By RALPH R. SHAW, The Librarian, United States Department of Agriculture Library
The availability of recorded knowledge is of great practical importance to those working in the fields of forestry and forest products. The modern techniques offer increasing possibilities and bring new concepts of documentation within our reach. Mr. Show is not only an eminent librarian but also the inventor of a new Rapid Selector, an electronic device giving ready access to the great mass of literature accumulated on the subject of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. He very modestly describes the possibilities of this machine without mentioning his own share in its development.He has already perfected a system for making available literature stored by the library of the U. S. Department of Agriculture through the medium of microfilm reproduction. The possibilities of this system were discussed at the 1949 session of the FAO Conference, and efforts are being made to extend such a service to all member countries. In practice, this would mean that anybody who sees an article or a book listed in the FAO Bibliography of Forestry and Forest Products could write to FAO and obtain microfilm copies, either positive or negative, up to any length for a very modest fee.
This would be truly a great service; in many war-damaged areas library collections of periodicals and other scientific material have been destroyed. Many of them, especially the older publications, are irreplaceable. Now such material would become available once more. However, certain difficulties must first be overcome: one is the question of copyrights, which is being explored and the other is the problem of payment of the fee involved. The fee is not large, US$ 1.00 for the reproduction of each 50 pages or fraction thereof from a single article or book, and it is only the present currency restrictions in soft currency countries that have to be overcome. It is hoped that the discussions under way on both questions will lead to a satisfactory solution.
However, as Mr. Shaw points out, the great problem is how best to make use of the new tools that scientific development is beginning to place at our disposal. Concerted thinking will be necessary to determine this. The joint bibliographical committee set up by FAO and the International Union of Forest Research Organizations has already begun work in that direction, and this is a starting point, we hope, for the international co-operation that must be achieved.
People scattered all over the globe must work together if any of the objectives of international organizations are to be achieved. Communication is, therefore, a basic problem of all international organizations. It is, in fact, the blood stream and the nervous system of an international organization. If the heart fails to pump the blood stream of technical information to the outermost extremities, the fingers and hands and feet and legs will fail to develop - they will wither and die, and the body will be immobilized and will stagnate. If the nervous system fails to convey warning signals from the extremities to the central intelligence and back out to all the parts concerned, then the vicissitudes of corporate life will whittle away the extremities and again the international body will stagnate and stultify.
Early in its history, FAO recognized the fundamental nature of its interest in communication through literature and called an informal meeting of experts on statistical, scientific, and technical information, which met in London on 10 April through 13 April, 1946. 1
1 FAO Information Service Bulletin, Vol. I, No. 4, 17 June 1946.
In the communication system of any international body, there are only three basic methods for obtaining or transmitting information.
The first of these, which is used most commonly because it is the simplest cheapest, and most convenient, is personal contact. Obviously, when an expert is at hand, and the subject is not controversial, we ask and get the answer. This may be done by personal visit, or by telephone, mail, or telegraph, etc. The newly developing technical aids, such reproduction, may be expected to reduce the cost and extend the usefulness of the person-to-person type of communication.
The second major means for obtaining information is research. This method requires large expenditures of time and money. It involves making laboratory studies or sending missions to observe on the scene, to discuss with many, and to reach conclusions. Research is necessary when information which is required does not exist and must be created. But since research methods are expensive and time-consuming, they can be applied only to a limited part of the universe of knowledge which is required for effective functioning of an organization of wide interests.
The third fundamental method for obtaining information consultation of the recorded knowledge - is related to both the first and second methods. The printed word is neither more nor less than the judgment of a specialist in recorded form. Our files and our libraries are really vast collections of expert opinions in formal, recorded form. Consulting the literature is, therefore, the same type of operation as person-to-person contact, except that much more latitude is possible because an effective documentation service can permanently assemble all the experts of all times and places, and bring all their testimony to bear whenever and in whatever form the information-may be required.
These three methods of obtaining and disseminating information are inextricably interwoven into the fabric of any international organization, and it is only through wise use of all three that FAO can hope to approach its goals.
Communication in an international organization is a two-way street. Information must flow inward to a center where it can be organized, synthesized, and evaluated; but it must also flow out to every member nation and to the individuals in every member nation if the headquarters is to be more than an ivory tower housing bureaucrats whose heads are in the clouds and whose lofty ideals lack reality because they lack contact with the solid earth on which agriculture, forestry, and fisheries programs must be built.
