. The chair will be taken by Sir John Wolfenden, CBE, Vice‐Chancellor of the University of Reading.

Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books, periodicals and reports appear at random: ‘The searcher is on a platform just above the belt and as the information material passes underneath he can pick up and read anything that he thinks might be of interest to him. You can imagine his frustration as he realises that for every item he takes time to examine, hundreds of others of possible interest to him have passed by’. Personality and environment will determine whether the individual can find an intelligent compromise between the extremes of neurosis induced by worrying about the material he is missing, or complacency with any system which produces one or two interesting items.

I am going to describe in general terms a research project which has been established to explore some of the problems of the use of the literature, particularly in the field of Biomedical Engineering. Work started on 13th September 1965 in the Division of Biomedical Engineering of the National Institute for Medical Research (Hampstead Laboratories). The project is scheduled to last for three years, and like most research, consists of a number of overlapping stages. We have reached the stage now of having acquired sufficient equipment and data to start trying out some of our ideas.

AT the very outset of this paper it is necessary to make clear that it is not an attempt to compile an exhaustive bibliography of literature relating to special librarianship. Neither space nor time permit this. In fact, the references given can only claim to be a sample of the wealth of material on the subject and this paper is submitted in the hope that it will stimulate others to more scholarly efforts. Reference numbers throughout this paper refer to items in the ‘Select list of references to the literature of special librarianship’, section 2 onwards.

This review aims to present a speciality to the general documentationalist. It will contain too little chemistry for the chemist, and too little documentation for the documentalist. A reviewer cannot win!