Mechanized information systems of the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the International Labour Office

Abstract

Comparing the respective information systems of Euratom and ILO, the former is more of technical (nuclear science and technology), the latter of economic and social nature (training economic leaders, problems of working and social relations between individuals and groups; problems of economic life and social development). It may be pointed out that - apart frorm some common features - the particuler characteristics in the structure of the two systems are essentially determined by requirements exacted from the system, by the quantity of documents getting into the system, and by the nature of subject fields covered by the documents.
Both systems use thesauri based on vocabularies; keeping thesauri up-to-date is also deemed to be of great moment. In both systems the human control of the relevance of documents selected by computere during the retrieving operation is considered as a key problem. The computers employed in both cases are members of the IBS 360 family working with magnetic tape and disc memories.
In order to carry out its task of offering many types of services, ILO feeds any material which gets into the circulation of its information system in the computerized system, as well. Euratom, in tum, since it undertakes computer-assisted retrieval only, stores its complete material in card-files, and only the reference identification numbers of documents judged relevant by the computer appear at its output device. This difference is motivated also by the difference between the order of magnitude of documents to be processed in the system. ILO possess 20.000 and Euratom 300.000 documents with annual increase of 12.000, respectively 100.000 items.