bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
AN OUTSIDER INSIDE INFORMATION: USA 1961–1962
Authors: FAIRTHORNE R.A.
Published: February 2008

About two years ago I got an invitation to spend some time with the Center for Communication and Documentation Research, which is a part of the School of Library Science in the Western Reserve University at Cleveland, Ohio. I was very pleased about this, not only because I happened to know the people personally but also because it was a place which had been getting on with its job, yet quite prepared to change what it was doing, for a considerable time. So by going there I would find out what really were the real difficulties in this line of work, particularly in what I consider to be the fundamentals of information. This is better than thinking it up in an armchair. We are still at the alchemical stage of this business, and the first thing one can do is to find out what is really happening, rather than build an enormous mathematical edifice on nothing at all—rather like a large elephant balancing on a small ball‐bearing—which is not unknown in computing circles.
MONITORING CURRENT TECHNICAL INFORMATION WITH The BRITISH TECHNOLOGY INDEX
Authors: COATES E.J.
Published: February 2008

Indexing is an activity in the performance of which a sense of aims and objectives may easily be blurred by one's over‐immersion in technicalities. This is a great pity because preoccupation with the technicalities is right and proper, is indeed the outcome of many lacunae in indexing technique which need further inquiry. It is, however, necessary at the very beginning of an indexing project to try to offset this risk, by sorting out the mixture of objectives to which the index is directed, to arrange them in a preferred order of importance, and then to proceed to apply the resulting scale of values.
The RELATIONS BETWEEN A CENTRAL INFORMATION UNIt AND SECTIONAL UNITS. PART II. SOME EXAMPLES TAKEN FROM LARGE ORGANIZATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM THEM
Authors: HOLLOWAY A.H.
Published: February 2008

Following upon Mr J. R. Stocks' paper on theoretical aspects, I should like briefly to discuss one or two examples of centralization which seem to be worthy of attention, and the first of these is the United States Armed Services Technical Information Agency, generally and more conveniently known as ASTIA. This Agency, which deals entirely with information in the shape of separate unpublished reports, receives copies of them from the three American Services and from some other sources which supply reports to these Services; it abstracts and indexes these reports, supplies photographic copies of them on request and also produces accession lists with abstracts, indexes, and bibliographies; its customers are the US Services, their contractors and nobody else, and it is in fact staffed by the United States Air Force on a repayment basis. Before ASTIA was set up there was a minimum of co‐operation between the US Services so far as documentary information was concerned and now the Agency's services are far more ambitious than any one of them could contemplate separately: it has mechanized many of its operations and it has been continuously concerned to expand and improve its services, and to this end has established branch offices to give more rapid service to its scattered customers. Yet, although it gives service to all within its terms of reference who have an entitlement it receives its raw material only at the discretion of the Services, and some of these are more forthcoming than others, although it is not questioned that it provides a better service than the individual Services could.
A COMPUTER‐INTEGRATED SYSTEM FOR CENTRALIZED INFORMATION DISSEMINATION, STORAGE, AND RETRIEVAL
Authors: TRITSCHLER RENE J.
Published: February 2008

The age‐old goals of libraries and librarians are recording knowledge for posterity, and the arrangement of such recording in a form in which future users may have easy access to the material. The IBM Technical Information Center attempts to achieve these same goals by using tools which promise to become increasingly useful in this work.
MACHINES THAT INTERACT WITH MEN
Authors: PASK GORDON
Published: February 2008

The teaching machine is both an instrument and a natural development of activities pursued in experimental psychology. Whilst the earliest machine was devised by S. L. Pressey in 1920, none was developed for teaching purposes until the late 1940s when Professor Skinner of Harvard University realized the potentials of these machines in ‘programmed’ learning.
The ROLE OF MARKET RESEARCH In The UNITED KINGDOM CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Authors: HODGE H.P.
Published: February 2008

The term market research may well suggest an assortment of mental pictures. Some of you may visualize an attractive young woman armed with a questionnaire and going from door to door asking questions about detergent powders. Others perhaps will picture a statistician plotting points on a graph and extrapolating them for future years. Both certainly have some application to market research, in its broadest sense, but I intend to discuss industrial market research, which poses and attempts to answer a more complex set of questions.
MAKING YOUR OWN INDEXING SYSTEM In SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (CLASSIFICATION AND KEYWORD SYSTEMS)
Authors: CAMPBELL D.J.
Published: February 2008

In visiting more than a hundred special libraries and information units in Britain (not to use their resources but to study their methods) I have often been concerned by the inadequacy of the private indexing systems in use, although there were many exceptions. The classifications were often crude, and/or outdated, and/or quite insufficiently detailed, and were seldom provided with good subject indexes. Alphabetical subject‐heading indexes are more difficult to assess on a brief visit, but these were seldom detailed enough, so that fifty or more documents could be indexed under one heading. Seldom was there a separate subject‐headings list, and often no recognition of the need of one. Guidance for the user was very often poor.
WHAT THEY READ AND WHY—ISRAELI VERSION
Authors: WELLISCH H.
Published: February 2008

