A Simple AP1/360 Program for Filing and Searching Literature References The maintenance of reprint and reference files hy several workers in an orgmimtition often leads t o much duplication. To minimize such wasted effort in our laboratory a central literature citation file was established on the University's IBM-360-50 computer, and s. simple interactive program was designed which would permit the reedy retrieval of the stored information. By specifying the topic(s), publication date, authorb), or other elements of classification any or all of thestored items can he correlated snd printed out. Access to the file stored in the computer is effected by means of a FILE or SEARCH function of an API/3G0 interactive program, which may he executed from an IBM 2741 remote terminal. Entries t o the reference file are unlimited in size with the size of the entire reference file being determined by the aveilahle computer workspace size. For very large collections of citations or other types of materid, it is possible t o distribute the file over more than one workspace. Literature references are entered by the FILE function as elements of a character vector. The date and author element has the form GSHARV, where 69 is the publication year and HARV are the first four letters of the first author's last name. The suhject code element may consist of up to twenty-six characters, with each character corresponding t o a. partioular key subject within the major topic covered in a particular workspace. The elements of the date, author, and subject code matrices are entered simultaneously with the FILE function; for example, GYHAKVPTHQ. The text of each literature reference citation is stored without any format spaces such as identures. These will be placed hack into the text when the SEARCH function is implemented. The removal of multiple spaces before storage increases the capacity of the library considerably, since mast reference citztitions are usually formatted with the first line of each reference against the left margin and all other lines indented five spaces. An accumulative entry counter 1s printed before each succeeding entry. The SEARCH function is capable of searching one or more subject codes simultaneously in an AND or an OR mode. The searched references may he outputted dphaheticslly by the author's last name or in reverse chronological order by publication year with the references arranged alphabetically by author for each year. A variable output pause feature was written into the SEARCH function so that large output may be examined segmentally. At the termination of the output, the user is asked whether or not a new search is to be made. If no references corresponding
viduh librarie~of information. Thestared iniormatiod c& he coded in any manner which best suits the user's
Syracuse University Syracuse, New York 13210
Volume 49, Number 3, March 1972 / 199
