USE OF STATUS FOR HOUSEKEEPING AT TOE DHSS Available to Purchase

Over the last two and a half years, the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) Library at Alexander Fleming House has been involved in a major automation project using STATUS, the powerful text‐retrieval package developed by the A.E.R.E. at Harwell. Text‐retrieval per se is not normally the province of VINE. However, in the case of the DHSS, STATUS is being used for what is by any standards a comprehensive rante of housekeeping tasks, including a novel linking of thesaurus terms with the Bliss classification numbers used. The system caters for acquisitions, cataloguing, catalogue enquiry, circulation, serials subscription control and serials distribution; in addition, it is used to produce copy for a range of DHSS Bulletins providing current awareness and abstracting services. The main database — DHSS‐DATA — is now also available online on the two hosts, namely Data‐Star and Scicon. It is, however, on the housekeeping aspects that the following account concentrates.