Water Planning for Israel, Ltd is the Israeli Government's central planning agency for countrywide projects of irrigation, drainage and water power. Its Technical Library serves the staff of engineers and technicians of the organization itself as well as technologists in other governmental, public and private institutions concerned with all aspects of hydrology and hydraulic engineering. The library's stock consists of about ten thousand books and bound volumes of periodicals, several thousand pamphlets and internal technical reports, and has a collection of articles and theses on microfilm; about two hundred periodicals and serials are taken currently.
RELIABILITY OF SCIENTISTS In SUPPLYING TITLES
Authors: PAPIER LAWRENCE
Published: February 2008

This study is an outgrowth of a broader one being conducted by the Biological Sciences Communications Project on the validity or relevance of titles in describing the content of biological articles. It is restricted to the psychology portion of the total sample. The purpose of the study was to assist the author in gaining insight into the problems of documentation research, and to provide the project with a pilot study—one of several.
SEMANTIC FACTORS, ROLE INDICATORS ET ALIA
Authors: REES ALAN M.
Published: February 2008

It is indeed a pleasure to talk to you this evening about information retrieval in general and at the Center for Documentation in particular. Information retrieval, I suspect, is treated with some suspicion in Britain, and much of the outpouring of documentation literature is doubtless discounted as typical American excesses of enthusiasm and braggadocio. I hope that I can contribute something tonight towards putting our own efforts into a sensible perspective.
The STRUCTURE OF NATIONAL DOCUMENTATION AND LIBRARY SERVICES
Authors: COBLANS HERBERT , Paige M.F.C.
Published: February 2008

Your Conference Committee asked me to talk about national documentation systems and to be provocative. Thus any dogmatism should not be taken too seriously. I would like to start by taking stock of the problem in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the last war we, as documentalists, have lived in a climate of crisis, of alarums and excursions. The cause has been commonly ascribed to the so‐called ‘flood of information’, the ‘literature explosion’. Perhaps the real revolution lies elsewhere, in the deep‐seated change in our publication potential.
MECHANIZED DOCUMENT CONTROL
Authors: LANCASTER F.W.
Published: February 2008

Since the second world war, considerable research funds and effort have been spent on developing means for controlling the ever‐increasing flood of recorded knowledge. As far as librarians and information officers are concerned, the problem can be divided up into five distinct stages, as shown in Figure 1.
MECHANIZATION IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: VESSEY H.F.
Published: February 2008

For some time an investigation has been proceeding on the benefits to be gained by mechanization of the report handling procedures of TIL with a view to computer ‘retrieval’. A small working party of representatives of TIL and the Organization and Methods Branch meets regularly to discuss progress and outstanding problems.
FORTY YEARS OF ASLIB
Authors: MEMBER FOUNDER
Published: February 2008

This anniversary gives us an opportunity to look back to the origin of Aslib, and those who took part in its first meeting will no doubt feel proud of the position it has attained.
A NEW UNIVERSITY PROSPECT
Authors: FAIRHURST HARRY
Published: February 2008

‘THhis,’ wrote Mr Mackenzie a few weeks ago, ‘is the first formal report on the working of the Library; it covers a period of rather less than a year—from 16th September, 1963, when the Librarian arrived in Lancaster with half a dozen books in his brief‐case, until 31st July, 1964, when an effective library was in operation with a stock of over twenty thousand volumes.’ There, if we forgive Mr Mackenzie for his poet's licence, is the essence of the accommodation problem with which each new university is being faced. We are not being asked to expand existing book and reader accommodation, or to replace it by new building. We have started with nothing and we have to be operational a year or eighteen months afterwards.
AN EXAMINATION OF CITATION INDEXES
Authors: MARTYN JOHN
Published: February 2008

In the past few years two methods of information access using the citations given in published papers have been developed. These methods are citation indexing and bibliographic coupling, and although they are closely related it is important clearly to distinguish between them. In essence, bibliographic coupling is a concept developed by M. M. Kessler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concerned with the relation existing between two documents by virtue of their joint descent from a third—that is, two documents are said to be coupled if they both cite the same document, and the strength of the coupling is determined by the number of citations they have in common. We are here primarily interested in citation indexing and will therefore only discuss Kessler's work as it becomes immediately relevant to this subject. A citation index is ‘an ordered list of cited articles each of which is accompanied by a list of citing articles. The citing article is identified by a source citation, the cited article by a reference citation. The index is arranged by reference citations.’ It is helpful at this stage to think of the source citations as descendants, and the reference citations as their ancestors.
NON‐STANDARD MATERIAL AT The NLL
Authors: BARR K.P.
Published: February 2008

