A SINGLE COMPUTER‐BASED SYSTEM FOR BOTH CURRENT AWARENESS AND RETROSPECTIVE SEARCH: OPERATING EXPERIENCE WITH ASSASSIN

ASSASSIN as designed and operated by ICI Agricultural Division, provides from, a single paper tape input a current awareness service by SDI and a retrospective search both by a weighted term machine search and printed KWOC‐type indexes. Programs for producing structured thesauri are part of the package. Input is in the form of abstracts from both published and internal sources. The system has operated for more than a year at the Agricultural Division and is currently in use at five other locations. Flexibility of the package is demonstrated by the variety of applications. This paper outlines the various applications and shows how a single package may be used complete, or in part, or with modification. Machine costs are given for the major application. The system was designed with the possible input of externally produced machine readable data in mind. The intended application of the package in conjunction with tapes such as those of the Institute for Scientific Information source and Chemical Abstracts Condensates is outlined.