Chapter 6. Handling the Products of the Information Search

Having found interesting references, your next task is to make good use of them. This involves obtaining the corresponding full-text documents, critical examination of the material, organisation of the information, possibly in some form of personal database, and incorporation into your personal frame of knowledge. This provides the starting-point for further work.

6.1 Obtaining the documents

Typical user requirements with regard to obtaining the original documents are:

The right information, at the right time and for a reasonable cost.

Over the years interlending systems have been developed between libraries for the acquisition of material from other libraries, in the form of loans or copies. There are local, national and international interlending and document supply systems. The latter make use of large document archives and suppliers, for example:

• BLDSC - The British Library Document Supply Centre - in Boston Spa outside York, UK, currently hold some 160,000 periodicals of which 60,000 are current periodicals.
• CNRS-INIST - Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique - at Vandoeuvre- lès-Nancy, in France.
• Universitätsbibliothek und Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), Hannover, Germany.
• Instituto de Información y Documentación en Ciencia y Tecnologiá, Madrid, Spain.

UnCover2 - Colorado Association of Research Libraries and Blackwells - aiming at including the contents of some 20,000 journals. This service is available via the Internet.

INSIDE INFORMATION -British Library and EBSCO - providing details of articles from 10,000 of the most frequently used journal titles at BLDSC. This database is available online throughout the UK and in Scandinavia, from BIDS - the Bath Information & Data Services.

Article Express International - a document delivery service for scientific and technical literature provided by Engineering Information in co-operation with DIALOG. This covers both journal articles and conference papers.

Choice of supplier and/or method for document supply is important with respect to three criteria:

1. satisfaction rate - as regards the documents requested
2. speed of document delivery
3. cost

The customer now has a lot of choice with regard to document ordering. If you want a document very quickly, direct ordering and fax delivery is probably the quickest, but this will cost you at least 15 US$ per article. The national interlibrary lending system tends to be cheaper but slower. A good document delivery service will achieve a balance between the three criteria and will at the same time be both reliable and flexible. It is important to remember that user needs vary greatly. For instance, an engineer or businessman who desperately needs a document might be willing to pay a high fee in order to have the document delivered as quickly as possible, whereas other customers might prefer to wait longer to receive a document at a low cost. It should be noted that "low cost" is often interpreted as "for free"!

6.2 The arrangement of a document collection

• the volume and rate of growth of the material;
• available resources - equipment, computer storage;
• retrieval possibilities - author, title, subject, chronological sequence, combination of several headings.

1. alphabetically under names of authors;
2. numerically according to accession number (accession = when acquired);
3. under subject headings, which can be arranged systematically or alphabetically. The choice of a suitable systematic arrangement for subject headings requires care and takes time. If there are relatively few documents, and these can be conveniently grouped under a few headings, then a simple storage system can work very well. If you are handling a larger quantity of documents, or if you are arranging documents under accession numbers, then you will need some kind of index or register, in order to find the documents quickly.

6.2.1 Manual indexing systems

6.2.2 The Computerised Personal Reference System

6.2.3 The database

Example of a record:
When you are constructing a personal reference system, it is extremely important to design the structure of the record in a clear and logical way and to be sure that you have included all the fields that you might want to search in the future. The following "pattern" would be suitable for use for references:

AUTHOR(S)*       Sullivan, John          

TITLE*           Economic analysis of a proposed industrial robot

SOURCE*          Mechanical Engineering. Vol.45 (1993) 6, pp.118-126.

KEYWORDS Robotics, Control systems, Forging, Optimisation, 
                Hydraulic drive, Computer simulation

ABSTRACT The article presents a simple program, written in C+, that is capable 
                of quickly answering  questions that arise during economic 
                justifications of robots. This is carried out by means of an after-tax 
                worth assessment of cash flow differences between the manual 
                operation and the robot application.

DOC.TYPE Journal Article

LANGUAGE English

PUBL.YEAR        1996

COMMENTS Useful review (156 refs.)

When designing the database for your personal reference system, it is a good idea to experiment with different record structures.

6.2.4 Storing and retrieving information

• Enter information (Write)
• Read stored information
• Edit or amend records
• Manipulate and sort information
• Append information from other files etc.
• Search for specified information
• Obtain output in various forms
• Exit

6.2.5 Software for personal bibliographic systems

• EndNote with EndLink (available for IBM PC and Macintosh);
• Papyrus (IBM only, Macintosh version under development);
• Pro-Cite (available for IBM PCs and Macintosh);
• Reference Manager (Available for IBM PC and Macintosh).

For the personal record system, based on any of the above software, a number of features are important:

1. The ability to search on text strings of variable length.
2. The possibility of using boolean operators.
3. The possibility for truncation.
4. The number of search criteria that can be used in a single statement.
5. Sorting capabilities.

6.3 Writing Abstracts

• A short statement, showing the purpose for which the article was written.
• A description of how the research was carried out. This might include an analytic method, a design technique, a system concept, experimental methods, collection of data, tests etc.
• An analysis of the main results.
• The conclusions, including an indication of the logic or interpretation involved in their production.
• Pointers to future research work and applications.

• Read the paper over several times to obtain an overview of its contents.
• Mark material for inclusion in the structure of the abstract.
• Produce brief entries under a number of headings.

6.4 Writing a Review

• as a free-standing account of a research in a given subject field. You might, for example, do this at the start of a project. This type of review might contain ideas about future directions for your own work.
• at the start of a project, and perhaps containing speculation on the direction that the work might take;
• as an introduction to an experimental paper.
• as the introduction to a thesis.

• The impulsive method. Here you just set pen to paper, without prior organisation. The attractions of spontaneity are offset by faults in logic, style and language. Time is required for revision.
• The piecemeal approach. You start with a knowledge of the required shape for the review, but the insertion of information in distinct pieces leads to a loss of coherence and some pieces prove difficult to fit in.
• The inverted pyramid. You present the conclusions first and then proceed to assimilate a diversity of information in justifying those conclusions. Although perhaps difficult to write, the product is easy to follow.
• The systematic approach. A skeleton of the review is critically prepared and then clothed with information. Easy to write, the product is well balanced between its parts.

6.5 Writing References