User perception of data importance and the economic feasibility of hardware and storage devices will determine the future direction of online systems. A retrieval system's functions are ultimately dictated by database design. Early online sytems were designed for bibliographic information limited to citations only using sequential files. When…

Developed from presentations given at a 3-day invitational meeting of 31 leading online catalog designers from both public and private sectors in North America, these papers provide information about online catalogs--their present form, their use, and the questions that need to be considered in their future refinement. All of the papers in this…

The report describes a large-scale computerized system for Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) developed over the past five years at the U.S. Army Electronics Command to serve its technical personnel. The system, which uses as its document base the current accessions of the Defense Documentation Center, was developed in three phases: (1)…