I have been asked in this lecture to tell you something of the way in which the National Lending Library treats non‐standard material, particularly pre‐prints, conference proceedings and reports, and shall deal with these three categories of material in order.
The TRAINING OF SPECIAL LIBRARY STAFF
Authors: CALLENDER T.E.
Published: February 2008

Mr Mason, in his paper, used the term ‘manager’ to denote the person at the head of or in charge of an information service. I shall use the word ‘librarian’ in the same sense, partly because the word comes easier to my tongue than ‘manager’, but mainly because I hold most firmly to the basic concept of the unity of librarianship. At the risk of a head‐on collision with Mr Farradane, I will say at the outset that I speak to you in the belief that information officers, information scientists, special librarians—calling them whatever they choose to call themselves—are, in fact, practising all or part of the profession of librarianship in a particular context.
DOCUMENTATION OF DOCUMENTATION
Authors: GILCHRIST ALAN
Published: February 2008

Five leading abstracts services in the field of documentation were inspected. A measure of their coverage was obtained by matching the items of a bibliography against each service. All abstracts published by these services in 1964 were counted and ranked to estimate the scope of each service, to identify key journals and to assess the language problem. Leading journals were also identified by counts of citations following articles in nine leading documentation journals, mostly over a five‐year period. These citations were ranked in the same way as the abstracts in order to further identify key journals and to provide another view of the language barrier.
ABSTRACTS AND THEIR INDEXES—STYLE, PRESENTATION AND USES
Authors: WOOD N.W.
Published: February 2008

This paper discusses techniques of constructing abstracts, the layout of internal abstracting publications, ways of communicating and disseminating information, machine methods of compiling indexes, computer abstracting, and the relative value of abstracting services.
UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AND The INFORMATION NEEDS OF The RESEARCHER 2: A CONSUMER'S VIEW
Authors: DOLBY JAMES L.
Published: February 2008

A library is, or should be, a service centre specializing in the location, storage, acquisition and exposure of information. From the consumer's point of view the emphasis in such a definition is on the words ‘service’ and ‘exposure’. Most libraries score reasonably well from the viewpoint of service. To be sure, it is not impossible to find librarians who are shocked at the thought of a book being removed from their well‐organized store and are further devastated when the errant user who has committed that crime compounds the felony by failing to return the item promptly. However, most users would admit that they receive much better service from libraries than they do from many other types of service centres.
HANDLING INDUSTRIAL (SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL) CONFIDENTIAL REPORT MATERIAL
Authors: GERRARD S.A. , LYLE D.F.
Published: February 2008

This paper deals with the report collection of one of the largest Divisions of ICI. Mond Division was formed by the merger of the Alkali and General Chemical Divisions of ICI in January 1964. It is organized into five Product Groups to manufacture a variety of inorganic and organic chemicals on a very large tonnage basis.
ORGANIZATION AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF COMPUTER USE
Authors: DIVE H.J.
Published: February 2008

I would like briefly to call to our minds one or two of the important practical features which concern us when we think about the use of computers in libraries. Perhaps, however, I should start with a disclaimer: I am not about to present you with a neatly packaged solution to your problems. I do not have one and I do not believe anyone else has at this moment. But I am certain that computer technology must have a fundamental role to play in any solution.
MICROFORMS IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
Authors: WILLIAMS BERNARD J.S.
Published: February 2008

The paper reviews present microforms in use and indicates briefly their areas of application in particular to the library field. Likely future trends and developments bearing on the library and publishing fields are then detailed. Coverage is given to retrieval systems and devices. Finally the work of the newly established National Reprographic Centre for documentation in this area is outlined.
ADAPTATION TO USERS' NEEDS
Authors: MAUPERON A.
Published: February 2008

The Center for Information and Documentation of Euratom has created a computer‐aided documentation system covering nuclear energy; co‐ordinate indexing of abstracts is used both for input and output and keywords are listed in a pre‐established thesaurus.
The LOGIC OF CO‐ORDINATE INDEXING
Authors: JOLLEY J.L.
Published: February 2008

The fundamental structure which is dealt with in all information handling is the data field—the set of things or items with which we are concerned, together with the set of qualities or features which make these of interest to us. It is an extremely important, and deceptively simple structure. Since co‐ordinate indexing forms a large part of information handling, we may deduce that its practitioners know a 'good deal about the data field in fact, no matter what they may think about its theory. Indeed, here as elsewhere facts come first and theories toddle after, explaining why we might have expected the behaviour which surprised us. The theoretician seems a professor of glorious hindsight, hoping that what he says will be helpful to people facing the other way.
THESAURUS CONSTRUCTION AND USE
Authors: GASTER KATHLEEN
Published: February 2008

ARIES, PHILIPPE. Un lexique par phrases descriptives. Bulletin de l'A.I.D., vol. 5, no. 4, 1966, p. 99–101.
PATENT INFORMATION SERVICES
Authors: TARNOFSKY V.
Published: February 2008

