THE DESIGN OF AN INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE LITERATURE OF ROCK MECHANICS

This case history describes an information system, using data‐processing techniques, with the following characteristic features: it is designed to serve an interdisciplinary group of workers, whose literature is widely scattered; the users themselves are taking an active part in the development and operation of the system; the large back‐log of past literature is being processed into the system with minimal effort; a variety of tools for both current awareness and retrospective search is being developed, with subject approaches via title words, keywords, facet codes, broad subject codes, and user profile codes; the relative value of these approaches will be evaluated; some of these tools are manually searched, others will be mechanically searched; some are derived from simpler data‐processing equipment, others from the computer; the system is integrated so that all these tools are derived from a single intellectual and clerical input; the system can be flexibly expanded to incorporate more literature, more users, more complex use, and wider subject scope.