bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
COMMUNICATION IN PHYSICS: REVIEW AND FIRST PARAMETERS
Authors: SINGLETON A.K.J.
Published: January 2008

The Institute of Physics is carrying out a project, funded by the British Library, to review information in physics. The approach concentrates on the gathering of quantitative data, and the article presents a first overview of some aspects of the communication system of physics of relevance to documentation. From an overall annual UK R&D budget of £1,000 million, we estimate that about £150 million is allocable to physics, including some three‐quarters of the SRC's budget. Although definition is difficult, we estimate the manpower in physics to be something over 10,000. We briefly consider the involvement of physicists in the documentary part of information flow. Firstly, as producers, or authors, a small study suggests that most members of the Institute do not write papers. Conferences are a major communication channel, but it is likely that out of more than 300 conferences of relevance to physicists held in 1973 in the UK, only fifty will produce specific proceedings. Lastly, past user studies indicate that many physicists carry out their work with little direct, daily use of libraries and information services, although these are obviously an important factor in such research. More ‘non‐user’, ‘non‐author’ etc studies are desirable. The money spent on these services we estimate at around £3 million annually, or 2% of the research budget. These first findings lead to two main conclusions: (i) the cost of library and information services is a negligible proportion of the overall physics budget, and no substantial economies can be made by cuts in them and (ii) documentation may well not play the major role in the communication system. It is only by examining the system as a whole that we can determine the relative importance of each mode of communication and the present and likely future place of documentation.
AN INVESTIGATION OF THE NATURE OF THE RELATION BETWEEN TERMS IN THESAURI
Authors: WILLETTS MARGARET
Published: January 2008

The nature of the affinitive relationships expressed through thesaural related terms has been studied in ten thesauri, of which eight were examined in detail. The relationships have been analyzed in terms of Farradane's relational indexing ‘operators’ and the four fundamental categories of concepts derived by the Classification Research Group in England. The results are tabulated to show the numbers of different categories of descriptors, category pairs, and descriptor/related‐term pairs; the relative occurrences of category pairs and of the different relational operators are shown in histograms. The results are considered in detail and show that there is no consistent pattern of relations in use. Problems in improving the nature and selection of related terms in thesauri are discussed.
NATURAL LANGUAGE
Authors: SHARP J.R.
Published: January 2008

In one of his two letters published in the June issue of Journal of Documentation, Moss rightly draws attention to the confusion arising out of the casual use of terminology in the field of information storage and retrieval. Unfortunately he does not go far enough, for there is a great deal of sorting out to be done with regard to our understanding of what we are talking about when we discuss languages, vocabularies, etc. before we start assigning names to the concepts which emerge. Moss's suggested terms are no more helpful in connoting the attributes of the things we are trying to isolate than those which he criticizes, and Bhatta‐charyya's reply (published with ref. 1) is a poor argument for retaining expressions which are clearly unsatisfactory. Leaving aside the problems arising out of retrieval of texts using such terminology, we have difficulty in knowing what authors are talking about when we read such documents, and the context and explanations in the text have to be used to enable us to appreciate what is being discussed. Bhattacharyya has had two papers published quite recently in which such lack of clarity appears, the first being that on ‘natural language’, of which Moss is critical, the other that on ‘explicit relations’.
PUNCHED FEATURE CARDS
Authors: JOLLEY J.L.
Published: January 2008

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.
TOWARDS AUTOMATIC INDEXING: AUTOMATIC ASSIGNMENT OF CONTROLLED‐LANGUAGE INDEXING AND CLASSIFICATION FROM FREE INDEXING
Authors: FIELD B.J.
Published: January 2008

A number of techniques have been studied for the automatic assignment of controlled subject headings and classifications from free indexing. These techniques involve the automatic manipulation and truncation of the free‐index phrases assigned to a document and the use of a manually‐constructed thesaurus and automatically‐generated dictionaries together with statistical ranking and weighting methods. These are based on the use of a statistically‐generated ‘adhesion coefficient’ which reflects the degree of association between the free‐indexing terms, the controlled subject headings, and the classifications. By the analysis of a large sample of manually‐indexed documents the system generates dictionaries of free‐language and controlled‐language terms together with their associated classifications and adhesion coefficients. Having learnt from the manually‐indexed documents the system uses these dictionaries in the subsequent automatic classification procedure. The accuracy and cost‐effectiveness of the automatically‐assigned subject headings and classifications has been compared with that of the manual system. The results were encouraging and the costs comparable to those of a manual system.
A PERFORMANCE YARDSTICK FOR TEST COLLECTIONS
Authors: SPARCK JONES KAREN
Published: January 2008

