Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Abstract
Librarians must look to the future information needs of a country
expanding in population, technology and educational requirements.
The "information explosion" is placing an additional strain on existing
methods of providing information rapidly and economically.
A library seeking to develop a modern information retrieval
program has many existing services from which to choose. The problem
is to define the program that will best serve the present library
users and leave room for flexible action in the future, and then to
pick a combination of services that best match these objectives.
Documentation Incorporated (Doc Inc) of Bethesda, Maryland,
was founded in 1952 by the late Dr. Mortimer Taube, and has been
engaged in developing modern information retrieval systems for
government and industry. A key concept that is now emerging is the
development of mechanized or computerized data banks. This data
bank concept is a plan for organizing a single set of data for producing
many products. The traditional library card catalog or data bank,
long the key to finding materials in the nation's libraries, today is
getting competition from book catalogs. Using data bank techniques
to keep a library catalog updated, Doc Inc computer systems generate
printouts of the catalog which are used to produce bound books for
distribution to library users. In effect, the book catalogs are carrying
the traditional card catalog, literally, into the homes and offices
of users instead of requiring them to trek to the library to find out
if the information they want is available. The computer is used to
produce several indexes (such as subject, author, and title) in various
formats from a single file of data and is particularly effective if
the catalog data bank is standardized.published or submitted for publicatio