An analysis of output costs and procedures for an operational searching service

For more than two years the Center for Documentation and Communication Research of Western Reserve University has been actively engaged in operating the American Society for Metals Documentation Service. Since this has been a new venture in information retrieval, it is thought to be of sufficient interest to others to justify a report on our cost and operational experiences thus far. Five previous reports prepared under grant number G‐10338 for the National Science Foundation have been concerned primarily with the ‘input’ portion of an information retrieval system. Although this is the sixth in the series, it is the first to report specifically on the ‘output,’ i.e., the provision of answers to questions by means of machine searching. It discusses in detail the procedures and costs of conducting searches, and it exposes several of the important but not easily predicted variables which affect the entire cost structure. Unlike Report No. IV, which analyzed the ‘input’ costs of the Service and formulated a final figure of $6.503 per abstract, Report No. VI presents ranges of costs which are applicable only to given situations. Future papers will expand on the phases of ‘output’ which are mentioned only briefly here and will report on the progress made in improving and refining procedures and in establishing a more compact cost structure.