It would be very helpful in retrieval experiments if good retrieval performance for a test collection was known, so that performance for particular devices could be fully evaluated. This paper presents one performance yardstick, based on optimally weighted request terms, and illustrates its application to different test collections.
JOURNAL ACQUISITION BY LIBRARIES: SCATTER AND COST‐EFFECTIVENESS
Authors: ROBERTSON S.E. , HENSMAN SANDY
Published: January 2008

The traditional Bradford approach to bibliographic scatter involves ranking journals in order of productivity. It is suggested that this approach should be modified, with a view to answering more directly questions concerning the cost‐effectiveness or cost‐benefit of journal acquisition. Several alternative ranking methods are suggested, and their properties and relationships explored. A test of some of these ideas is described. A collection of journals contributing to a specific subject area were ranked in the various orders, and the relative value of decisions taken on the basis of these rankings was assessed. From a cost‐effectiveness point of view, the Bradford ranking performed substantially worse than the other rankings; but the results appear to be very dependent on the particular journals that contribute to a field.
THE USE OF THE BRADFORD‐ZIPF DISTRIBUTION TO ESTIMATE EFFICIENCY VALUES FOR A JOURNAL CIRCULATION SYSTEM
Authors: MAYES PAUL B.
Published: January 2008

A value for how efficient a journal circulation system is at attracting the number of readers it ‘should’ attract is estimated using the Bradford‐Zipf distribution. This method is confirmed by data from four other libraries and represents the first stage in an effort to find a series of efficiency indicators for library operations.
CITATION ANALYSES AS INDICATORS OF THE USE OF SERIALS: A COMPARISON OF RANKED TITLE LISTS PRODUCED BY CITATION COUNTING AND FROM USE DATA
Authors: SCALES PAULINE A.
Published: January 2008

Lists of journals ranked according to number of citations received are frequently used as indicators of usefulness, but little research has been carried out to test the validity of this hypothesis. On comparing lists of titles of journals ranked by citation counting with lists of the same journals, ranked according to frequency of use (using data from a survey at the National Lending Library), it was found that the rank order correlation between the two was low. This suggests that ranked lists produced by analyses of citations do not constitute valid guides for journal selection by libraries.
OBSOLESCENCE OF THE PATENT LITERATURE
Authors: CLARK C.V.
Published: January 2008

Patents deserve bibliometric study both for their own sake and because their formality can be exploited. Here the year by year issue of US patents since 1836 is used to correct for growth their apparent aging, as obtained by a synchronous study of citations made by (a) US patent examiners and (b) periodicals. Apparent and corrected aging are treated in terms of conditional probabilities. In (a), whereas the recent apparent aging of chemical patents is much faster than that of the whole, after correction the rates are very close. Using a very broad (trichotomous) subject classification, no cut‐off dates for novelty searches can be established if total recall is the goal. The strictly retrospective method of such searches is invoked to explain why a linearity found here in one type of corrected aging function has also been found for a search file truncated at 1920. In (b) the now classic exponential form of aging applies back to the twenties, but older patents are cited too frequently to conform. The deviation is graphically even more striking after correction for growth and is probably due to citations made for historical purposes.
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL TEST COLLECTIONS
Authors: SPARCK JONES K. , VAN RIJSBERGEN C.J.
Published: January 2008

Many retrieval experiments have been based on inadequate test collections, and current research is hampered by the lack of proper collections. This short review does not attempt a fully documented survey of all the collections used in the past decade: hopefully representative examples have been studied to throw light on the requirements test collections should meet, to show how past collections have been defective, and to suggest guidelines for a future ‘ideal’ test collection. The specifications for this collection can be taken as an indirect comment on our present state of knowledge of major retrieval system variables, and experience in conducting experiments.
THE PRODUCTIVITY OF GEOGRAPHICAL AUTHORS: A CASE STUDY FROM NIGERIA
Authors: AIYEPEKU WILSON O.
Published: January 2008

The study identifies 621 authors who contributed 1,423 periodical articles and monograph publications to the geographical literature on Nigeria between 1901 and 1970. Publications/author relationship shows a perfect Bradford distribution comprising fifty‐three core authors having each six publications or more and among them contributing 38 per cent of all items. The significance of these results for retrospective bibliographical searches and their methodological implications for documentation studies in general are suggested and briefly discussed.
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF HENRY EVELYN BLISS (1870–1955)
Authors: CAMPBELL D.J.
Published: January 2008

