The HDL Automated Information System

Book excerpt: The report reviews the purpose and development of the ABC system and presents the computer programs that were written and tested for the automatic construction and standardization of syntactical descriptors. Reasons of economy have overridden consideration of quality and have forced the installation to accept the analytical products of national and professional information centers rather than reprocess the items using the ABC system. The report contains a description of how the magnetic tapes distributed by national information centers are processed to provide the (under given conditions) best possible bibliographic (including SDI) services for HDL personnel; and presents also an outline of prototype test which is to estimate the inherent limitations of a proposed system and thus prevent further investments in a system if it has less potential capability than required by the application.