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This is the reason for the minimised services to scientific and technological departments or, as Dr. Urquhart has put it, the university library's “take it or leave it” attitude to its scientific readers. See Urquhart, Dr. D. J., “The Rising Tide of Paper”,Advancement of Science, XXI, 91 (September, 1964), pp. 279–285.
Price, Derek J. de Solla,Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 11–20.
The evidence for the information explosion is available in the experience of every practising scientist. Only one example must suffice here. On the basis of the number of abstracts inChemical Abstracts, Cahn has shown that the doubling time for chemical information between 1915 and 1963 was 8 years. See Cahn, R. S.,Survey of Chemical Publications (London: The Chemical Society, 1965), p. 65.
Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, “Survey of Information Needs of Physicists and Chemists”,Journal of Documentation,XXI, 2 (June, 1965), pp. 83–112.
Price, Derek J. de Solla,Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 62–91. Hagstrom, W. O.,The Scientific Community (New York: Basic Books, 1965), p. 163.
“Four Years of Information Exchange”,Nature, CCXI, 5052 (27 August, 1966), pp. 904–905.
The Physics Information Exchange is criticised in “Unpublished Literature”,Nature, CCXI, 5047 (23 July, 1966), pp. 333–334, and in “Preprints Galore”,Nature, CCXI, 5052 (27 August, 1966), pp. 897–898.
Menzel, H. (director, Bureau of Applied Social Research),The Flow of Information among Scientists (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 69.
Garvey, W. D., and Griffith, B. C., “Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology”,Science, CXLVI, 3652 (25 December, 1964), pp. 1655–1659.
Price, Derek J. de Solla, “The Scientific Foundations of Science Policy”,Nature, CCVI, 4981 (17 April, 1965), pp. 233–238. Professor Bernal disagrees with this view of the desire of scientists to write papers but not to read them. See Bernal, J. D., “Summary Papers and Summary Journals in Chemistry”,Journal of Documentation, XXI, 2 (June, 1965), pp. 122–127.
Menzel, H., —op. cit. “, p. 14.
The cards were kept by 63 scientists and engineers working on various research projects over a period of two months. Day by day records of “units of useful information obtained” were made on the cards, together with details of how these were traced. The notes issued with the diary cards defined a unit of information as normally equivalent to a printed account such as a single journal artikel or report. Information obtained orally or as a private communication had earlier been excluded from the survey owing to the difficulty of defining a unit of such information. The interview survey covered a sample of 50 scientists and engineers from the staff of the establishment. See Fishenden, R. M., “Methods by which Research Workers find Information”,Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information (Washington: National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, 1959), Vol. I, pp. 163–179.
Slater, M.,Technical Libraries: Users and their Demands (London: Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, 1964).
Slater, M., —op. cit., p. 39.
These three types of information need may be compared with the three basic “approaches to information” singled out by Voigt in his survey of Scandinavian scientists. Voigt's results were obtained by interview and he identified the “current approach”, the “exhaustive approach” and the “everyday approach”. The latter, which is equivalent to the need for specific and often factual information, he found to be the paramount need of the three. See Voigt, M. J.,Scientists' Approaches to Information (Chicago: American Library Association, 1961), p. 21.
Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, —op. cit.
Fishenden, R. M., “Information Use Studies Part 1: Past Results and Future Needs”,Journal of Documentation, XXI, 3 (September, 1965), pp. 163–168.
Martyn, J., “Unintentional Duplication of Research”,New Scientist, XXI, 377 (6 February, 1964), p. 338.
Martyn, J.,Report of an Investigation on Literature Searching by Research Scientists, (London: Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, 1964), pp. 10–11. Late discoveries of useful information were broken down in Martyn's survey as follows (in descending order of importance): (a) information which revealed unintentional duplication of other work; (b) information which, if known, would have fundamentally altered the plan of research; (c) information which did alter the plan of research; and (d) information which, if known, would have saved time, money or research work.
A survey of social and behavioural scientists, though on a smaller scale, found that “late finds” of useful or vital information had been experienced fairly frequently (up to 60 per cent. of individuals) and that many such finds had been made by accident. See Appel, J. S., and Gurr, T., “Bibliographic Needs of Social and Behavioural Scientists: Report of a Pilot Survey”,American Behavioural Scientist, VII, 10 (June, 1964), pp. 51–54.
In the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy survey a similar investigation was made, though from the point of view of testing out the invisible college hypothesis. No significant relationship was found between the incidence of late finds and the extent to which respondents favoured personal contacts as a source of information. See Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, —op. cit., p. 102. The Martyn survey was unable to find any significant differences between theoverall approaches to information of those who had made late finds and those who had not. See Martyn, J.,op. cit., p. 17.
Kessler, M. M.,Technical Information Flow Patterns (AD 261303, 1961).
Weinberg, A. M., “Second Thoughts on Scientific Information”,College and Research Libraries, XXV, 6 (November, 1964), pp. 463–471.
Martyn, J., —op. cit. “, p. 17.
Examples of these are to be found inPhysical Review Letters, VIII, 6 (15 March, 1962), which includes an article from CERN, Geneva, and Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires, Saclay, and another by H. N. Brown and 11 other scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in association with C. Baltay and four other scientists at Yale University.
Cleverdon, C. W.,ASLIB-Cranfield Research Project: Report on the Testing and Analysis of an Investigation into the Comparative Efficiency of Indexing Systems (Cranfield: College of Aeronautics, 1962), pp. 82–107. The punched feature card is often used in retrieval systems in preference to the conventional edge-punched card, since it simplifies the process of making a search. Each card represents a single feature or subject heading, and the code numbers of documents dealing with this subject are punched in the central area of the card.
Aitchison, J., and Cleverdon, C. W.,ASLIB-Cranfield Research Project: Report on a Test of the Index of Metallurgical Literature of Western Reserve University (Cranfield: College of Aeronautics, 1963), pp. 12–18.
Weinberg, A. M., —op. cit..
Kessler, M. M., “The M.I.T. Technical Information Project”,Physics Today, XVIII, 3 (March, 1965), pp. 28–36.
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Dannatt, R.J. Books, information and research: Libraries for technological universities. Minerva 5, 209–226 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02388525
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02388525