This is a longer version, with additional material, of the biography contributed to the Introductory Volume of the new (2nd) edition of the Bibliographic Classification, the first parts of which should appear this year. It goes into Bliss's private as well as his professional life and shows for the first time in print the reasons why he devoted himself first to librarianship, and later to a life of scholarship, particularly to the study of classification and the production of an entirely new general scheme.
COULD BIBLIOMETRIC DATA BE USED TO PREDICT THE CLINICAL SUCCESS OF DRUGS?
Authors: WINDSOR DONALD A.
Published: January 2008

Bibliometric traits were used to describe the development and clinical use of levodopa as an antiparkinsonian agent. Yearly percent compositions of a complete collection of 2,335 papers, published from 1960 through 1974, which reported the administration of levodopa to humans, were obtained for: single‐author, non‐regular‐journal, DOPA‐word in title, short, O reference, English language, and contemporary papers. From this basic description a hypothesis was erected, according to which these bibliometric traits can be used for predicting the future of a developing drug. A successful drug (a drug of choice) will have a development peak and a clinical‐use peak on a graph plotting the annual slopes of the percent composition of the trait against the year, for ‘bursts’ of 3–6 years. The main premonitory event (predictor) is the switch in polarity of the slope. Single‐author papers were judged to be the best bibliometric trait for predictive use.
RELATIONAL INDEXING APPLIED TO THE SELECTIVE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION
Authors: YATES‐MERCER PENELOPE A.
Published: January 2008

Farradane's system of relational indexing, which had been previously used in a retrospective search system with good results, was further tested as the indexing language for an experimental S.D.I. system. Sections of Metals Abstracts were used for the data base of 2,820 abstracts, and forty‐three volunteer users participated in the experiment which lasted for six months. Performance was assessed by recall, precision and fallout ratios, and the ‘coefficient of association’ (Q value) and the product (recall X precision) were used as overall measures. The overall average performance was about 75% recall and 75% precision. A failure analysis was also carried out. The browsing strategies incorporated into the system were analysed, as were the profile structure, the distribution of performance measures and possible relationships between recall, precision and generality. Farradane's relational indexing appeared applicable to the different scientific area of the properties of metals and again gave good results with a greater depth of indexing. Some new features of the system were observed.
DOCUMENTATION NOTES
Authors: VAN TONGEREN E.
Published: January 2008

I would like to comment on the article by Mr M. B. Line and Mr D. N. Wood on ‘The Effect of a Large‐Scale Photocopying Service on Journal Sales’, which was published in the December 1975 issue of the Journal of Documentation, as I feel that the authors have achieved the enviable feat of obscuring the real problems facing the dissemination of scientific information through a haze of generalities.
SOCIAL CONSIDERATIONS TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF INFORMATION SCIENCE
Authors: ROBERTS NORMAN
Published: January 2008

Information work, as practised by intermediaries such as librarians and information specialists, among others, is a communication function within a social context, the facilitation of a social act which, in information jargon, is sometimes misleadingly described as information flow. Out of, and around, the complex of social issues associated with ‘information transfer’ or ‘flow’ there has developed a cluster of research and investigative activities, fundamental and applied, which have come to be labelled, loosely, it must be admitted, information science. Although no agreed definition of the scope of this science has emerged most contributors to the debate accept the social significance of information concepts and phenomena and, hence, that information science is a social discipline. Strangely, this level of agreement is not reflected in the many proposals intent upon shaping a separate, distinguishable, identity for information science. There appears to be a reluctance to accept the intellectual consequences of the obvious. This reluctance manifests itself in a number of forms. Three of these are important enough for the future development of information science to deserve extended analysis. They are (a) prescriptive restrictions of the areas of investigation thought proper to information science (b) the adoption of limited, theoretically refined, definitions of information as a basis for information science and (c) the insistence that the scientificity of information science may be protected only by divorcing its study from the practical concerns of information work. The state of affairs represented by these modes of thinking probably owes much to the origin of information science in science, science information and telecommunications and the strong, directional, influence which these beginnings continue to exert upon a developing area of study still searching for an individual identity.
JOURNAL RANKING AND SELECTION: A REVIEW IN PHYSICS
Authors: SINGLETON ALAN
Published: January 2008

Over several decades many ranking techniques have been proposed as aids to journal selection by libraries. We review those closely related to physics and others with novel features. There are three main methods of ranking: citation analysis, use or user judgement, and size or ‘productivity’. Citations offer an ‘unobtrusive’ quantitative measure, but not only is the absolute value of a citation in question, but also there is no consensus on a ‘correct’ way to choose thecitingjournals, nor of the ranking parameter. Citations can, however, point out anomalies and show thechangingstatus of journals over the years. Use and user judgement also employ several alternative methods. These are in the main of limited applicability outside the specific user group in question. There is greater ‘parochialism’ in ‘use’ ranking than in ‘judged value’ lists, with citation lists the most international. In some cases, the attempted ‘quantification’ of subjective judgement will be misleading. Size and productivity rankings are normally concerned with one or other formulation of the Bradford distribution. Since the distribution is not universally valid, for library use the librarian must satisfy him/herself that the collection conforms to the distribution, or that his users would be well served by one that did. This may require considerable effort, and statistics gained will then render the Bradford distribution redundant.
FILE ORGANIZATION IN LIBRARY AUTOMATION AND INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Authors: VAN RIJSBERGEN C.J.
Published: January 2008

