Use of the ERIC database is explained in the 1980 edition of the guide. Presented first are the major components of the ERIC document collection and journal index, including the thesaurus, indexes, and source materials. A step-by-step procedure for searching Resources in Education (document index) and Current Index to Journals in Education by…

This manual is intended to provide users with a description of the information required by the New York State Library to adequately process a database search. Sections cover computer searching, what it and its advantages are; topic suitability; turnaround time for receipt of a database printout; reference interview to determine search topic;…

Developed for biology students, this handbook discusses categories of various types of reference books and other information sources, and presents a step-by-step approach to the logical, systematic, and comprehensive way in which library resources may be used to locate information on the biological sciences. An accompanying bibliography lists…

Based on a series of studies performed by ERIC/Information Resources staff and consultants which focused on the activities of over 40 experienced online searchers, this report offers the following suggestions for enhancing certain online retrieval system features and making improvements in ERIC vocabulary: (1) the implementation of an online…

This collection of search formulations was assembled to assist in Dialog Searching of the ERIC data base. The formulations represent modular building blocks or concepts that occur frequently when searching this file. They have been formulated and described in such a way that they can be used as given, or they can be modified to suit specific…

An experiment was conducted to identify some of the important parameters affecting search time, a critical cost factor in retrieval systems. Using actual computer searches of Chemical Abstracts Condensate, a comparison was made between the effectiveness of linear and inverted filing systems. Since the results indicated that it was the type and…

Differences in judged relevance of Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) abstracts identified by two different information systems were investigated. A national semi-private educational service agency which utilizes mechanical searching of the research literature was one information system, while the other was a regional,…

INFOL for the CDC 6400 is a rewrite in FORTRAN IV of the CDC 3600/3800 INFOL (Information Oriented Language), a generalized information storage and retrieval system developed by the Control Data Corporation for the CDC 3600/3800 computer. With INFOL, selected pieces of information are extracted from a file and presented to the user quickly and…

This paper reports an experiment in on-line retrieval using man-machine dialogue on a remote console. Message editing procedures and the use of two command languages are described. The system employs a PDP-8 computer for generating, proofreading, and editing messages, and an IBM 7040 computer for information retrieval processing. The symbolic…

This is the third in a series of eight reports of a research study for the National Agricultural Library (NAL) on the effective utilization of bibliographic data bases in machine-readable form. It consists of about 750 references collected to provide background data for the seven technical tasks of the study. The bibliography is set up to…

Three indexes to a collection of 3204 documents in the field of chemistry were test searched. The indexes are a keyword from title index without added keywords, a keyword from title index with added keywords, and a single access point per document alphabetic subject index. The three indexes were searched by 14 graduate chemistry students with 66…

A series of five batches of twenty searches were carried out in a three year span of the INSPEC data base by the 31 Company's Information Retrieval Service. The same queries were processed manually in the corresponding volumes of Science Abstracts and comparison of the output of each search method exposed reasons for the failures. Emphasis is laid…

Part Two of the eighteenth report on Salton's Magical Automatic Retriever of Texts (SMART) project is composed of three papers: The first: "The Effect of Common Words and Synonyms on Retrieval Performance" by D. Bergmark discloses that removal of common words from the query and document vectors significantly increases precision and that…

From experimental work performed, and reported upon in this document, it is concluded that converting the New York State Library (NYSL) shelf list sample to machine readable form, and searching this shelf list using a remote access catalog are technically sound concepts though the capital costs of data conversion and system installation will be…

The design of an English-like query language and an interactive computer environment for searching the full text of the U.S. patent collection are discussed. Special attention is paid to achieving a transparent user interface, to providing extremely broad search capabilities (including nested substitution classes, Kleene star events, and domain…