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A strong definition of aboutness and a theory of its role in information retrieval systems have not been developed. Such a definition and theory may be extracted from the work of T. A. van Dijk. This paper discusses some of the implications of van Dijk's work for bibliographic classification theory. Two kinds of intertextuality are identified: that between documents classified in the same class of the same classification system; and that between the classification system as a text in its own right and the documents that are classified by it. Consideration of the two kinds of intertextuality leads to an investigation of the linguistic/cognitive processes that have been called the ‘translation’ of a document topic into a classificatory language. A descriptive model of the cognitive process of classifying documents is presented. The general design of an empirical study to test this model is suggested, and some problems of implementing such a study are briefly identified. It is concluded that further investigation of the relationships between text linguistics and classification theory and practice might reveal other fruitful intersections between the two fields.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

The recent report for the Commission of the European Communities on current multilingual activities in the field of scientific and technical information and the 1977 conference on the same theme both included substantial sections on operational and experimental machine translation systems, and in its Plan of action the Commission announced its intention to introduce an operational machine translation system into its departments and to support research projects on machine translation. This revival of interest in machine translation may well have surprised many who have tended in recent years to dismiss it as one of the ‘great failures’ of scientific research. What has changed? What grounds are there now for optimism about machine translation? Or is it still a ‘utopian dream’ ? The aim of this review is to give a general picture of present activities which may help readers to reach their own conclusions. After a sketch of the historical background and general aims (section I), it describes operational and experimental machine translation systems of recent years (section II), it continues with descriptions of interactive (man‐machine) systems and machine‐assisted translation (section III), (and it concludes with a general survey of present problems and future possibilities section IV).

The common view of the ‘aboutness’ of documents is that the index entries (or classifications) assigned to documents represent or indicate in some way the total contents of documents; indexing and classifying are seen as processes involving the ‘summarization’ of the texts of documents. In this paper an alternative concept of ‘aboutness’ is proposed based on an analysis of the linguistic organization of texts, which is felt to be more appropriate in many indexing environments (particularly in non‐specialized libraries and information services) and which has implications for the evaluation of the effectiveness of indexing systems.

The issue of language as a barrier to the work of librarians in post‐war Britain was pinpointed in the report of the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference in 1948. Concerning the work of information officers, it stated:

Given the demonstrable deficiencies of indexing and indexes as means of document analysis and selection, a system is proposed which matches uncondensed and unanalysed texts with search requests and semantically equivalent transformations derived from them. The method utilizes the results of machine translation and structural linguistics in syntactic analysis and in semantic classification with adaptations to the requirements of a document selection system.

In acknowledgement of the key position of the concept of ‘aboutness’ in the indexing process, the definition of the term ‘about’ seems to have become the crux of the discussion about indexing systems. ‘About’ is not a simple and self‐evident term in the process of indexing, and the earlier view of a one‐sided relationship between the term and the contents of documents is called into question. A new definition of ‘about’ is needed and a short review of recent contributions on the subject will illustrate some of the suggestions put forward for operational and functional definitions of the ‘aboutness’ of documents. The problem has also been tackled through experiments on alternative design criteria for indexing schemes (Swift et al).

Knowledge, as represented in the history of ideas and in studies of knowledge paradigms and bibliographical structures, appears coherent and rationalistic. By examining the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, this view is discussed. Special attention is given, in any cultural or scientific interpretation of an age, to the need to get behind the dominant or hegemonistic body of institutionalized and documented knowledge. We need to investigate the assumptions and underlying influences on the ways in which discourse embody and shape meanings. What preconceptually underpins, we might ask, what people know as knowledge. Important links between language, truth and power are examined, and these are major concerns for Foucault. It is argued that Foucault's ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ insights into the nature of warranted knowledge are crucial for an understanding of the communication process and the knowledge‐organizing activities of information specialists.

The literature of the information needs and uses of humanities scholars in universities is reviewed, using, in the main, material published from 1970 onwards. The areas covered include definitions of humanities, the way humanities scholars work and the materials of their research; secondary services; computers and new technology; the role of libraries and library services and comparisons between humanities and other disciplines. The review ends with a brief assessment of the state of the art; an outline of some unanswered questions and some consideration of the future of humanities. The main conclusions drawn are that the literature is piecemeal, at times confusing, and that progress in providing guidelines to librarians on the basis of systematic enquiry is slow.

After considering the search process and functions of index entries, a classification of entry types is offered, based on index term context, predominant term order, and between‐term function words. Then a multiple entry generation scheme is described, comprising rules for term manipulation, input and output. After discussing access points and cross reference measures, a preliminary linguistic analysis is given, showing links with psycholinguistics. The study forms the basis of a current laboratory investigation (EPSILON) into a number of entry types.