Items of information that have been stored in a computer normally need to be accessed via their contents. In principle this is always possible by doing an exhaustive scan of the entire file of information, but to achieve the access efficiently we use some sort of organizing principle, a file organization or file structure, to reduce the amount anning. Typically the items retrieved are a response to a request which fully or partially specifies their contents. Often the file organization requires pre‐processing of the body of information so that a secondary body of information (an index or directory) may be created which in some sense reveals the contents of the file. So, ultimately file structures are time saving devices, where we pay for the time saved by extra storage. They enable us quickly to find items of information by completely or partially specifying their contents.
Recollections of a colleague whose memory may be at fault
Authors: BRADFORD S.C.
Published: January 2008

Bradford was a small, dapper man, dressed immaculately in expensive suits, and in the rose season never without a perfect specimen in his button‐hole. He walked with his feet turned out in a very characteristic fashion and out of doors used a heavy walking‐stick. He obtained his degree by study at night‐school and his D.Sc. by research carried out in his office in the Library. Any ordinary person would have been deterred by the lack of normal facilities such as water, gas, electrical points (the room was heated by a coal fire!). He arrived punctually at the then official starting time of 10 a.m., lunched off sandwiches in his room, and went home at the official time of 4.50 p.m. In between he worked like a beaver. After he became Keeper of the Library his scientific work was of a theoretical nature as he had by then got his D.Sc. Anything he wanted to achieve he worked at against all odds and would never give up no matter what obstacles were put in his way, in his library work as in his scientific.
ON‐LINE SEARCHING IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Authors: BARRACLOUGH ELIZABETH D.
Published: January 2008

The possibility of having access to all the world's literature from a single computer terminal stimulated the imagination of the research workers in the late' sixties. It was this goal and the fascination of the co‐operation between man and machine, that inspired the major changes that have taken place in Information Retrieval over the past ten years.
ON THE PROCESSING OF PRINTED SUBJECT INDEX ENTRIES DURING SEARCHING
Authors: MICHAEL KEEN E.
Published: January 2008

Reports a laboratory experiment in which verbalized tape‐recorded searches on five printed subject indexes reveal something of the linguistic processing that took place. Some 20% of the entries examined were changed grammatically, by word order change or function word supply, according to the linguistic form of the index concerned. Extracts from the search transcriptions are given, and the search processing modes of seeking, scanning, and screening are discussed.
THE PROBABILITY RANKING PRINCIPLE IN IR
Authors: ROBERTSON S.E.
Published: January 2008

The principle that, for optimal retrieval, documents should be ranked in order of the probability of relevance or usefulness has been brought into question by Cooper. It is shown that the principle can be justified under certain assumptions, but that in cases where these assumptions do not hold, the principle is not valid. The major problem appears to lie in the way the principle considers each document independently of the rest. The nature of the information on the basis of which the system decides whether or not to retrieve the documents determines whether the document‐by‐document approach is valid.
A THEORETICAL NOTE CONCERNING THE ADAPTIVITY OF DEMAND FOR LIBRARY DOCUMENTS
Authors: HINDLE ANTHONY
Published: January 2008

A number of Management Science applications in libraries have been concerned with increasing the ‘immediate availability’ of documents held by the library. It has been found that low availability is often a cause of user complaints about library service.
CLUSTER ANALYSIS USED ON SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL CITATIONS
Authors: ARMS W.Y. , ARMS C.R.
Published: January 2008

Cluster analysis was used on three files of citations from social science journals to other journals. The files were a pilot study, a file of criminology data and a very large file covering all social sciences. The criminology data was divided into sections drawn from 1950, 1960, and 1970 sources. The large file was in two sections, one drawn from a ranked list of source journals and the other from a list of journals selected at random. The study looked at the effect of several cluster methods and various ways of normalizing the data to find out which observed effects are true properties of the data. The results indicated that clusters of social science journals generated using citations have a non‐hierarchical structure. The criminology samples from 1960 and 1970 showed little change over ten years in the main clusters, but the two sections of the large file gave results which, although similar in general shape, differed substantially in their details. The overall conclusion is that cluster analysis is an unsuitable approach to the design of secondary services in the social sciences, though it may have some value in automatic retrieval systems. Two problems are the vast amounts of data needed and the difficulty of presenting results comprehensibly, particularly with overlapping clusters.
STUDIES ON PATENT CITATION NETWORKS
Authors: ELLIS P. , HEPBURN G. , OPPENHEIN C.
Published: January 2008

