MONO91 Indexes Generated by Machine-Automatic Derivative Indexing chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards The important economic factor, however, is the total number of lines to be printed in the index, which is directly reflected in page costs. The effects of page costs, in turn, engender compromises in printing quality, such as page format and size of type. These are among the serious unresolved problems that affect user acceptance of KWIC indexes and involve questions of format, legibility, character sets, and size of the index. In general, however, in the present state of the art of KWIC indexing, the consensus seems to be that of qualified praise, especially for the early announcement and dis- 1/ semination applications. The KWIC index is recognized as responding to a definite need,- as having merit for fields in whi[OCRerr]h more conventional indexes do not exist as well as for current awareness searching,21 as receiving excellent response from users "because they can take a handy booklet, sit down at a table and look under the words they know and use, and which they expect other engineers to use in titles. 3/ Bernier and Crane, after considering comparative effectiveness data for subject as against word indexing, come to the following conclusions: `1Title lists keyed by words have value for quick distribution and fast use since time is often a very important element in the obtaining of information. Such lists do not serve adequately for thorough searching. ... A title concordance may be more use- ful than would seem from the . . . data on index entries. However, it must obviously be incomplete, must have many unnecessary entries, and would not prove suggestive enough to users who lack background in the subjects sought." 4/ Additional benefits can quite readily be obtained by taking advantage of the biblio- graphic information once it is in machine-readable form to provide selective KWIC indexes (Ba1z and Stanwood, 1963 L28],' Black, 1962 [65j; Carroll and Summit, 1962 [lOZj') machine retrieval of item citations by specified keywords. (Kennedy 1961 [OCRerr]11]) and selections of items geared to a Selective Dissemination of Information System (Barnes and Resnick, 1963 [36]; Balz and Stanwood, 1963 [28]). Gallianza and Kennedy at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, for example, report as being under development programs for the IBM 1401 and 7090 computers which will combine KWIC type indexing features with the logical search operators "AND", "OR", and "IF" in order that users may specify subject searches in ordinary English language terms. 1/ Clapp, 1963 [122], p. 7 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ Markus, 1962[394], p.19. Black, 1962 [65], p.316. Bernier and Crane, 1962 [56], p.120. National Science Foundation's' CR&D Report No.11, [430], p.42. 67