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-17 since whatever methods are used, they [OCRerr]Till be fast relative to the speed of the output device. Finally, one rrri[OCRerr]st consider cost. The biggest single item arises by the fact that currentlv there exists no way to obtain machine-readable abstracts except by keypunching. Keypunching 250,000 abstracts would cost perhaps $200,000. `To program the system, construct the dictionaries, and do other necessary tasks (e.g. abstract any unabstracted articles) would probably be about eight full-time jobs, for two or three years. A total of [OCRerr]l50,000 should be sufficient for this purpose. Renting a data cell, type 23Pl, or as much of it as needed would cost about $35,000. Counting perhaps $100,000 for machine time rental, and money for microfilm terminals (several thousand dollars) one would hope to accomplish the job for less than $500,000 in two or three years, (this is a rough estimate). Lowering the collection size by a factor of 5 would probably lower the costs by only a factor of 2. The best way to save money might be to do the job quickly, obtain cheap computer time, and make use of an optical print reader. [OCRerr]intenance cost would consist of keypunching cost for 25,000 documents per year ($20,000) and hardware, plus salaries for one or two people ($50,000). It would probably be wise not to expect cash contributions from the users. 5. Conclusions The construction of a documentation center operating with fully automatic information retrieval techniques seems well within the possibi- lities of present-day knowledge and technology. It should be undertaken soon.