Work is described on patent citation networks, a novel technique for displaying the history of technological subjects and their key turning points. The method accurately identifies the key patents in a subject field, and if a subject docs not have a definite starting point, this is reflected in the patent network. The networks are less satisfactory if the key patent took a long time to appear in print. Subjects studied were: semi‐synthetic penicillins, tobacco substitutes, electrophotography, Ziegler‐Natta catalysis, and hovercraft. Possible uses of the technique are examined.
AN EXTENSION OF THE SIGNAL DETECTION MODEL OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
Authors: HUTCHINSON T.P.
Published: January 2008

It is suggested that a possible reason for receiver‐operating characteristics (ROC) curves having a slope other than unity when plotted on Normal‐deviate axes is that the dichotomy into relevant and non‐relevant items is artificial, and that there is really a bivariate distribution of objective relevance and relevance as assessed by the IR system, with positive correlation. This correlation is the appropriate measure of the effectiveness of the IR system, and can be calculated from the shape of the ROC curve.
INFORMATION CONCEPTS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE
Authors: BELKIN N.J.
Published: January 2008

Information science, or informatics, has almost from its beginnings been characterized by a seemingly inordinate self‐consciousness, exemplified by concern with its status vis‐à‐vis other disciplines, with its status as a science, and with the significance of its objects of investigation and the goals of that investigation. The bibliography by Port, and the survey by Wellisch, of definitions of information science, and the historical survey by Harmon, all give substantial evidence of this self‐consciousness. Some aspects of this attitude are of course due to the social and political problems facing any new discipline (or field of investigation aspiring to such status), such as indifference or hostility from the established academic community, the fight for a share of limited research and development funds, the inferiority complex associated with having no well‐defined methods of investigation in a social situation which requires them for acceptance, and so on. Other aspects of this self‐consciousness may, however, be more related to strictly internal, ‘scientific’ concerns; that is, to problems within the theoretical structure of information science which must be solved in order for substantial progress in solving its practical problems to be made. This review surveys contributions to one such problem: the question of a suitable concept of information for information science.
WHAT IN FACT DOES IT MEAN? SOME INTERLINGUISTIC PROBLEMS IN LIBRARY SEMANTICS
Authors: ALLEN C.G.
Published: January 2008

The article examines a number of specimen terms of interest to librarians in various languages with a view to establishing the degree of ambiguity inherent in them and the extent to which the connotation of apparent equivalents in other languages matches. The inference is drawn that in many cases a simple statement of equivalence is not appropriate, and that a scries of detailed studies is needed, analysing the actual use of particular groups of terms in various fields and languages. The first question to be answered is ‘What does this term mean?’ not ‘How is it translated?’.
AN EVALUATION OF FEEDBACK IN DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL USING CO‐OCCURRENCE DATA
Authors: HARPER D.J. , VAN RIJSBERGEN C.J.
Published: January 2008

This paper reports experiments with a term weighting model incorporating relevance information in which it is assumed that index terms are distributed dependently. Initially this model was tested with complete relevance information against a similar model which assumes index terms are distributed independently. The experiments demonstrated conclusively that index terms are not independent for a number of diverse document collections. It was concluded that the use of relevance information together with dependence information could potentially improve retrieval effectiveness. As a result of further experiments the initial strict dependence model was modified and in particular a new relevance‐based term weight was developed. This modified dependence model was then used as the basis for relevance feedback, i.e. with partial relevance information only, and significant increases in retrieval effectiveness were achieved. The evaluation method used in the feedback experiments emphasized the effect of the feedback on documents which the potential user would not previously have seen. Finally the incorporation of relevance feedback in an operational system is considered and in particular it is argued that if high recall searches are required, relevance feedback based on the modified dependence model may be superior to the widely used Boolean search.
HISTORICAL STUDIES IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: URQUHART D.J.
Published: January 2008

The NCL—the National Central Library—came into existence in 1930 and the main part was merged with the NLLST—The National Lending Library for Science and Technology—in 1973 to form BLLD—British Library Lending Division. S. P. H. Filon joined the staff of the NCL in 1931 and retired as the Chief Officer of the NCL in 1971,so he was in a special position to provide a history of the NCL from the inside; and he has provided a very readable account of it.
DOCUMENTATION NOTE
Authors: WITTIG GLENN R.
Published: January 2008

