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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
“
I
INTRODUCTION
II
BACKGROUND
III
METHOD OF APPROACH
IV
DISCUSSION
APPENDIX
Summary
°
Overview
'
Contents of PsiLine
Contents of Each Record
PsiLine Search Capabilities Using TEXTBANK
Data-Base Display Capabilities
H
Hard-Copy Records
I2
Recommendations for FY 1987
Access Procedures
Fees
Development of Standardized Vocabulary
iii
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I INTRODUCTION
The Parapsychology Sources of Information Center (PSIC) has been asked to provide,
and maintain, an extensive data-base
facility for parapsychological literature. *
Although the
program will be evaluated and the contract renewed on a yearly basis,
it
is anticipated that the
data base will be enlarged and maintained through Phase III of the prime contract, on SRI
International’s major research effort.
This report details the progress of this effort for FY 1986.
This report constitutes Objective B, Task 1,
detailing the establishment of a resource library of
parapsychology literature.
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II BACKGROUND
Since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research (London,
1882), there has
been extensive worldwide publication of journal articles, books, abstracts, popular articles, and
conference proceedings about parapsychology that have been written in many different
languages.
For over 20 years, Ms, Rhea A. White, Director of the PSIC, has been following
this literature from a technical and organizational perspective.
Her hard-copy records,
prepared primarily by hand, contain a nearly complete cross-referenced and abstracted
accounting of this literature.
Other areas of science, such as those represented by the American Physical Society or
the American Psychological Association, have massive amounts of literature that have been
abstracted and categorized, and are available through a number of commercial library retrieval
organizations.
While some of these commercial services contain some material on
parapsychological literature,
it
is often either out-of-date and/or incomplete.
Given the
estimated near-time demand,
it was inappropriate to obtain the services of one of the
commercial organizations and require them to add the parapsychological literature to their
data bases.
Because Ms. White's expertise
is in library science, and because she
is an active
researcher and
is completely familiar with the parapsychological literature, she was the obvious
and appropriate choice for the performance of this task.
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III METHOD OF APPROACH
As detailed in the Interim Report dated 31 March 1986,* the PSIC has already
completed the necessary hardware and software choices to implement the
first working version
of the data base.
In order to carry out the second task for FY 1986, the PSIC began the
actual work of writing abstracts and entering them into the data base.
A detailed report of the progress to date
is contained in the Appendix. A listing of the
volumes entered from the principal journals
is given below:
•
European Journal of Parapsychology
(1975-date
)
•
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (1970-1985)
•
Journal of Parapsychology (1964-date)
•
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1970-1985)
•
Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (1970-1974)
•
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1970-1985).
The PSIC
is continuing the task of writing abstracts, checking references, and entering
data.
* “Report on Design of the PsiLine Database System,” R. A. White, PSIC,
New York.
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IV DISCUSSION
The Parapsychology Sources of Information Center has already satisfied the initial
requirement for a complete design specification for PsiLine—an on-line bibliographic retrieval
system for the parapsychological literature.
The enormous task of completely abstracting and
coding all necessary parapsychological literature will obviously require sustained effort.
The scientific literature on parapsychology research was initiated in the Nineteenth
Century.
As a result,
it
is estimated that the PsiLine data base will contain approximately
50,000 documents when brought up to date; approximately 1,000 documents per year will be
added to maintain currency.
As outlined in the final report from the PSIC for FY 1986
(see Appendix), two
outstanding issues need to be resolved for FY 1987 in order to make PsiLine available to the
general community.
Those issues are
(1) access procedures and
(2)
fee structure.
It was
obvious early in the contract year that PsiLine could not be made directly available to
researchers.
Manipulating a large computerized data base requires specialized knowledge and
experience to achieve the desired results.
Therefore, queries will be directed to the PSIC,
where Ms. White will perform the actual search.
The fee structure will most likely be based
on the rates charged by commercial services such as Dialog.
Once these issues are fully
resolved, PsiLine
will be made available to the parapsychology community.
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SUMMARY
During Fiscal Year 1986, a data-base program, TEXTBANK, was selected for PsiLine,
the data base of the parapsychological literature.
As of September 30,
1986, PsiLine consists
of nearly 3.5 megabytes, composed of 2,000 records.
Each record consists of an individual
journal article, chapter, dissertation,
letter, or other published record.
PsiLine
is mounted on
an IBM compatible system operating at 7.22 MHz. TEXTBANK
is a text retrieval program
having variable record and field sizes whose capacity
is limited only by the hardware or the
operating system.
It searches every word or number in the data base.
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OVERVIEW
CONTENTS OF PSILINE
PsiLine currently covers documents published in the major parapsychological journals
from 1970 to date, with some exceptions.
