MONO91 Indexes Generated by Machine-Automatic Derivative Indexing chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards 1/ Trans-Canada Air Lines - is using a KWIC System, and at the EURATOM ISPRA labora- tories a KWIC type program has been developed with up to 600-character context and a left-most indexing position. 2/ 3.1.2 Advantages, Disadvantages and Operational Problems of KWIC Indexing Luhn's original acronym, KWIC, is peculiarly apt for permuted title word indexing. As both proponents and critics have noted, the resulting product may be relatively crude in terms of indexing quality, but it is quick. The speed achievable both by elimination of human intellectual effort and by use of machine (especially computer) processing is indeed the major single advantage of this type of automatic indexing. Closely related, however, are the advantages of currency of announcement and the availability of these indexes for individual use. Some typical claims with respect to speed and currency are as follows: "The permuted index was invented as a means of adequately controlling (essentially, of indexing) the literature without further intellectual effort, and thus eliminating indexing delays " 3/ "The great merit of this particular method. . . is that it enables information concerning new articles to be made available very much more quickly than if there were the inevitable delays of human abstracting and indexing " 4/ "In spite of the disadvantages which are pointed out, perhaps the greatest advantage is the timeliness and the speed with which permuted-title indexes can be prepared." 5/ Specific examples of high speed are given by Biological Abstracts, where one hour's computer time suffices to prepare and arrange entries for over 150,000 items. 6/ Kennedy reports for the Bell Laboratories System that: "Editorial scanning is very fast; only several lines of print must be read for each report and the required text markings are trivially few. Keypunching, the largest single task, takes about two minutes per report. .. Main-frame time ... was 12 minutes for 1703 reports " 7/ 1/ 2/ 3/ 4/ 5/ 6/ 7/ Simons,1963 [556], p.34. Meyer-Uhlenried and Lustig, 1963 [417], p. 229. Tukey, 1962 [611], p. 13. Cleverdon, 1961 [125], p.108. Janaske, 1962 [299], p.3. See Biological Abstracts, 36:24, p. xii. Kennedy, 1961 [311], p. 123. 55