Nearly ten years ago Alan Pritchard, in a ‘Documentation Note’ in this journal, reviewed the use of the term statistical bibliography, and, being dissatisfied with it, proposed bibliometrics as a better name for the subject. He con‐cluded his note by expressing a hope ‘that this term bibliometrics will be used explicitly in all studies which seek to quantify the process of written communication and will quickly gain acceptance in the field of information science’. That hope was indeed quickly realized. In the subsequent years the new term has gained almost—but not quite—universal acceptance by librarians and information scientists, and Pritchard's note, in turn, has been frequently cited in support of the new term's use.
HERBERT COBLANS
Authors: CARTER EDWARD
Published: January 2008

Herbert Coblans to whose memory this number of the Journal of Documentation is dedicated served for thirteen years as its editor and as a world‐wide spokesman of Aslib's cause. In character and intellectual make‐up he was an exemplar of Aslib itself: a highly professional exponent of the skills and techniques of recording and communication in, particularly, scientific fields. In this role he never allowed himself to be an extroverted propagandist but maintained his sometimes magisterial status as a highly attuned expert talking to experts. Thirty years ago he had been Head of the Chemistry Department in the University of Natal and it was certainly because of his scientific background that he was able to show to the scientific world a sense of the philosophies and techniques and sciences inherent in modern methods. What we are trying to show here, mainly in contributions from his professional colleagues, is more than just a record of his achievements at the summit of expertness in his profession but something of the social, cultural and moral character of a very remarkable man.
CONCEPTS OF DOCUMENTATION
Authors: VICKERY B.C.
Published: January 2008

Documentation is a practice concerned with all the processes involved in transferring documents from sources to users. The volume and variety of documents are immense, and consequently procedures of handling them are often pragmatic. Nevertheless, principles emerge that may be applied in practice. It is these principles that we may call ‘concepts of documentation’.
DOCUMENTATION AND THE SCIENTIFIC PRODUCER/USER
Authors: MEADOWS A.J.
Published: January 2008

One of Dr Coblans' most widely read papers was certainly his reassessment of J. D. Bernal's ideas on the communication of scientific information, as originally outlined in The social function of science, published in 1939. Dr Coblans' examination of these ideas was contributed to The science of science, which first appeared in 1964 and was re‐issued as a paperback in 1966. Coblans scrutinized Bernal's work with understandable sympathy, since both the approach and the topics of interest meshed with his own. Bernal, he remarked, was essentially concerned with, ‘the basic methods of publishing information, the inadequacy of the traditional learned periodical as a vehicle of transmission, and user analyses; studies of what working scientists read, why they read, and what use they made of what they have gleaned.’
DEVELOPMENT OF MECHANIZED DOCUMENTATION
Authors: KEENAN S.
Published: January 2008

In 1964 Herbert Coblans wrote that the development of photo‐effect lithography, the invention and evolution of photographic techniques, had profoundly affected the ‘recording of knowledge, the making of libraries and all that that means’. He went on to ask if ‘two other lines of technical development, Hollerith's punched cards… and the electronic computer … [which] represent a third revolution, comparable to the other two’, had had the same significance for libraries and documentation. When originally asked, this question could not be answered with any clarity. Fourteen years later it should be possible to answer the question with some authority and to identify the other areas of technical development that form an integral part of the mechanized documentation services of today and those which are under development for tomorrow.
SOME TRENDS IN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: MACGREGOR ALAN
Published: January 2008

In this inevitably personal view, where I have taken documentation to embrace libraries and information centres, services and systems, I propose to stress Research rather than Development—with one exception. Other authors will be considering the application of research results in operational systems of documentation but Herbert Coblans, as a librarian first, would have—and did—welcome the development of automated aid in the basic library processes—to this we shall return.
SEARCH TERM RELEVANCE WEIGHTING GIVEN LITTLE RELEVANCE INFORMATION
Authors: SPARCK JONES KAREN
Published: January 2008

Previous experiments demonstrated the value of relevance weighting for search terms, but relied on substantial relevance information for the terms. The present experiments were designed to study the effects of weights based on very limited relevance information, for example supplied by one or two relevant documents. The tests simulated iterative searching, as in an on‐line system, and show that even very little relevance information can be of considerable value.
THE USE OF SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE AT THE SCIENCE REFERENCE LIBRARY FOR UPDATING SEARCHES
Authors: SANDISON A.
Published: January 2008

