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The purpose of this article is to examine the hypothesis that ‘classified schedules of features, with specific/generic relationships, are of value in feature‐card indexing.’ The data in support of the hypothesis has been drawn from experience gained in the construction and use of a feature‐card index designed for anaesthetics literature. This index has already been described in detail elsewhere; but to make this article comprehensible it is necessary after outlining the problem of the information explosion in medicine, and in anaesthesia in particular, to give a brief account of the development and structure of this feature‐card index.

Feature card systems are particularly suited to dealing with information pertaining to drugs, diseases, anatomical terms and biological species, for which elements of vocabulary control and hierarchy are useful for information retrieval. In the biomedical field some feature card systems in the UK have been described in some detail; the McClelland system for anaesthesia literature used a deck of about 500 feature cards of 5,000‐hole capacity, and the Project FAIR index to biomedical engineering literature now has sis decks of 1,280 hole capacity feature cards each containing around 300 cards.

A recent Aslib Research Department Project which investigated problems relating to the construction of thesauri for indexing and retrieval ended with two publications, to be published shortly by Aslib. During the project, extensive use was made of the thesauri held in the Aslib Library, and information about them was tabulated. Information concerning openly available thesauri is displayed below.

Faced with an unprecented growth in available knowledge it is now almost impossible for the doctor, whether in clinical practice or engaged in research, to keep abreast of current developments. Both the research worker and the clinician would benefit greatly from ready access to papers dealing with their areas of interest. Most have experienced the sense of frustration that arises from knowing that somewhere one has seen a piece of information, but one does not quite know where. The human brain as a storage system is poorly organized and as a retrieval system is chancy at best (Ann. Int. Med., 1967). What is needed is some aid to memory. To obtain an estimate of the magnitude of one aspect of the problem I reviewed papers I published in 1965–66. The total number was thirty‐two, the average number of references per paper nineteen and the total number of references cited was 595. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg and represents only a fraction of the references to be reviewed. It was obvious that some form of automated literature retrieval system was desirable if not essential, and it is the purpose of the present paper to report my experiences of such a system.

IThis review has been sponsored by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information and the end product of the complete research will be a thesaurus of management terms. Parallel research in the business management area and also supported by OSTI is being conducted by David Dews, Librarian of the Manchester Business School, and K. D. C. Vernon, Librarian of the London Graduate School of Business Studies. As Mr Vernon is at present engaged in the construction of a faceted classification scheme for management, this investigation has concentrated on the possibility of utilizing faceted techniques to construct such a thesaurus.

THE appointment of a Vice‐Chancellor for the University of Warwick was announced towards the end of 1962. The Registrar was next appointed and then the librarian, who arrived on the scene in July 1963. The building which is described in this article was envisaged in a programme handed to the architects, Messrs. Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, early in December 1963.