The object of this talk is to let you know what services are offered by the Patent Office to help people get at the technical information contained in patents. Since these services largely arise from the official work performed in the Patent Office, it would seem logical to say something about this work: this I also intend to do. Finally, I shall be giving some background detail on current activities in the Patent Office concerned with information storage and retrieval as well as some thoughts on one or two possibilities for the future. In this way I hope to up‐date the last address made to Aslib by a Patent Office speaker.
WHAT COMPUTERS WILL DO
Authors: GILL STANLEY
Published: February 2008

My objective is to give a thumbnail sketch of the computing art, and perhaps to kill a few fallacies on the way. One fallacy which I will tackle right away is the idea that computers are essentially for numerical computations, and that if they do anything else it is, like Dr Johnson's description of a woman's preaching, ‘not done well, but it is surprising to find that it is done at all’. It is true that numerical computing was the umbilical cord on which the electronic computer was born; but the digital computer uses pulse patterns to represent the data, and there is nothing essentially numerical about the pulses.
SEARCH STRATEGY EVALUATION IN MANUAL AND AUTOMATED SYSTEMS
Authors: KEEN MICHAEL
Published: February 2008

Document retrival systems are designed and implemented for the purpose of satisfying the information needs of a group of users, and the final stage of the technical processes required is the search of the stored file of documents or document surrogates. Studies of many aspects of retrieval systems have been made, but work has concentrated on the indexing or input stage, and little attention has been paid to the search or output stage.
The PROPOSED WORLD INSTITUTE FOR DOCUMENTATION OF HOUSING, BUILDING AND PLANNING
Authors: AGARD EVANS B.
Published: February 2008

Before embarking on this paper, I want to make an emphatic disclaimer. In so far as the proposed Institute has political angles, these are expressly excluded from my treatment. The Expert Group had fairly wide terms of reference, but these were regarded as professional or technical questions and answered factually.
ASLIB CIG RESEARCH PROJECT: PROGRESS REPORT I
Authors: DAMMERS H.F.
Published: February 2008

Two years ago in March 1966 Dr Batten suggested that the newly formed Co‐ordinate Indexing Group should embark on a constructive co‐operative project, preferably one that would involve all members willing to participate in such a venture.
REPROGRAPHY APPLIED TO COMPUTER PRINT‐OUT
Authors: MARTYN A.W.
Published: February 2008

Before discussing reprographic equipment which is specifically designed for computer print‐out, it is as well to mention that investment in a simple document‐copying machine for use in a computer installation may be worth while. Many computers are situated away from the centre of office services and generate and receive a fair amount of paper work which requires copying. Copiers of the electro‐photographic type, suitable for intermittent use but nonetheless able to provide an A3 size copy for about 6d, are now becoming available and can be a valuable aid to making the odd copy of programs, flowcharts, correspondence, and so on.
SHARED CATALOGUING : A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM
Authors: WELLS A.J.
Published: February 2008

The concept of shared cataloguing is by no means new. Library literature over the past 120 years is studded with attempts to show the wastefulness of individual cataloguing and the virtues of systems of shared cataloguing, called in the past centralized or co‐operative cataloguing.
The ‘SHEFFIELD REPORT’
Authors: SAUNDERS W.L.
Published: February 2008

The background to the ‘Sheffield Report’ on Education and training for scientific and technological library and information work is probably well known to most members of this audience, for many of you have contributed to it by answering our questionnaires and letters, by allowing us to visit your units and by submitting your views on various aspects of our inquiry. The scope of the report is, I hope, clear from its title. Its raison d'être can be found in the results of the OSTI survey of staff employed in scientific information work, carried out by Mr A. P. J. Edwards and published in 1966.
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD MSc COURSE IN INFORMATION STUDIES
Authors: SCHUR HERBERT
Published: February 2008

IN this brief paper outlining the new MSc course in Information Studies, I propose to consider five questions:
INFORMATION SERVICES AND MARKET RESEARCH
Authors: HILL D.W.
Published: February 2008

When, some months ago, I was asked to prepare a paper for this conference it was suggested to me that the conference would discuss the problems associated with the location of sources of unpublished information, how information sources could best be exploited in market research work and, in particular, the role of the research association as a focal point for information. This is a wide enough limit for anybody and immediately raises certain questions.
COLLECTION AND UTILIZATION OF ECONOMIC INFORMATION—SOME OF ITS PROBLEMS
Authors: HANDOVSKY F.L.A.
Published: February 2008

It is very fashionable today to talk about information and documentation and their tremendous growth. Much has been said and done about scientific and technical information. However, until recently, economic information has been more or less treated as a poor relation. The fact that a conference, such as this one and also a subsequent seminar to be held in April, by request of members of the Aslib Chemical Group, is a very encouraging sign that the situation is now undergoing change.
EVALUATION OF INFORMATION‐HANDLING SYSTEMS
Authors: MARTYN JOHN
Published: February 2008