The use per issue‐day of recent issues of 125 periodicals on open access at the Science Reference Library (SRL) has been studied for over four months. There is statistical evidence for the expected separate phase within ‘updating’ of ‘current awareness scanning’ of issues which have arrived since the reader's last visit to the library: its half‐life of two to three months reflects the pattern of reader‐visit frequencies rather than any characteristics of the literature. The isolated uses of issues of periodicals, representing a part of ‘following up searches’, showed no significant relation between use and age. The irregular monographic and conference series, with their unpredictable dates of arrival at the shelf, were not subject to current awareness scanning. Of the regular periodicals in the two chemical technologies, ‘magazines’ were more heavily used than ‘journals’ and, as expected, issues in the English language more heavily than those in foreign languages: these differences were less marked in chemical sciences than in chemical technologies. The results include figures for the variances of use data. These were so high as to suggest that lists of periodical titles ranked by use per issue data are of very little value in critical decisions between one little used title and another. Differences in rank, resulting from a difference of less than fifteen uses obtained from less than five monthly surveys, are unlikely to be significant. Ranking by use per title instead of by use per issue (or equivalent) tends to arrange journals in size order.
C. W. HANSON
Authors: WOLEDGE G.
Published: January 2008

C. W. HANSON, B.Sc., F.I.Inf.Sc., who was for eleven years a member of the Editorial Board of this Journal, died on 20 February 1979, aged 77.
INDEXERS’ REACTIONS TO PRECIS
Authors: BAKEWELL K.G.B.
Published: January 2008

The background to the Liverpool Polytechnic study of indexer reactions to the PRECIS indexing system and the methodology of the study are described. Some of the findings are discussed, special attention being given to points which some indexers regarded as advantages and others as disadvantages; the alleged labour‐intensiveness of PRECIS; the British Library and PRECIS; and the impact of PRECIS on the British library community. A thesaurus of terms used in the British Library PRECIS indexes is needed, and some consideration should be given to the possible simplification of PRECIS or modification to suit the needs of different users. Feedback from users of PRECIS indexes is required.
PROGRESS IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: HARRISON HELEN P.
Published: January 2008

In addition to providing a review of the literature recently published in the librarianship of non‐book materials this survey aims to draw attention to the characteristics, problems and achievements particular to the documentation and handling of non‐book materials (NBM) in many types of libraries. The materials are briefly described and considerations of selection, acquisition, organization, storage and in particular bibliographic control are dealt with in some detail. Other areas of concern to the librarian dealing with media resources, including the organization and training of staff, planning, equipment, exploitation and copyright, are also discussed. The past decade has seen the widespread introduction of NBM into libraries as additional or alternative sources of information. Librarians have been given an opportunity to rethink many basic principles and adapt existing practice to encompass the new materials. The survey reflects the achievements and some of the failures or problems remaining to be solved in this rapidly expanding area of library work.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE TYPE OF SOURCES USED ON THE RESULTS OF CITATION ANALYSES
Authors: LINE MAURICE B.
Published: January 2008

Most citation analyses are based on references taken from two or three source journals. There are good theoretical reasons for believing that these may not be representative of all references. In the social science citation analyses carried out as part of the DISISS programme, references were collected from 140 journals, including forty‐seven drawn at random from a comprehensive list, and also from 148 monographs. Analyses of references drawn from high ranking and randomly selected journals showed differences in date distribution, forms of material cited and rank order of journals cited. Analyses of references drawn from journals and monographs showed differences, some of them large, in date distributions, forms of material cited, subject self‐citation and citations beyond the social sciences, and countries of publication cited. These differences may be peculiar to the social sciences, but any citation analyses that are based on only a limited number and type of sources without specific justification must be regarded with suspicion.
DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL EXPERIMENTS USING INDEXING VOCABULARIES OF VARYING SIZE. II. HASHING, TRUNCATION, DIGRAM AND TRIGRAM ENCODING OF INDEX TERMS
Authors: WILLETT PETER
Published: January 2008

This paper describes the use of fixed‐length character strings for controlling the size of indexing vocabularies in reference retrieval systems. Experiments with the Cranfield test collection show that trigram encoding of words performs noticeably better than the use of digrams; however, use of the least frequent digram in each term produces more acceptable results. Hashing of terms gives a better performance than that obtained from a vocabulary of comparable size produced by right‐hand truncation. The application of small indexing vocabularies to the sequential searching of large document files is discussed.
DOCUMENTATION NOTE
Authors: WINDSOR DONALD A.
Published: January 2008

Many bibliometric investigations study changes in different variables as a function of time, where the unit of time is the year of publication.
PROGRESS IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: REYNOLDS LINDA
Published: January 2008

