ISR11 Design Criteria for Automatic Information Systems chapter M. E. Lesk G. Salton Harvard University Gerard Salton Use, reproduction, or publication, in whole or in part, is permitted for any purpose of the United States Government. V-' Design Criteria for Automatic Information Systems M. E. Lesk+ and G. Salton 1. Introduction Considerable attention has been paid in recent years to the organiza- tion of information centers. Various plans have been advanced for the establishment of partly mechanized information and library centers, and recommendations have been drawn up specifying the organization of a national document handling system. Ll,2] In general, such plans stipulate use of a given equipment complex to store the information to be searched. Provision is normally made for introducing search requests from a variety of input stations, some of which may be situated far away from the central equipment, and users are often allowed to submit their requests asynchronously, and independently of each other. Nearly all of those proposals are, moreover, based on a number of under- lying assumptions, which though unproved and unaccompanied by supporting evidence, are nevertheless stated with great forcefulness and considered to be axiomatic. The principal assumptions may be stated as follows: a) a computer cannot perform the intellectual work required to analyze the content of a document, and information centers must therefore rely on a large staff of human subject experts to assign keywords to all items stored in the system; * This study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants GN-360 and GN-[OCRerr]95. + Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 02138. Dept. of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 14850.