The ROLE OF The OFFICE FOR SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION (OSTI) Available to Purchase

Technical information centres of one type or another span the whole range of intellectual effort and activity. At one end there are small one‐man collections of material used by one or two groups of individuals, and at the other there are the very large collections, open to all comers, held by scientific and technical Government agencies. The role of OSTI at the present time is to provide support for a comparatively recent type of information centre, which we call a specialized information centre, for the purposes of experimentation and evaluation. This type of centre is now called an information analysis centre in the USA, and the importance attached to this information technique can be judged by the fact that there are now approximately two hundred such centres operating there.