One of life's biggest problems is that of being sure what it is we are talking about. Even if we are sure ourselves what exactly we mean when we talk about something, we very often have no guarantee that our audience is listening about the same thing. At its simplest level this is often a problem of homonymity; the doctor may have a use for plasma, but his use will differ depending on whether he is a doctor of medicine or of physics. At the more troublesome level, it is a matter of interpretation, often affected by emotional predisposition, so that ‘justice’, for example, means different things depending on whether or not one is in the dock oneself. It is particularly a problem when one is obliged to study something in detail with a view to future application. Before you can do any research into the topic of ‘evaluation of information‐handling systems’ you have to have an exact and unambiguous knowledge of what you mean by a system, what you mean by information‐handling, what you mean by information, and what you mean by evaluation, and not only must you have these things defined to your own satisfaction, but you must eventually define them so that everyone else will understand the same things. The usual approach is to sit and think very carefully, make up a definition, look for examples you want included but which your definition excludes, reshape the definition, and so on, in a process of successive approximation. After a while, you usually have a definition which includes either everything or nothing, and you are probably beginning to wonder if you know what you really mean by ‘of’. Happily, for our purposes today we do not need to do too much in the way of philosophical gymnastics. The literature is not entirely without definitions of the word ‘system’, and any one will do for the time being. I used the term ‘information‐handling’ in my title so that I could include libraries, parts of libraries, information departments, commercially available information services and the like. These parts of the title can be left comfortably vague; the thing we are really going to consider is ‘evaluation’; and this is the word I must define.
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE ABSTRACTS: A BRIEF PROGRESS REPORT
Authors: GILCHRIST ALAN
Published: February 2008

During 1968 Aslib and the Library Association agreed to collaborate in the production of a new abstracts service, starting in 1969, to cover their combined areas of interest. Two issues of Library and Information Science Abstracts have now appeared and though this brief note of progress may appear somewhat premature it is the intention of the LISA editor and his Advisory Committee to maintain a critical watch on the performance of LISA. Such an attitude is a proper continuation of two reports which examined abstracting services in documentation and library science, and Library Science Abstracts in particular, and which laid the foundation for LISA. A full account of the events leading to the publication of LISA, including attempts to collaborate with Referativnyi Zhurnal and Documentation Abstracts (renamed Information Science Abstracts in the March 1969 issue), appeared earlier this year. The initial intention behind the analysis of only two issues of LISA was to provide a comparison with various figures of throughput predicted during planning. A good correspondence was found; for example, the predicted total for 1969 of 2,489 abstracts is only slightly higher than the figure of 2,379 extrapolated from the first two issues. However, users of the service will be interested in actual performance rather than predictions.
ESRO/ELDO SPACE DOCUMENTATION SERVICE
Authors: MARTIN W.A.
Published: February 2008

I would like to begin by quoting a brief passage from the General Report for 1968 of the European Space Research Organization:
CO‐OPERATION IN CATALOGUING
Authors: BATTY C.D.
Published: February 2008

As the theme of this conference implies, librarianship itself is inherently an act of co‐operation. We are communications specialists bridging the gap between information and ignorance, by organizing information so that we can use it, and by organizing ignorance so that we can find information to match it. A part of this effort is the exploitation of the total resource of recorded knowledge, and the catalogue is one of the most valuable tools that we use in this exploitation, provided that, as with all tools, we keep it in good order, and know how and when to use it. In recent years and even in recent weeks, much has happened both directly and indirectly to promote co‐operation in the field of cataloguing; sometimes these developments have occurred because cataloguers have recognized a need and they sometimes form part of a larger movement for professional co‐operation. In this paper I should like to concentrate on an important aspect of the whole problem of co‐operation in cataloguing, and that is the nature of the relationship between the problem itself and its practical solution. I intend to offer a summary of the way in which the problem has developed and the way in which different kinds of solutions have been proposed, since perhaps one of the most important things we can do as librarians to ensure effective co‐operation in the future is to examine the very peculiar nature of the situation that faces us. We may then confirm the developments that are now taking place, or we may begin to wonder if some of them are not likely to suffer the same fate that has overtaken attempts at co‐operation in the past.
2. From Co‐operation to Contracts
Authors: DAWSON D.R. , ELLIOT R.G.J.
Published: February 2008

The Rubber and Plastics Research Association of Great Britain (RAPRA) has, since 1923, provided a conventional abstracting service. The major scientific and technological abstracts are published in a monthly abstract journal, originally entitled The Summary of Current Literature but today known as RAPRA Abstracts. Subject, patent, and name indexes are provided for each volume. From the beginning two of the main objectives of RAPRA Abstracts have been the reduction of essential reading time and the reduction of individual abstracting effort within the industry. The efficiency with which these objectives were met obviously decreased as the rate of publication of scientific and technical literature rapidly increased.
ACCESS TO PRIMARY MATERIALS IN The SOCIAL SCIENCES
Authors: PEMBERTON JOHN E.
Published: February 2008