The coverage of the Journal of Parapsychology
begins with 1964; coverage of the International Journal of Parapsychology begins with Volume
1, 1959 and proceeds through the last volumes in 1968; and over 100 articles from
non-parapsychological journals that were published prior to 1970 are also included.
The other principal parapsychological journals in the data base are the Journal of the
American Society for Psychical Research (1970-1985), the Journal of The Society for
Psychical Research (1970-1985), the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical
Research (1970-1974)
[(latest]), and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
(1970-1984)
[(latest)].
The
full runs of some of the newer parapsychological journals are included.
In this
group are Anabiosis:
The Journal of Near-Death Studies (1982 to date), the European
Journal of Parapsychology (1975 to date), and Parapsychological Monographs
(all numbers
published to date are included, as well as other monographs, including the reports of the
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory).
The entire contents of these major parapsychological journals are included, except for
book reviews, letters about book reviews, notices, and glossaries.
In other words,
all articles,
research notes, papers,
articles about books, and letters to the editor are included.
Also included are approximately 250 articles from non-parapsychological journals, 50
from general interest magazines, 50 dissertations, 80 abstracts of Parapsychology Foundation
conference papers, 50 chapters, and 60 books.
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CONTENTS OF EACH RECORD
A record consists of an individual journal
article, book chapter, dissertation, or other
published record.
There are 16
fields (TEXTBANK calls them zones)
in each record
(TEXTBANK calls them documents).
These
fields are:
•
Record Number—A unique number that enables a document to be
called up quickly.
It
is also used to indicate cross-references from one
abstract to another,
•
AU—Author’s name
(including names of
all joint authors; given as they
appear in the
article).
•
TI—The
full title of the document.
•
SO—The source
(generally the journal title, year and month of
publication, volume and issue number, inclusive pagination,
place of
publication, and publisher).
•
AD—Additional items of interest such as the number of figures,
illustrations, tables, references,
etc.
•
YR—The year of publication
(listed separately to enable sorting by year
of publication only).
•
PS—The publication source, or the organ or organization responsible for
the publication.
•
AB—The abstract or summary of the document.
•
LA—The language of the original document.
•
DI—The discipline characterizing the source of the document,
e.g.,
general science, psychology, parapsychology, education,
•
DT—The document type,
e.g., journal article, book,
dissertation,
chapter.
•
DF—The document form, such as an experimental report,
letter,
research note, book review article,
editorial.
•
DE—Descriptors or subject headings.
•
ID—Identifiers, which in PsiLine means proper name headings, and the
affiliations of the authors.
In this
field or zone, order
is important.
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First is the name of the country where the
initial author wrote the
document followed by his or her institutional
affiliation.
If a second
author has a different country or affiliation,
it
is given next, and so
forth.
Last, proper name subject headings (such as names of psychics or
mediums or organizations covered in the document) are identified.
•
RL—Reading level
(1 indicates no background
is required to
comprehend the document; 2 means some background
is required; and,
3 means the document
is technical in nature and aimed at professionals).
Most of the documents in the parapsychological journals—certainly the
experimental reports—receive a rating of 3,
•
DN—Document number; this refers to the number of the document
if
it
is abstracted in Parapsychology Abstracts International (PAI).
It
is
included because a search consisting of document numbers only could be
obtained.
If a heading in the Descriptor or Identifier field
is followed by a space and an asterisk,
this indicates that a major portion of the document
is devoted to that subject.
If a
title
is
followed by three asterisks,
it indicates that the document
is significant for some reason:
outstanding quality, uniqueness of coverage, possible notoriety, frequently cited by other
authors, and so forth.
All of the fields in the data base have been
filled in (when available) except for the
descriptor and document number
fields.
The latter can only be
filled in
if the document
is in
PAL
The descriptors are a separate problem.
Because a standardized vocabulary and
thesaurus of terms for PsiLine has not yet been developed, not
all records have descriptors;
assigning a descriptor for some records,
for example, would require a rereading of a journal
article and thus would be too time consuming at this stage in the development of PsiLine
(see
“Recommendations for FY 1987”
at the end of this Appendix).
However, even without a
descriptor, a record can be accessed by any word in
its
title or abstract.
Currently, four
different kinds of display are available for the Descriptor
field:
(1)
for many items there are
no descriptors;
(2) sometimes a few descriptors have been assigned that are quite major and
obvious;
(3) some of the records have been completed, with descriptors typed in lower case
except for the
first letter of the
first word; and
(4) using the program David Altman wrote, we
were able to transfer some of the old dBASEII headings to TEXTBANK; these headings were
typed
all in caps.
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PSILINE SEARCH CAPABILITIES USING TEXTBANK
TEXTBANK permits Boolean searches through use of the logical connectors between
terms of OR, AND, NOT, or XOR.
