Feature Articles
Conversion of Bibliographic Information to Machine Readable Form Using On-line Computer Terminals (p.217-226)
FREDERICK M. BALFOUR
A description of the first six months of a project to convert to machine readable form the entire shelf list of the Libraries of the State University of New York at Buffalo. IBM DATATEXT, the on-line computer service which was used for the conversion, provided an upper- and lower-case typewriter which transmitted data to disk storage of a digital computer. Output was a magnetic tape containing bibliographic information tagged in a modified MARC I format. Typists performed all tagging at the console. All information except diacriticals and non-Roman alphabets was converted. Direct costs for the first six months were $.55 per title.
Bibliographic Retrieval from Bibliographic Input; The Hypothesis and Construction of a Test (p.227-238)
FREDERICK H. RUECKING
A study of problems associated with bibliographic retrieval using unverified input data supplied by requesters. A code derived from compression of title and author information to four, four-character abbreviations each was used for retrieval tests on an IBM 1401 computer. Retrieval accuracy was 98.67%
Automatic Retrieval of Biographical Reference Books (p.239-249)
CHERIE B. WEIL
A description of one of the first projected attempts to automate a reference service, that of advising which biographical reference book to use. Two hundred and thirty-four biographical books were categorized as to type of subjects included and contents of the uniform entries they contain. A computer program which selects up to five books most likely to contain answers to biographical questions is described and its test results presented. An evaluation of the system and a discussion of ways to extend the scheme to other forms of reference work are given.
Compression Word Coding Techniques for Information Retrieval (p.250-260)
WILLIAM R. NUGENT
A description and comparison is presented of four compression techniques for word coding having application to information retrieval. The emphasis is on codes useful in creating directories to large data files. It is further shown how differing application objectives lead to differing measures of optimality for codes, though compression may be a common quality.
MARC II and COBOL (p.261-272)
HENRIETTE D. AVRAM AND JULIUS R. DROZ
A description of the machine processing of MARC II records using COBOL for an application of the Library of Congress System 360/30. Emphasis is on the manipulation by COBOL of highly complex variable length MARC records containing variable length fields.