A TEXT-RETRIEVAL SYSTEM USED IN HUMANISTIC ARCHIVE APPLICATIONS (abstract only)

Abstract

NOVA*STATUS is a text-retrieval system which is available at all Norwegian universities and several government institutions, running on computers from different manufacturers.NOVA*STATUS is a full-text retrieval system originally developed by AERE, Harwell, England, and redeveloped at the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities and other Norwegian institutions. The data is divided into documents and each word (or a truncated part of it) in each document is potentially a key word. The format of the document is free. By use of prefixes it is possible to divide each document into specific fields of information.A request to the system can consist of a Boolean expression of words and prefixes and relational expressions between prefixed words. The system allows for macros which can be permanently stored which makes, for example, synonym lists possible. The system also contains procedures for off-line sorting and printing of catalogues and for the coding of data for statistical analysis by SPSS.At the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities, NOVA*STATUS has been, and is still being used in a variety of humanistic archive applications. Several of these have a common data format which consists of 20-30 defined fields of fixed information and one or more fields of free-text description of e.g., photographs, paintings, archaeological and cultural artifacts, old buildings and documents. The second part of the paper will describe the actual use of the system in these various applications.