A KWIC step to computer history
Suzan Deighton · ITNOW · 1979
The British Computer Society Library has a large collection of pamphlets which has been built up over the years from members’ donations. When the Library moved to The City University in 1967 there were 1,500. Today it is estimated that there are over 3,000. When the collection arrived at the Institution of Electrical Engineers it was parcelled up in cardboard boxes and was apparently not indexed. We were faced with the problem of what to do with it: traditional indexing methods would have been too slow to cope with such a large collection. The problem has been solved by the use of a computer produced KWIC-type index. A suite of computer programs had already been written by one of the IEE information officers to produce a KWIC index for another collection. The programs were easily adaptable to the BCS collection. KWIC is an acronym for Key Word In Context. In a KWIC-type index an entry for a document is made under each keyword in the title of the document. This method of indexing is particularly effective for technical papers as the titles are generally descriptive. The programs also produce an author index with entries under up to three authors. The pamphlets are given a serial number, which includes two digits to indicate the year of publication, and are filed in numerical order.