I want to start by thanking the Committee for giving me the honour of presenting the first paper to the newly formed Aslib Social Sciences Group. This coincides with the uneasy lull between publication of the Report of the National Libraries Committee and the Queen's Speech to Parliament. We do not know yet if the Government intend to legislate for the new national library structure which the Dainton Committee say we should have. What we do know is that a Dainton‐based Bill might well turn out to be a lost opportunity for the social sciences.
LIBRARY SERVICES FOR OPEN UNIVERSITY STAFF AND STUDENTS
Authors: SIMPSON D.J.
Published: February 2008

As the Open University courses for 1971 are only partly written and many decisions have still to be made, a good part of any discussion on the Open University must inevitably be conjecture. Accordingly a précis only of this paper is given here.
CLASSIFICATION AND INDEXING IN The SOCIAL SCIENCES
Authors: FOSKETT D.J.
Published: February 2008

It would indeed be pleasant to be able to begin this paper with the relation of many striking and significant advances made since I last spoke on the topic to Aslib, at the 1965 Annual Conference at the University of Keele. Such, alas, is not possible; it would not be too much to say, of the social sciences as a whole, what R. B. Joynson has recently said of Psychology: ‘The present sub‐divisions of Psychology are not, for the most part, the fruit of any agreed and deliberate analysis. They are historical flotsam—a haphazard collection of topics … brashly inflated by a hand‐to‐mouth empiricism into one great blooming buzzing confusion.’ Although there are a few bright patches of orderliness, I fear that much of our subject presents something of the same confusion; while I am certain that the same hand‐to‐mouth empiricism is earnestly providing classification and indexing with more than its fair share of historical flotsam.
REPROGRAPHIC SERVICES IN LIBRARIES
Authors: MORGAN T.J.
Published: February 2008

A photocopier is now regarded as an essential part of the furniture of most libraries, and during the last decade machines operating on the dry electrostatic principle have almost entirely superseded the earlier chemical copiers. They are usually quicker and easier to operate, and produce a cheaper and more permanent copy. A range of fast automatic pressbutton machines can be hired (or purchased) which will generally provide a copy in about fifteen seconds, at a cost of approximately fourpence for an A4 size sheet. Coin‐operated machines are also available for self service applications.
PROBLEMS WITH REPORTS
Authors: CHILLAG J.P.
Published: February 2008

When I was first approached to give this talk I was faced with an immediate dilemma. How does one define reports and worse still how can one define a microfiche report? It can be said that as a general rule reports have an alpha‐numeric identification code, but this will convey different ideas to different people. Many experts tend to agree that you cannot define a report, but if you see one you can generally recognize it as such. This is probably true as far as full size reports are concerned, but is far more complicated if one has only the micro‐images of a microfiche to go by. It is true that generally there is an eye‐readable title line, incorporating an alpha‐numeric code, but this as a rule will not be sufficient to distinguish a report from a conference paper, from a translation, a patent, or in some cases, even from journal articles. For this reason alone, the parameters of report literature will vary according to individual interpretations.
The PILKINGTON TECHNICAL COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
Authors: YATES BRYAN
Published: February 2008

This paper describes the methods used by the Pilkington Group Technical Communications Centre to ensure that all staff in the Pilkington Organization have clearly defined and easily accessible means of obtaining technical information. As far as we are aware we are the first organization to try to formalize the concept of ‘Technological Gate Keepers’, who have been shown by Professor T. J. Allen to be the major means by which information flows within the organization. A ‘Gate Keeper’ is a person who is usually consulted by his colleagues for information; this consultation takes place as a first step in obtaining information and in spite of any other avenues open to the enquirer.
INNOVATION RESULTING FROM RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN The INFORMATION FIELD
Authors: LINE M.B.
Published: February 2008

I am not sure whether I was asked to give this paper as an innovator, a researcher and developer, or a user. If I claim to have some elements of all three, this presumably exonerates me from having to be expert at any one of them. I should perhaps say that I see all three as closely interlinked: for me, at any rate, all worthwhile library and information research has arisen out of strictly practical problems, which present knowledge is inadequate to solve; and these problems occur to one as a librarian trying to give an adequate service within various economic, social and political constraints—the definition of an adequate service being arrived at by seeing the library through the consumer's eyes, and by using it oneself as a consumer.
CURRENT RESEARCH IN MECHANIZATION
Authors: EAST HARRY
Published: February 2008