In the past, legibility research has been mainly concerned with the conventionally typeset and printed word. ‘Printed’ materials are now produced by a variety of other methods, however, and other media such as microforms and cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are commonly used for information display. The effects of these new methods and media on legibility are often given scant consideration, but because of their visual limitations, it is all the more important that the legibility and ease of use of the information should be taken into account. The scope of legibility research must therefore be extended to cover the products of modern information technology. The aim of this paper is to summarize some of the research which has already been carried out and which is of relevance to present‐day problems, and to suggest where further research is most needed.
THE PUBLISHING OF SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPHS
Authors: MANN P.H.
Published: January 2008

Monographs are conventionally books which report specialized research work to a restricted readership. The publishing of such books requires special publishing skills of both an editorial and financial type. Many scholarly publishers make great use of academic advisers and scouts who seek out research workers and can actually bring about the writing of new books. Scholars and publishers exist in a symbiotic relationship which contains areas of potential mutual benefit but also potential conflict. Good publishers are greatly appreciated by authors who themselves become a part of the communication network.
SUBJECT HEADINGS FOR MATHEMATICAL LITERATURE
Authors: GÖDERT WINFRIED
Published: January 2008

In this paper we will try to reach a twofold goal. First we will give an analysis of mathematical terminology in order to give practical hints for assigning subject headings to a book. Secondly, we will propose a method which could be helpful for the subject analysis of a given document. The main basis for this method is the connection between a special classification scheme, the Subject Classification Scheme of the American Mathematical Society, and the task of indexing books by subject headings. Examples of this method are given, and they are compared with Library of Congress Subject Headings and PRECIS entries. With both the study of the terminology and the proposed method, it should be possible to increase quality and consistency of the library indexing results for mathematical books. A thesaurus for mathematics with entries along the lines of the PRECIS rules and connected with the subject classification scheme of the American Mathematical Society, would be desirable, as would the printing of appropriate classification data, assigned to them by their authors, inside the books.
DOCUMENTATION NOTES
Authors: DHAWAN S.M. , PHULL S.K. , JAIN P.
Published: January 2008

The merits and demerits of existing techniques for the selection of journals are discussed. This discussion brings out the fact that the use of journals characterizes their importance. A model for the ideal selection of journals is presented. A canon of decreasing usefulness is invoked to determine journal priorities and to formulate guidelines for selection. The highest priority in the matter of journal selection should be given to those journals which are highly cited, abstracted, and used.
RELATING ‘INFORMATION NEEDS’ TO LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Authors: FORD N.
Published: January 2008

‘Information needs’ are defined in terms of conceptual incongruities, the paramaters of which are described by a number of constructs originating in the fields of cognitive and social psychology. The ‘satisfaction’ of such needs are discussed in terms of access to varying ranges of information sources, from individual learning resources to large‐scale data bases, which may contain information appropriate to the resolving of such conceptual incongruities. From a review of systems designated to satisfy information needs of higher education students, it is concluded that generally, the wider the range of of information that an individual has access to, (i) the more restricted to the names of ‘topics’ and ‘subjects’ have been the parameters of information needs catered for by the system; and (ii) the less the individual has been able to know about the suitability of the sources to other parameters of his information needs, as proposed, at the time of searching. Implications are drawn, for students working in the context of relatively independent access to wide ranges of information sources, in terms of the need to develop effective information handling skills; assessment procedures; and information accessing systems.
A SIMPLE STOCHASTIC MODEL FOR LIBRARY LOANS
Authors: BURRELL QUENTIN
Published: January 2008

A simple stochastic model for the borrowing of books from a library collection is proposed which explains some observed circulation frequency distributions. Use of the model requires the specification of just two parameters which may be calculated from the circulation statistics for a fixed period of time. These allow one then to make predictions regarding the patterns of likely future usage, and should assist therefore in determining the impact of any proposed relegation policy. The article is illustrated with data from the library of the University of Sussex, the Wishart Library of the University of Cambridge and from the published University of Pittsburgh study. In the latter case our conclusions differ from those of the original investigators.
PROGRESS IN DOCUMENTATION
Authors: BRYANT PHILIP
Published: January 2008

The nature and purpose of the catalogue has been the focus of considerable and vigorous debate during the past decade. This article attempts to identify those topics which have been the most significant causes of the debate and discusses: the need for catalogues; users and non‐users; the nature of the bibliographic record and catalogue entry; the development of UK and LC MARC; standards, including exchange formats, the development of the ISBD, and the concept of UBC (Universal Bibliographic Control); the Anglo‐American Cataloguing Rules and the controversy over the implementation of AACR2; COM catalogues; subsets of the MARC record; co‐operatives, networks and resource sharing; and the development of subject access methods better suited to COM and online catalogues. The relevance of catalogue research activities at Bath University and elsewhere is highlighted.