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The article presents information on oral history records at Columbia University. The Oral History material at Columbia University is housed in Special Collections of Butler Library, room 104, and is available for examination by qualified scholars on the premises only. It may not be reproduced, nor are we permitted, by the terms of agreement made with each donor, to loan the material to other institutions. About one third of the memoirs thus far obtained may not yet be examined by anyone, in most such cases until five years after the death of the authors.

To improve accessibility and maintenance of art slides in the United States Military Academy Library at West Point, a model card with a graphic image of the slide was designed with pertinent identifying information displayed directly above a black-and-white opaque photo and also key-punched into it. The card serves for ample comparison reference previous to handling the slides and can produce a subject-arranged permuted index in book form. The latter permits access from the approach of form, geographic area, name, time of origin, artist, school, or style, etc. Some added advantages, common to other kinds of graphic collections, are detailed. Estimated costs of photo-reproduction of original cards, various kinds of copies, and computer time and materials ore listed. Future benefits from a consistent, unified cataloging system for graphic objects and the dissemination of this kind of information in a network structure are indicated as major goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A definite need exists for an absolute and uniform means of comparison and evaluation of certain characteristics of various information retrieval systems. This paper is concerned only with the system's ability to satisfy queries; the effort and time used, and their relative costs, are not considered. Some past procedures that have been used are reviewed and discussed, along with some of the difficulties that arise when these procedures are followed. We present some desirable characteristics for a meaningful measure of effectiveness, then analyze in detail one such measure that may be used to compare the retrieval capabilities of a large variety of systems. This measure, called the "normalized sliding ratio," has a relation to the classical recall and precision ratios and may be looked on as a generalization of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process and compexity of scientific communication is presented in graphic form. A plan is presented for the development of a library network involving the National Agricultural Library and a selected group of libraries of land-grant colleges. The proposal is to cover the entire literature in the field of biology and agriculture by the method of each library assuming responsibility for a collection in depth in a given special subject area, and then, through an AIBS central clearing house, furnishing information and actual articles to all participating libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on microfiche, a piece of flat transparent film for reproducing pages or documents in microform. In a normal size print the title of the piece appears at the top of the long side of the sheet. The microfiche is made by means of an automatic step camera developed in The Netherlands by J. Goebel. The microfiche is made by means of an automatic step camera developed in the Netherlands by J. Goebel. This step camera can reduce up to twenty-five times. The book, or other text to be reproduced, is placed on the bookholder above which there is a glass plate.

Presents abstracts of research on documentation and librarianship. "A. I. A. Standard Filing System," by the American Institute of Architects; "Translating Spoken English Into Written Words," by Edmund C. Berkeley; "Biological Research--From Journal Article to Abstract"; "Conservation of Library Materials."

The article presents a bibliography of documentation which appears regularly in the journal "American Documentation." One of the notes provides that the Division of Biological Sciences of the National Science Foundation, for administrative purposes, has departed from conventional terminology, such as biochemistry, biophysics and physiology, in its system for grouping research projects into categories. For this purpose, biological sciences have been divided into areas covering the full spectrum of biology with the molecule at one extreme and the psyche at the other.

The article reports that the annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute will take place in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., on February 15, 1951. All sessions will be held in the Coolidge Auditorium. Dr. Raymund L. Zwemer, as chairman of the Program Committee, has planned an extraordinarily well integrated and stimulating series of papers. A special feature of the meeting will be an exhibit of documentation equipment in which will be displayed latest models of a wide range of devices useful in various aspects of documentation.

In this article the author presents information on the social image of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. According to the author, Roosevelt was an imaginative and foresighted man. But he could not have predicted the pertinence of his observation for the picture of him. The author remarks that with the publication of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in the journal American Documentation, his public image will gain new clarity. The purpose of the Roosevelt Project is to select for publication from approximately 100,000 letters written by Roosevelt those which reveal his thought and action in all the major and many of the minor undertakings of his private and public life.

The article presents a number of selected entries from the bibliography to the Committee on Organization of Information. One of them is titled "The Use of Punched Card Techniques in the Coding of Inorganic Compounds." It describes a system for coding on punched cards all chemical compounds, their serial numbers, structures, physical and biological properties, which was developed by the National Research Council's Subcommittee on Chemical Codification working under the auspices of the Council's Chemical Biological Coordination Center.

