Card decks bring current awareness to users
Chemical & Engineering News · 1969
New techniques that use computerized information searching and retrieval from chemical journals may soon radically streamline the reading habits of chemists and chemical engineers. A system being pioneered in Britain offers a chemist a stack of index cards every two weeks bearing titles of articles covering his field of interest. The cards are printouts from twice-monthly searches of Chemical Abstracts Service tapes holding data on articles that appear in more than 1000 chemical journals. The chemist or chemical engineer long has faced foot-high piles of journals in his in-tray. Usually, he will be one on a long list of readers waiting to visually sift out articles of particular interest. He may have to read hundreds of titles to papers to find a few directly relevant to his field of work. Instead of spending two to three hours each week plowing through the journals, chemists can scan the cards in a matter of minutes, says Dr. ...