On-Line Personal Bibliographic Retrieval System

Abstract

The Norris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) On-Line Personal Bibliographic Retrieval System was developed to assist researchers at the Center in managing personal or project-related collections of reference materials. The system supports on-line entry, storage, and retrieval of bibliographic citations for collections of books, journal articles, reprints, reports, manuscripts, other documents, and audio-visual materials.The NCCC system is intended for relatively small collections of materials (under 10,000 items) and is not intended to duplicate or compete in any way with MEDLARS, CANCERLINE, or any of the other on-line bibliographic retrieval services. It is similar in concept to Mitre's SHOEBOX (1), but is much less complex and requires far less computer resources. The major advantage of the NCCC system is that it is simple, small, and easy to use.None of the techniques used in developing the NCCC system is particularly new or innovative. Rather, several well-known approaches to bibliographic retrieval were combined to produce a system that was easy and inexpensive to develop and is easy and inexpensive to use. The system is now running on the Dartmouth College Computing system's equivalent of a Honeywell 66/DPS-3. The programs are all written in BASIC.