The costs of creating and maintaining permanent files and retrieving keyword title indexes in TRIAL (Technique for Retrieving Information from Abstracts of Literature) are presented. This system, which is used for bibliographic control and file efficiency, is relatively easy to learn and use, and popular with school, academic, business, and…

Educational administration is an applied professional field that is more like medicine and law than it is like sociology or economics. However, education has struggled for years to take a broad and somewhat ill-defined field of endeavor and create a hard discipline. This attempt has helped separate the practitioner and the professor. Collaborative…

This paper documents procedures for maintaining and updating the National Education Practices File, a program designed to identify needs in education and to develop a resource system for educators. Each feature is discussed with emphasis on major issues. Documentation of procedures and discussion of issues are based on experiences of the file…

Prepared to introduce the user to advanced scientific and technical information services and systems (STI/SS), this guide emphasizes computer searches, helping the user to set the bounds of his or her problem, to define the way the literature is stored in the computer, and to develop an improved problem statement with which to enter the computer.…

One of four projects conducted by the American Statistical Association (ASA) in cooperation with the Bureau of the Census, the conference explored the most important and fruitful research and development topics within the user-oriented software domain. Its objectives were to (1) develop recommendations on mechanisms to improve access to and use of…

The World Energy Data System (WENDS) allows qualified users on-line access to non-classified management level data on worldwide energy technology and research and development activities. Information is arranged on textual pages and available by means of a simple accessing procedure. Described in this report are the WENDS concept and approach, the…

This survey of online search service centers in Canada was conducted to provide data on these centers and, more specifically, on the characteristics of the human search intermediary; and to provide an accurate overall picture of online searching in Canada. The survey questionnaires were mailed to approximately 765 Canadian customers of seven…

One response to the large and rapidly growing number of legal cases with which nonlawyer researchers must deal is computerized legal data retrieval technology. LEXIS, an example of such technology, improves upon traditional research tools in two ways: it increases the speed with which researchers may discover relevant documents and, through its…

This report discusses the management of scientific and technical bibliographic data bases by the Federal Government, the existence of overlapping and duplicative bibliographic information services, the application of cost recovery principles to bibliographic information services, and the need to manage information as a resource. Questionnaires…

The future of information resources management requires new approaches to implementing systems which will include a type of data base management that frees users to solve data processing problems logically by telling the system what they want, together with powerful non-procedural languages that will permit communication in simple, concise…

Findings of this detailed analysis of the problems and errors present in the 1977 University of California Union List of Serials (UCULS-77) identify four major problem areas: (1) variations in campus cataloging practices (such as choice, form, and content of entry), the existence of both brief listed and fully cataloged titles, and the presence of…

An interactive search and editing system, 3RIP, is being developed at the library of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm for large files of textual and numeric data. A substantial part (on the order of 10-E9 characters) of the primary file of the search system will consist of bibliographic references from a wide range of sources. If the…

The data center and the user offices at a public university have a responsibility to maintain security and to protect the privacy of the individuals whose data they process. This persists even though much personal data are accessible in libraries. How to identify "private" data, what security precautions to take to protect these data…

Costs and cost-related factors connected with providing on-line search services through the public library are examined. The examination was based on preliminary results from an on-going evaluation of an experimental program (DIALIB). In the DIALIB experiment Lockheed's DIALOG search service was available to the public through four public…

A cost analysis was made of on-line bibliographic searching in four public libraries in the San Francisco Bay Area using the Lockheed DIALOG system. The study involved monitoring the time that 35 individuals in the libraries spent processing some 411 search requests. The study identified a set of seven tasks that are performed for each request and…