The article presents a profile of Alberto F. Thompson, the Head of the Office of Scientific Information of the National Science Foundation. Thompson was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, and did his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry from Harvard and was awarded the Parker Traveling Fellowship of Harvard, which enabled him to continue his studies at the University of Munich. One of the principal achievements of the Service under Thompson's leadership was the establishment of a major abstracting publication in the field of nuclear science. In November 1955, Thompson became Head of the Office of Scientific Information of the National Science Foundation where he undertook the development of a broad program designed to improve scientific communication.

This article reports that in the future it may become commonplace for some documents never to be issued in "original" or printed form, but to be reproduced from typewritten or "cold-type" copy directly by one of the processes of micro-photography. While it may also become commonplace in the future for every home and office to be equipped with its own reading machine, right now it appears that the best customers are librarians. Some of the libraries suggested that a retrospective "micro" publishing program should have a higher priority than a program to publish current materials.

This article presents information related to the auxiliary publications. By what is called auxiliary publication, microfilm supplements other forms of publication and makes accessible material of all sorts that cannot now be printed because of economic factors. It makes available valuable research data that otherwise would go unrecorded. It makes available out-of-print and rare books. It is adapted to the publication of photographs and other illustrations. Auxiliary publication service is auxiliary to established channels of scholarly publication and aids, and does not affect the publication of journals.

This article presents information about the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago, which was organized in July 1950. The conference was based on the subject of bibliographic organization. The program consisted of the presentation of fourteen papers presented over a period of six days. The primary objective of the conference was not to present a survey of existing facilities but rather to bring together a wide variety of points of view concerning the problems of bibliographic organization, and thereby to try to bring about an understanding, if not a consensus of opinion regarding basic problems which must be solved before an effective organization of the world of recorded materials can be developed.

The article presents information on the Management documentation preview that is announced by Documentation Inc. Management's Documentation Preview will feature reproductions of the contents pages of current periodicals and books in business and management. Regular scanning of Management's Documentation Preview will enable research minded management to keep abreast with the increasing volume of management literature.

Presents an abstract to the article "Sundry Suggestions on Divers Publication Issues," by J.E. Wallace Wallin, published in the journal "American Psychologist." Need of Christian name of the authors in order to indicate the sex of the contributors of a journal; Information that bibliographic references should contain the month of publication and the chronology of contributions; Agreements among the editors on the style requirements of the journal.

Presents an abstract of the article "This Cult of Brevity," by John H. Wilson, published in the journal "Chemical Education." Requirement of brevity in publications; Information that authors should be conventional, trite and understood; Comment that brevity propagates confusion rather than information.

Presents an abstract of the article "The Language of Science," by Charles E. Whitmore, published in the journal "Scientific Monthly." Information on the growth of scientific vocabularies; Comment that the total vocabulary of science is made up of the separate vocabularies of the several sciences; Description of a new complex terminology such as in astrophysics, geophysics and biophysics; Attempt to develop an international language called Interlingua.

Presents an abstract of the article "Physics Literature: A Reference Manual," by Robert H. Whitford. Information on a survey of physics literature at the college level; Description of efficient library methods; Comment that background materials have been interspersed for greater interest and information.

Presents an abstract to the article "The Communicator Athens Starts Pouring In," by Thomas Whiteside, published in the journal "The New Yorker." Role of Sylvester L. Weaver, president of the National Broadcasting Co. Inc. (NBC) in communications and cybernetics developments; Statement that one should think of working in NBC communications center with a thousand monitors being on tap and all information coming in live, film, and recorded and the index operated cybernetically with electronic push buttons; Description of communications problem.

Presents an abstract of the journal ""Some Photographic Copying Methods Useful in Libraries," by Karl M. Weigert. Information on the use of photographic copying by the library visitors who wish to record quickly and cheaply small parts of articles or books for further study; Description of different methods of making photographic copies; Report that Leica Auxiliary Equipment is applied where only ordinary room light was available.