This compilation of miscellaneous information about the San Mateo Educational Resources Center (SMERC) was designed as a reference tool for SMERC linking agents, i.e., SMERC-trained personnel responsible for explaining their center's information services to subscribing agencies. It contains SMERC subscription information: listings of resources and…

A staff improvement course was developed by an intern at the technical information center (TIC) at Owens-Illinois, Inc. (O-I). First an analysis was made of the information center itself--its goals, services, literature search procedures, information sources, and the function of the information representative-analysts. Next a comparison was made…

An information retrieval system was developed using technical word occurrences as a basis for classification. A set of words, designated a vocabulary, was selected from the middle range of frequency listing of words occurring in an experimental sample of 94 documents. The selection produced 115 non-function words with technical definition that did…

This experiment used five index languages to form nine different index files to the same collection of documents. Each index term, in each language, was treated in two ways: as an independent English term, and as a coded entry in a faceted-type thesaurus which specified relationships between terms. The performance effect of the thesaurus was then…

TRIAL is an information processing system that will perform editing, indexing, and retrieval of textual and certain types of numeric information. The system allows for: (1) the creation and maintenance of a master file, (2) indexing on words designated as 'key' words or, alternatively, on every word in the text, excluding those common terms that…

This report describes for the potential user a set of procedures for processing textual materials on-line. In this preliminary model an information analyst can scan through messages, reports, and other documents on a display scope and select relevant facts, which are processed linguistically and then stored in the computer in the form of logical…

This dissertation presents a pragmatic interpreter/translator called Real English to serve as a natural language man-machine communication interface in a multi-mode on-line information retrieval system. This multi-mode feature affords the user a library-like searching tool by giving him access to a dictionary, lexicon, thesaurus, synonym table,…

The Text-Pac System is capable of generating indexes and bulletins to provide a current information service without the selectivity feature. Indexes of the accumulated data base may also be used as a basis for manual retrospective searching. The manual search involves searching computer-prepared indexes from a machine readable data base produced…

Experience of browsing with a text retrieval system is reported. The technique discussed consists of adding and deleting query terms on successive interactive cycles. The number of hits consistently increased, while the number of false drops consistently decreased on successive cycles. The search system used allows non-Boolean free form query…

The objectives of this paper are to describe the effect of using weighted index terms in a document retrieval system, and to evaluate retrieval performance when queries are expanded by terms occurring in clusters with the query terms. Three data collections, each indexed by several methods, two of which were studied and reported on in previous…

WISE-ONE is a bibliographic information retrieval system which is designed to perform keyword searches of such data-bases as the ERIC RESUMAST and the ERIC CIJEMAST. Produced as a result of the search are the ERIC citation numbers, titles, authors, and, in the case of the journal file, the journal citation. Because WISE-ONE allows for nesting of…

Words and word fragments from the computer-readable data bases "Chemical Abstracts Condensates" and "Biological Abstracts Previews" were analyzed in terms of length, number, and frequency of appearance to determine some parameters upon which inversion of these data bases could be predicated. Types (unique words or fragments)…

The major objective of the IITRI Computer Search Center is to educate and link industry, academia, and government institutions to chemical and other scientific information systems and sources. The Center was developed to meet this objective and is in full operation providing services to users from a variety of machine-readable data bases with…

The study compares the retrieval effectiveness of two alternative input and search systems in terms of such measures as recall, fallout, precision, and total retrieval. One system uses manually indexed document files searched by controlled vocabulary, while the other employs fulltext input using natural language searching. Both systems are applied…

Contained in this report are the results of the second phase (July, 1968 - June, 1970) of the File Organization Project, directed toward the development of a facility in which the many issues relating to the organization and search of bibliographic records in on-line computer environments could be studied. The papers in this volume deal…