Highlights of the Senate Report on Information Indexing and Retrieval

Abstract

Bibliographic frustration is an increasingly common ailment among social scientists. The root of the affliction is a far-flung abundance of materials on a given subject, its major symptom a persistent uneasyness that some significant material has been over looked. The physical sciences have felt the full brunt of the problem; it is con servatively estimated that 1,250,000 original technical papers will be published throughout the world in 1960. One major approach to the problem has been the de velopment of mechanized systems of information and processing and retrieval, by both private and governmental organizations. The U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations has recently prepared a comprehensive report on the present status of such systems. We present here some of the significant findings of that report,² with an in junction for behavioral scientists: "Go thou and do likewise."