An "answer-passage" is a passage which is either answer-providing or "answer indicative." New text searching techniques for the retrieval of answer-passages are discussed. Appendices listing thesauri, glossaries and dictionaries, syntactic joints, and connector words are included. (31 references) (Author/RS)

A little understood aspect of implementing on-line software is the problem of effective monitoring. Northwestern University has developed techniques to monitor an on-line information retrieval system, by using that system both to monitor itself and to process the data collected. The Remote Information Query System is a batch and on-line…

The personal literature search of a scientist is strongly governed by subjective influences. If he delegates his query, he must be aware of the problems emanating from this subjectivity. The information scientist, on the other hand, must consider the subjective character of the fundamental notions of information and order. (33 references)…

A uniterm keyword system is explained which is thought to be suitable for small information centers operated by a staff of one or two. (3 references) (Author)

A new microfilm system at Ohio State University provides complete information about all of the institution's alumni. (Editor/HS)

The Information Flow System is a large-scale information retrieval system developed for processing of Du Pont information files. As currently implemented, the system stores and retrieves information on company technical reports. Extensions of the system for handling chemical structure information and on-line processing are also discussed. (3…

The paper describes TSAR, a current awareness or SDI system which has been developed for processing MARC records in general, but is particularly concerned with the INSPEC service. Some statistics on the frequency of occurrence of words and comments on data compression conclude the paper. (7 references) (Author/SJ)

Advantages of the Berkeley Mass Storage System (MSS) for information retrieval other than its size are: high serial-read rate, archival data storage; and random-access capability. By use of this device, the search cost in an SDI system based on the Nuclear Science Abstracts" data base was reduced by 20 percent. (6 references) (Author/NH)

Causes of Boolean failures to retrieve relevant MEDLARS index references are: search formulator failed to include important terms, indexer failed to include important terms, and misunderstanding of user's needs. On the evidence of this test the Probabilistic search is at least a partial solution to these problems. (8 references) (Author/NH)

Interactive systems must be designed to furnish error information to the user and must be able to accept a modification to the input and continue to cycle until convergence on the desired output is reached. (10 references) (Author)

The entire issue is devoted to reporting the Eighth Annual National Information Retrieval Colloquium, which was held in Philadelphia on May 6-7, 1971. (NH)

Using 20 question-document pairs and the document corpus that had been searched to find them, a small-scale study was made of how effectively answer-providing documents can be retrieved by text searching. (MF)