For an OR search,
at least one of the two terms must
occur.
For an AND search, both terms must occur;
for a NOT search, we look for the
first
term named but not the second; and for an XOR search, only one or the other of the terms
may occur, but not both.
When doing complex searches by using logical connectors to join the answer sets of
previous searches, TEXTBANK automatically stores the last five answer sets so that they can
be searched in place of the former query.
It
is also possible to save earlier answer sets until
the end of the search.
PsiLine
is capable of searching the entire document but
if we are interested in only one
field
(e.gM SRI International not as an affiliation of an author but as a subject), then we
specify that only the abstract field be searched.
To search for
J. B. Rhine as an author but
not as a subject, we specify that only the author field be searched.
Adjacency may also be specified.
If we want terms to occur within a limited proximity
of one another, we can specify within the entire document or within a specific field that a
term occur within a specified number of characters or words or sentences or paragraphs of
one another.
(However,
if sentences, or words or paragraphs are specified, and a specific
field
is selected to be searched,
it must be one that contains paragraphs, sentences, or words.)
If direct adjacency
is required, we simply search the terms we want to find together, such as
“random event generator.”
If we search a long phrase, we must take care that certain words
reserved by TEXTBANK are not included, such as “and,
is, in.”
In such cases, the words
can be searched simply by entering the phrase enclosed in quotation marks.
TEXTBANK also allows for range searching, so that
if we are interested in RNG
experiments published after 1983,
say, we would do an RNG or REG
(random number
generator or random event generator) search only in those documents where the year field
is
greater than 1982.
It
is possible to save specific queries for future use.
For example,
if we
wish to keep
up to date on a specific subject,
say, precognition experiments employing dreams as the
response mode, we could do so by requesting that this query be run each time new data are
loaded in the data base, or
if preferred,
at a regular interval, such as once a month.
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DATA-BASE DISPLAY CAPABILITIES
It
is possible to specify which fields we would like to see displayed on the screen or
printed.
As a general rule, three types of displays will be available:
(1) author,
title, and
source;
(2) author,
title, source, and abstract; and
(3)
entire record.
Before displaying or
printing the answers, they can be sorted on up to six fields in ascending or descending order.
Thus, they could be sorted chronologically, and within that by author, and within that by
title.
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HARD-COPY RECORDS
The parapsychological journals that have been abstracted are stored on bookshelves at
the PSIC.
Articles from journals not owned by the PSIC, separate reports, monographs,
etc.,
are stored in
file cabinets by the record number used in PsiLine.
Thus,
it
is easy to locate
the original of any record
if a
full copy should be desired.
The unit we use for loading purposes
is usually a
full volume of a given journal.
The
printout at various stages of editing, as well as the handwritten abstracts and any relevant
notes concerning that volume, are kept in a manila folder—one per volume—marked with the
load number for the data base.
Thus,
if anything goes wrong or something needs to be
checked, the input data are always easy to find.
We also maintain a listing of what was loaded into the data base each time, including
the numbers of the records, the number of characters, the total number of records, and a
notation identifying the floppy disks. We keep the information on two floppy disks per load:
one
is on the disk of the inputter, and the other
is on another set of disks arranged by
journal.
For example, the
file for the Journal of Parapsychology for 1971
is located on the
I.G. No. 7 disk
(the 7th disk containing files keyboarded by Inga Goldhammmer) and the
Journal of Parapsychology disk No.
4.
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RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FY 1987*
ACCESS PROCEDURES
It
is recommended that the PSIC perform
all search and display for PsiLine. A client
would write, telephone, or contact the PSIC via modem to communicate a search request.
The PSIC would conduct the search and send the results in whatever display the client
preferred.
FEES
During FY 1987, the fee structure and distribution of revenue
(if any)
will be
determined.
For example, the fee structure for PsiLine may be similar to commercial rates,
such as Dialog, Psychinfo, Medline, and Dissertation Abstracts International.
PSIC proposes
that the charge for searching PsiLine would be $30 per hour, or 50 cents per minute.
This
fee would be halved for members of the Parapsychological Association (PA).
After the PSIC
upgrades to a faster microprocessor, the charge would be higher because more work could be
done per minute.
For printouts, the charge would be 20 cents per item for the No.
1 display
choice
(bibliographic citation plus abstract) and 60 cents for the No.
3 display
(full record).
These same rates would apply for members of the PA.
DEVELOPMENT OF STANDARDIZED VOCABULARY
An essential feature of PsiLine
will be a standardized vocabulary and thesaurus of terms.
It
is recommended that development of such a vocabulary be delayed until after the bulk of
the bibliographic information and abstracts for the parapsychological literature have been
entered.
*Note:
Above recommendations are from Subcontractor (PSCI)
to SRI International,
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