MONO91 Indexes Compiled by Machine chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards In the use of the JBM 705 for the concordance to the Summa Theologiae, Fr. Busa reports that oflly 60 hours were required to arrange in alphabetical order 1, 600,000 words. 1/ This advantage of speed, with the concomitant benefits of both economy and timeliness, is illustrated by Tasman as follows: * . It has been estimated that it would take 50 scholars 40 years. . to manually index the 13 million or so words of St. Thomas Aquinas! complete works. IBM punched card machines would produce the indexes and concordances much more accurately and would take ten scholars about four years. Large-scale data processing techniques would reduce the time to about 25 percent... (or)... ten scholars to do the job in less than a year 2/ Other advantages stem from the facility with which further machine processing can be introduced. Once the text is in machine-readable form, a number of valuable byproducts can be derived. Examples are statistics on the number of words that have 2, 3,... n letters, frequencies of letter usage; printouts[OCRerr]of occurrences of specified words or groups of words; and lists alphabetized on terminal rather than initial letters. Added advantages of computer processing are further exemplified in the options available with the California concordance computer program (1964 [95]), some of which are as follows: (1) The user may obtain a restricted rather than a full concordance by supplying a list of words for which nd entries are to be made. (2) The user may obtain a selective concordance by supplying a list of words for which, and only for which, entries are to be made. (3) Each entry word may be centered with its preceding and succeeding context, up to the limits of one full line of 131 characters, or each entry word may be listed together with the full sentence or verse in which it occurs. (4) Text with interlinear information such as grammatical symbols can be used and selective concordances can be compiled on the basis of such interlinear information. (5) The citations of an entry can be listed in order of textual occurrence, in an order determined by preceding or following words in its context or in an order determined by accompanying interlinear symbols. 2.2 Card Catalogs, Book Catalogs, Bibliographies and Subject Index Listings Prepared by Machine The use of machines such as punched card equipment for the preparation and pro- cessing of library card catalogs and of index listings was advocated by a few far-sighted documentalists at least as early as the 1930's (Parker, 1938 [463]; Dewey, 1959 [153]). 1/ 2/ See his statement in Scheele, 1961 [522], p.209. Tasman, 1958,(596] , p.1[OCRerr]. 19