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Push vs. Pull Or, Shall We Do Away with the Literature? here is a strong wave of sentiment from what one might call the T “systems people” to do away with the literature as we now have it, One of the best known such people-and one well qualified to have an opinion in the field by virtue of his many years in the information business-is Walter Carlson, Secretary-Treasurer of Engineers Joint Council. Mr. Carlson, writing in Engzneer (Sept.-Oct. 1967, page 8 ) ) says that “perhaps the greatest single contribution our engineering and scientific societies can make to technical communication would be to suspend the issuance of technical journals altogether. . . .Specialized journals. . . .are push mechanisms addressed to an information problem whose solution lies in the effective use of pull mechanisms.” Translated, a push mechanism means coming out regularly with a collection of articles that editors select, while a pull mechanism is providing information to users when they see a need for it and ask for it. According to Mr. Carlson, pushing the stuff out is inefficient, but easier on the publisher; a collection of pull mechanisms would be much more difficult for the disseminator to develop but more effective for the user. Although many will argue the point, it seems probable that the major incentive for pushing pull mechanisms is the great difficulty that abstracting and indexing services are having in keeping u p with the primary literature (the sum of the push mechanisms). Most scientists and engineers will say, when asked in what is quite possibly a biasing approach, that they have trouble keeping up, that they need help in digesting scientific and technological literature to stay abreast of progress, and that the proliferation of journals is a serious problem. Yet, each human mind is a marvelous screening device-flexible, rapid, and highly selective in partly predictable, partly unpredictable ways. Each of us adapts to the flood of information beating in on us, screening out the useless just as we screen out most of the advertising stimuli that come to us. True, we may miss some points of interest; yet we all recognize, a t least implicitly, that most of the things we miss will come to us in time. A great advantage of push mechanisms, to use Mr. Carlson’s terminology, i s their ability to thrust before you a fact, a n idea, a correlation that strikes a responsive chord in your mind when you see it, even though you might never have asked for it without having seen it. Another great plus is its automatic availability-you do not have to go after it; it comes to you. You will pick it up and look a t it when it comes, but you would not go across the street, down the hall, or even next door, in many cases, to seek it. The browsing effect and the activation energy barrier have different intensities in different people, but are present a t some fairly consistent level in all of us. I d o not see how any system of pull mechanisms can get around these two points. They seem so firmly rooted in the behavior patterns of human beings that they are not likely to be changed by education-or even by systems of information dissemination that cost the user none of his own money. They seem also to be important reasons why the literature, with all its cost and faults, actually does disseminate information and spark technical progress.
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