Can present methods for library and information retrieval service survive? (Panel)

When the need of the research people for keeping in touch with current and ongoing research in their field started to become acute new methods of librarianship were indicated. Progress of all research and their results are being reported at conferences in proceedings, in professional journals and in special reports. Because of the large volume of these materials, locating specific items of interest within this great bulk, to a scientist conducting research is of the essence. In depth indexing of these materials become the panacea to satisfy this new requirement. The need for currentness, the large volumes of materials, and the in depth identification of content suggested automatic processes which resulted in the development of several specialized information retrieval centers, each specializing in the literature of a discipline or a profession. Basically, most of the centers followed a somewhat similar approach. A policy for acquisition of materials would be adopted based on needs and the center's available resources. These materials would be received at the centers, a document number would be assigned to each paper and passed on to indexers. The indexers would read each document and assign index terms to them, identifying information content. In some instances, where abstracts are not available, they would create them. A search file would consist of document numbers and their respective index terms stored in a machine readable form. An alphabetic list of all the terms used for indexing the literature in the given corpus would consititute a dictionary of index terms. A search request would be converted into a search strategy consisting of a logical combination of terms taken from the dictionary, using AND, OR, and NOT logic. The method of indexing by terms and coordinating their concepts at search time using Boolean logic is known as coordinate indexing. An output of a search request would consist of a set of document numbers or accession numbers which met the search strategy requirement. Abstracts relating to the accession numbers would constitute the bibliography which the originator of the search request receives. He then examines them and finds that many are not relevant to his need nor to his biblio- graphic request. The non relevant references are referred to as false drops. In addition to the false drops, he finds that some are only peripherally relevant and it is his decision as to which documents he wishes to pursue further or read in full.