I have applied a fairly liberal interpretation to the title given to me by the Conference Committee. Much of what I am going to say comes under the heading ‘recent developments’, for much of the valuable empirical work that has been done recently would hardly qualify in intellectual integrity for the title ‘research’. One of the themes I wish to explore is the extent to which advances in mechanization are predicating a move towards rationalization and standardization in many areas of library and information work, and conversely how trends in these directions require us to examine problems whose existence has largely been unrecognized or ignored.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Authors: SHARP JOHN R.
Published: February 2008

The remit for this, the last session of the Conference, was to consider the papers on specific issues given by the other speakers, to comment thereon, and to try to take a look into the future on the basis of what has been said. The views presented here are those of a librarian/information officer concerned almost solely with practical, day‐to‐day work and not directly with research activity. They therefore represent an overview as seen by one who is the recipient of the output of research workers and who must consider the applicability of research findings to systems and procedures at the point of use.
A CASE STUDY IN The PROBLEMS OF INFORMATION PROCESSING IN A SOCIAL SCIENCE FIELD: The OSTI‐SEA PROJECT
Authors: WINN V.A.
Published: February 2008

The Sociology of Education Abstracts project, funded by OSTI (Office for Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Education and Science), is a three‐year project, now, after eighteen months, entering its second phase. The first phase has been concerned with (a) an analysis of SEA practice with regard to selection and abstracting, (b) consultation with specialists over questions relating to the dissemination of information in the sociology of education, and (c) experimentation with selected methods of subject indexing.
The ARCHIVES OF TWENTIETH‐CENTURY SCIENTISTS AND TECHNOLOGISTS
Authors: KURTI N. , GOWING M.M. , PYE J.M. , ELLIS R.H.
Published: February 2008

To start this discussion, I should like to give a brief account of the events that led to the establishment of the Joint Standing Committee on Records of Science and Technology of the Royal Society and Historical Manuscripts Commission and thus, ultimately, to proposals about the systematic preservation of the papers of present‐day scientists and technologists. In 1957 Mr Roger Ellis was appointed Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts and began his efforts to get the Commission more interested in records of science and technology. It was mainly at his initiative that a Commissioner with special responsibility for this type of work was appointed in the person of Mr Roger Quirk, a scientist by training, a mediaeval scholar and archaeologist. After lengthy consultations and discussions with scientists, Mr Quirk came to the conclusion that a useful first step would be the preservation of valuable labor‐tory records when their originators retire or die. To this end the Master of the Rolls and ex officio chairman of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, Lord Denning, wrote in 1964 to all Vice‐Chancellors and Principals asking them for their help. The response was very encouraging, but because of the untimely death of Mr Roger Quirk in 1965 and the failure to appoint another ‘scientific’ Commissioner, it seemed likely that the scheme might come to nothing.
STRUCTURED THESAURI
Authors: BLAGDEN JOHN
Published: February 2008

The first point that I would like to make about the differences between a structured and unstructured vocabulary is that the question is very much related to vocabulary size and this has certainly in the past generated a good deal of controversy in Aslib co‐ordinate indexing circles. Mr Snel and Mr Boyd have been two of the leading advocates of a restricted vocabulary and they argue that this keeps both indexing and searching simple. They also argue that it allows for human intelligence to play a much bigger part in the search process by allowing the sifting of search output to be done by the inquirer and not the system. It is also assumed, probably correctly, that the bigger the vocabulary the more noise a system will produce. The reason that I believe that the question of structured vocabularies and vocabulary's size are related is simply that if one does employ structure, i.e. a classificatory element of some sort, then the practical result of this is a bigger vocabulary. May I interject with a quotation from Cyril Cleverdon, who, to my way of thinking, summed up the question of vocabulary size in a conference that the Co‐ordinate Indexing Group organized some considerable while ago: ‘Much of the disagreement has been due to the fact that speakers were arguing from different view points. If it was found that a particular system operated satisfactorily for a certain organization, then obviously there was no need to find fault with it. However, it was unjustifiable to make claim as speakers had done that the same system would necessarily operate satisfactorily in all other situations. There were obvious differences when one organization was more interested in having a good recall ratio and was relatively unconcerned about relevance, whilst another organization was more interested in having a good relevance ratio. Certain indexing devices were available which could bring about either of these situations but it was unlikely that any of the operating systems discussed would satisfactorily meet both requirements.’
PRIMARY MATERIALS IN POLITICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
Authors: RUSH MICHAEL
Published: February 2008

I would like first of all to thank the Aslib Social Sciences Group for inviting me to address this conference and I welcome the opportunity of discussing the library and information problems that I experience in political science, not only with fellow social scientists, but particularly with members of the library profession. Because of the nature of political science, as I see it, I want first to say something about the relationship between the various social sciences, then to define politics more specifically (since I regard this as essential in considering the topic), and finally to discuss the sources and the problems they present. In company with Professor Swann, I regard myself as an amateur on the topic on which I am speaking. This being so, I will not try to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive list of primary sources in politics, but endeavour to outline the types of sources and illustrate these from my own experience.
The BLPES AND The COLLECTION OF PRIMARY MATERIALS
Authors: CLARKE D.A.
Published: February 2008

