Machine‐readable output from online searches
Donald T. Hawkins · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1981
Abstract Machine‐readable output (MRO) from online searches is useful in the compilation of large bibliographies. Arrangements were made with a major online retrieval vendor to obtain (for a fee) output in the form of magnetic tape, rather than conventional offline prints on paper. A program was written to transform and process the data; part of this program is similar to a computer compiler. A method of checking for duplicate items was developed. MRO is cost‐effective and eliminates the time‐consuming and labor‐intensive data entry process. It is a natural extension of the powers of online retrieval systems.