Reexamines the feasibility of automatic thesaurus generation by establishing a framework for analyzing the degree of correspondence between automatically generated thesauri and a thesaurus of the same terms constructed by subject specialists. (Author/FM)

In November 1982, questionnaires were sent to 1400 public, secondary school, academic, and special libraries in Massachusetts to determine their use of computers for various activities. Of the 778 respondents, 282 (36.2%) reported automation of some kind and an additional 105 (13.5%) indicated that they were planning some automation within a year.…

Over the last decade, studies of online catalogs have revealed that they frequently discourage users. Subject queries often fail to produce retrievals or produce retrieval sets that are too large and unwieldy to be easily scanned. Research shows that users are seeking alternative approaches to those that manipulate the subject headings in catalog…