Problems in the use of electronic data processing (EDP) in biological collections are explored. To accomplish this, the uses of EDP, actual and potential, are first set forth. The uses are divided into three groups, depending on the source from which the relevant information is obtained. The problems themselves are then grouped into nine mutually exclusive categories. Each problem is discussed in detail. The concept of a decision context is introduced. Its use in making the overall decision as to whether or not EDP should be used in a particular situation is explained. A questionnaire on the problems of EDP in biological collections was returned by 22 curators. Their comments are incorporated into the appropriate places of the text.

Problems in the use of electronic data processing in biological collections

s (and other short surrogates for the complete text) of a document have been generally considered a valuable aid to the reader in quickly determining the relevance of a document (as well as, in some cases, serving as a substitute for reading the text, and as a separate surrogate in secondary services). A test of this hypothesis was conducted in the form of a field experiment in three military laboratories. Based on what a sample of 85 scientists and engineers reported on the time they took and the relevance judgments they made with respect to the documents which came across their desks over a four week period, there does not appear to be any evidence to support the assumption that abstracts, accompanying a document, have any significant effect.

The Functions of Abstracts in the Initial Screening of Technical Documents by the User.

The challenges of design of programming systems, file organization and manipulation, and user-oriented query languages have held the spotlight in the development of data processing support to systems for retrieval of scientific literature. At BIOSIS, development of such a system from the pragmatic viewpoint of providing viable self-supporting retrieval service from a data base of more than two million references has resulted in focusing attention on supporting the formulation of the information need into an effective computer search specification. Developed under CPS and now implemented under CICS, the program claims no novelty of structure or technique, but constitutes an innovation in application and goal with primary emphasis on accommodating the behavior of a user not previously knowledgeable about the structure, indexing language, and detailed content of a machine based references file.

Breaking the communication barrier between searcher and literature file: An interactive guide

N a t i o n a l A g r i c u l t u r a l G U . S . A . M o n t h l y , 2 , 5 0 0 $ 2 6 . 5 0 9 4 , 2 3 8 L i b r a r y e x c e p t n o D e c e m b e r a n n o u n c e m e n t i s s u e B i o s c i e n c e s I n f o r m a t i o n N U . S . A . S e m i M o n t h l y $ 8 0 0 , $ 6 4 0 n o n p r o f i t 1 2 5 , 0 2 6 S e r v i c e o f B i o l o g i c a l a n d i n d i v .

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Study and Comparison of the Indexing of the "Bibliography of Agriculture" in Relation to the Indexing of 15 Other Secondary Services.

The growing science of virology has witnessed a parallel expansion of its literature. This study was undertaken to demonstrate that this specialty literature can be efficiently extracted from the broader data base of general biology in which it is contained. The scope and coverage of virology literature by BIOSIS was reviewed in the study which was based on manual and computer-supported identification of more than 2300 virology papers announced in Biological Abstracts (BA) and its sister publication over a five-month period. Papers announced had been drawn from 495 different sources representing 44 different countries and eight fields of science other than microbiology and were printed in 20 sections of BA other than those dealing directly with virology. Nearly two-thirds of the virology abstracts in BA originally appeared in journals published outside the United States; approximately half of these foreign abstracts were taken from Russian sources. The techniques of retrieval and further results of the study are presented.

Louise Schultz

Papers

Direct User Access to the Biological Literature Through Abstracts: A Cooperative Experiment in Customized Service