ISR11 Design Consideration for Time Shared Automatic Documentation Centers chapter M. E. Lesk Harvard University Gerard Salton Use, reproduction, or publication, in whole or in part, is permitted for any purpose of the United States Government. X. Design Considerations for Time Shared Automatic Documentation Centers M. E. Lesk 1. Introduction Consideration is being given to the design of documentation centers as part of projected general revisions of the scientific information dissemination system. Simultaneously, the changeover in computing equipment at all large data processing installations is stimulating the revision of automatic information retrieval systems. New equipment, such as time- sharing systems and large-scale random-access data-storage devices are now available. The use of fully automatic procedures in documentation centers thus becomes practical. Experimental investigations into algorithms for automatic content analysis have shown that such methods are competitive with classical (i.e. manual) indexing methods. Although irnich analysis remains to be done, the total ignorance of automatic methods which prevailed a few years ago is now decreasing. Despite the progress in fully automatic information retrieval, the designers of large-scale documentation centers still think in terms of systems which operate with manual subject indexers. Because of the current interest in large documentation systems, it is necessary for the proponents of f'illy automatic systems to formulate practical proposals for computerized analysis projects. The SM[OCRerr]T project, after several years of study with experimental retrieval programs, [OCRerr][OCRerr]st therefore consider the extension of its procedures