المكتبات الفنية - صنع الحاسبات .. الحاسبات تعمل

Technical Libraries - Making Computers .. Computers work

Technical Libraries

The number of books, articles and technical reports doubles every ten years or less, thus generating a huge amount of information on any subject. The computer is also used in this field to prepare indexes to facilitate the investigation of the required technical information. This indexing system depends on the keywords in the titles of scientific articles. First, some letters and short words are removed from these titles that are coupled with others and do not greatly affect the meaning of the title, such as the definite article "al", prepositions, demonstrative pronouns and the like. The average length of the title then becomes between five and seven words, each of which may be suitable as a keyword. This title appears in the full index between five and seven times, each with a different keyword.

In some cases, special punched cards are used to enter information into the computer (the figure above). The figure below shows a card that has not yet been punched.

For example, suppose the title of an article is “Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data,” which can be abbreviated to “Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data,” and it has four keywords as follows:

Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data
Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data
Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data
Introduction to Control Systems with Physical Data

The word “introduction” is not considered a keyword because it has no specific scientific meaning. The title of this article appears four times in the full index.

Although the computer creates and stores the indexes, it can decide which titles actually mean a given topic, so a human researcher must do this task. For example, if the researcher is looking for control systems with physical data, the computer may give him a large number of titles that contain the keyword (data), but they are not related to control systems. This can be avoided by assigning groups of articles to specific topics by human workers. These references are then stored in the computer. If he is asked for information about a certain topic, he prepares a list of titles from the group of articles related to that topic.

Similar systems to the above are used to provide technical information to engineers and scientists about the products that interest them. This product selection system aims to prepare a list of products and the companies that produce them that an engineer may request in a specific field from among tens of thousands of devices and available parts.

Information about all current or new products in all engineering fields is stored in the computer. A cross-reference index is prepared that relies on keywords and assigns to each product a word and a code consisting of a distinctive letter and number, provided that the letter is the same for all products prepared for similar applications. The information seeker enters this letter in his inquiry, and the computer searches in His classifications are about products that have the same letter in their code, and he selects them, then prints the name of their producer, his address, and a brief description of them.