Information dissemination and automatic information systems

Automatic information dissemination, search, and retrieval systems have become increasingly important in recent years, because of the urgency of the information problems themselves, and also because of a wide-spread feeling that computers can help in providing the much needed solutions. Over the past few years much has been learned about the design of automatic information systems and about the effectiveness of various types of analysis and search procedures. The present report reviews the principal techniques of interest and provides a forecast of the systems design and type of operations likely to be implemented in automatic information systems of the future. The information dissemination process is first examined in detail. The main functions and organization of information systems are then reviewed, and present capabilities are described using some of the currently existing operational systems as examples. Finally, future systems are considered, including in particular those based on automatic content analysis and on user-controlled searches. Specifically examined are author indexing and automatic analysis techniques, automatic typesetting and composition procedures, automatic and semiautomatic dictionary construction, and iterative search techniques.