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From: sachs@tanner.berkeley.edu (Rainer Sachs)
Newsgroups: bionet.followup,bionet.molbio.genbank,news.software.b,sci.bio,sci.chem,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Creating Electronic Research Libraries
Keywords: Usenet M_Lesk Refer Software Terabyte_Optical_Disk_Devices
Message-ID: <1989Dec20.011113.724@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 20 Dec 89 01:11:13 GMT
References: <617@mbph.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: sachs@tanner.UUCP (Rainer Sachs)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 22

In article <617@mbph.UUCP> hybl@mbph.UUCP (Albert Hybl  Dept of Biophysics  SM) writes:
>
>Dear Santa,...
>There appears to be a need to establish electronic research libraries.
>...
>An UNIX shell program like lookbib or seekbib can be used to extract
>relevant reference from an M. Lesk archive.  Because it is unlikely
>that all users will be able to ftp directly to the computer system
>that contains the archive, they should be able to issue a control
>command that would cause the remote execution of a seekbib shell
>with the results of the search returned via e-mail.  ...

Is this advocating non-interactive searches?
Speaking for myself, I think a non-interactive search would be
virtually useless.  I have lot of experience searching medline.
I can't recall *ever* getting the search exactly right the first
time.  When I do get it right, I always need to pick and
choose among abstracts in order to get the ones I want without
hopelessly cluttering up my own reference files, duplicating, etc.
Assuming Santa has limited funds, I would urge him to put them
only into programs and situations where interactive searches are
possible.  How does the net feel?