The British Library of Political and Economic Science was founded as a national library of the social sciences which would pay particular attention to collecting documentary materials: it continues to be available to all scholars conducting research in the social sciences, and is rich in primary materials over the whole range of social science subjects.
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE ABSTRACTS: The FIRST TWO YEARS
Authors: GILCHRIST ALAN , PRESANIS ALEXANDRA
Published: February 2008

With the thirteenth issue affected by the recent postal strike, now seems an opportune moment to take a look at the performance of LISA in its first two years. This bi‐monthly abstracts service succeeded the former Library Science Abstracts in 1969 as a joint venture between the Library Association and Aslib. An account of its birth and a brief report on early progress both appeared in 1969.
AN ANNOTATED LIST OF THESAURI HELD IN The ASLIB LIBRARY
Authors: WALKLEY JANET , HAY BARBARA
Published: February 2008

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.
The INFORMATION USES AND NEEDS OF SOCIAL SCIENTISTS: AN OVERVIEW OF INFROSS
Authors: LINE MAURICE B.
Published: February 2008

When INFROSS began in the autumn of 1967, although a large number of studies had been conducted into the requirements of scientists for information, very little had been done in the field of social science information. There are a number of possible reasons for this. Social scientists, faced with a much smaller total volume of information, were much less information‐conscious and less inclined to seek for solutions. There are very few specialist libraries in the social sciences, and few librarians were therefore confronted with social scientists' information needs in the same way as librarians in scientific libraries were confronted with users and their problems. Finally, until OSTI came along there was little in the way of funds to support this kind of research. This almost total absence of previous research had its disadvantages and advantages. There were very few clues to guide us, and we were therefore working to a certain extent in the dark. On the other hand, we had a clean and open field uncorrupted by confusing and non‐comparable studies. There is something to be said for being one of the first in a field. (For an extended review of relevant work previously carried out, Michael Brittain's book should be consulted.)
PROBLEMS OF The INDIVIDUAL USER
Authors: LEGGATE P.
Published: February 2008

To avoid confusion, I will start by saying that I intend to use the word ‘user’ in a different contest to that in which it has been used by Dr Matthews and other speakers. Previous speakers have discussed problems of organizations such as ICI, Shell and UKCIS who are interested in operating magnetic tape services. They have therefore considered the user as the organization operating the magnetic tape service. However, the users whom I will be discussing are the individual research scientists for whom a profile is written, who receives a list of titles or abstracts, and who in some cases goes to the actual documents and possibly extracts useful information from those documents. I have some doubts, however, whether the discussion of the two types of user in the same meeting is a reasonable combination as my own comments will obviously be from a rather different point of view to that of previous speakers.
INSPEC
Authors: BARLOW D.H.
Published: February 2008

Most of you have probably heard of INSPEC, but there are many people who do not seem to know the full range of what we do, so I thought I would just take a few minutes first of all for what I would like to call an educational session on INSPEC. I want to tell you what INSPEC is doing; to talk about the philosophy of our products and what we are actually trying to provide for the users. And then I shall end up by reviewing some of the problems that we have, as suppliers, in trying to satisfy your needs.
ATTITUDES IN PROMOTING AND USING EXTERNAL SDI SERVICES
Authors: CAWKELL A.E.
Published: February 2008

Many scientists have routine information‐seeking habits, which probably have not been subjected to the scientific scrutiny which they devote to their own subject. Neither they, nor in the case of industry, the management, have assessed the value of timely, relevant, scientific information. On the whole they do not want information, although they need it. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this generalization.
UNISIST: A forum
Authors: Adams Scott , Gray John , Coblans Herbert , Matthews F.W.
Published: February 2008

The origins of the UNISIST programme proposals are to be found in the concerns of the scientific community itself for the survival of its traditional communication institutions. From the outset, the concern transcended political and ideological boundaries. Scientists of East and West, meeting under Pugwash Conference auspices, in Karlovy Vary in 1964, viewed the tendency toward fractional and unco‐ordinated mechanization of information processing in different countries and in different fields of science with apprehension. Were the sciences in the process of creating in the electronic age a new Tower of Babel? Would the adventitious application of technology defeat the fundamental purpose of free and open scientific communication among all nations?
Ergonomics and information systems
Authors: Fox J.G.
Published: February 2008

With an ever increasingly sophisticated technology, man has produced tools and systems which essentially extend his basic capacities: computers to handle calculations beyond his immediate grasp: supersonic planes to transport him faster.
The FID policy for the UDC
Authors: Wright J.E.
Published: February 2008

The FID has undertaken as a matter of urgency to prepare a scheme which may drastically alter the tables of the UDC. Although the full proposals have not yet been decided, the information that is available indicates that they will significantly affect existing users.