An effective and reliable computerised system for storage and retrieval of references to scientific publications.

A suite of programs has been implemented to facilitate the storage and retrieval of references to published works in a typical scientific research establishment. The retrieval process is governed by searches for specified combinations of keywords, author names, individual references, and lengths of time that references have been held on file. The system currently caters for approximately 1290 journals together with abstracts, reports, supplements, symposia, proceedings and books. Five years experience has proved the system to be reliable and effective, and it requires only 1.5 technician-days per week to operate it and to input about 25 000 articles annually. This system fulfills a requirement felt by many specialised institutions in providing localised control over quantities of information which are too large to be processed manually.