KWIC-index producted with punched card system in Hungary

Abstract

One well proved method of automatic indexing is the KWIC-index. For its production electronic data procceaing systems of medium or large capacity are used with stored programs. But the method, reviewed here, produces KWIC-index on a small but up-to-date punched card data processing equipment, without the use of stored program and magnetic tape units.
The equipment applied was a UNIVAC 1004 III Model-C Card Processor. The program compiling the index was controlled from a plugboard. The 62 program steps available were sufficient to produce an index with permutated titles. The index was processed by the machines on 80-column punched cards. The text to be processed was fed into the magnetic core memory by punched tapes. In addition to the basic magnetic core unit with 961 positions, the equipment had also a second built-in core memory of 961 positions. Thus vocabulary operations could be performed automatically. In this second magnetic core matrix there were stored 115 irrelevant words of the text, and with the help of the vocabulary the machine decreased the size of the alphabetical keyword index by 38,6 per cent. The printer, having 132 print positions per line (speed: 36.000 lines per hour) enabled the procesaing and printing of index lines with 125 characters. These long lines were punched by the machine on two joint cards. Alphabetic ordering of the permutated index lines was done through a sorter. As an experiment, 600 titles of the English language publication: Hungarian Technical Abstracts, volume 1965, of the OMKDK (Hungarian Central Technical Library and Documentation Centre) were processed.
The KWIC-index completed in November 1966 ie the first machine-made index of this typs in Hungary. The applied procedure ia such economical, that preparation of further indexes is in progress.