It would appear obvious that FAO must carry its findings to users in all lands through a dynamic publishing program. Since publishing reports of meetings, surveys, and findings is one of the principal tools of communication, FAO must, as a minimum, have a publication program which will make the knowledge created by FAO meetings, missions, technical assistance, and research programs available to all its members.
The responsibility of FAO for disseminating knowledge which it has not itself created is not so positive. Nevertheless, if one of the purposes of FAO is to advance knowledge in the fields it covers, very much might be done by calling important information to the attention of those who need it, regardless of whether this knowledge was created by FAO, by its member governments, or by others.
The limits to which such services can be carried are determined by very practical considerations. Obviously, FAO cannot have enough money to publish all the world's literature on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, in many language editions and in quantities sufficient to supply a copy of every item to every agriculturist forester, and fisherman in each participating country; and even if such funds were available, such unlimited distribution would be fantastically wasteful of money which might better be used to create new knowledge. Nor can the problem be adequately approached by attempting to build up complete libraries in each country, for few countries are rich enough to support a great agricultural research library.
It would appear from the above that, while we say on the one hand that communication through the use of literature is absolutely indispensable to effective international work, we say on the other that such communication is impossible. The explanation of this paradox lies in recognizing that we may have been confusing the physical objects through which knowledge is customarily conveyed with the knowledge itself. By the use of some of the newer techniques of documentation, it should be quite possible for FAO to build up the potential for research and to help in making technical information available in its member countries without building up great research libraries in each or making unlimited distribution in each.
The minimum requirement for communication of knowledge contained in literature, in addition to such dissemination as can be made through FAO's own publications, is, first, the establishment of mechanisms through which anyone in the world can find out what has been done anywhere in the world.
In some fields, such as chemistry, the presently available abstracting services do an excellent job of letting people know what has been published. In others, such as agriculture, the Bibliography of Agriculture, published monthly by the U. S. Department of Agriculture Library, provides a current index to an large portion of the world's knowledge. And many similar services, including the abstracting services of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux, Biological Abstracts, and others, are now available. If FAO could stimulate the improvement and wider distribution and use of such tools as these, then eventually anyone in the world could, by the use of the pertinent indexing and abstracting journals, find out what is known anywhere in the world which would help him to solve his own problems.
However, knowing that a publication exists is not the same as having the publication in hand, and, in many cases, neither index entries nor abstracts can substitute for the complete report. Mechanisms which enable low-cost copies of pertinent articles to be obtained in any part of the world are therefore essential. This type of service is necessary in the great centers of research as well as at outlying points, because there is no center which has all recorded knowledge. The removal of deterrents to the free flow of knowledge, such as currency difficulties and tariff restrictions, would benefit all the member countries of FAO by making the technical information on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries more easily available to them. Possibly in co-operation with other UN agencies such as UNESCO, FAO could profitably work toward this end.
But while the current indexing and abstracting services, together with international inter-library loan services and photographic copying services, might greatly reduce the differential in research: and in practical information, it is not the whole story. Obviously, no one of us can read all of the languages in the world; so translation of information into other languages is one requirement. Furthermore, all information needed is current, and in many cases extended searches, going back over a long period, must be made. The number of indexing and abstracting services is so great that it is not even feasible to build up complete files of all of the indexing and abstracting journals at every point where research must be done, nor is it economically feasible for the technical worker or bibliographer to search through all of these volumes on every subject on which information is needed. In these two areas great possibilities are emerging through the new electronic machines which have been developed. At the present time an electronic computer is being developed in California which shows real promise of serving as a translating machine, capable of storing hundreds of thousands of words in many languages and automatically converting from one language to another. While there are many problems to be worked out, it does not appear impossible to expect that electronic machines will do at least rough draft translations for us in some areas within the next ten or fifteen years. A second electronic machine of interest has been developed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture Library. This machine, called the Rapid Selector, can store any number of abstracts or pages of text and can search through them at the rate of 120,000 subjects a minute, making copies of the pertinent abstracts as it runs through the searching process. More will be said about this machine below.
The ultimate objective should be to make all the technical information on agriculture, forestry, and fisheries accessible to anybody who needs it, no matter where he may be located, in order to increase research potential and thus contribute to the attainment of the goal set for FAO by its Constitution - that is, to better the standard of living of the peoples of the world.
Past Experience
One particular example in this field, the experience gained by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, can serve as illustration:
The problems faced by the Department in providing knowledge about agriculture to its employees as well as to the country as a whole, are not greatly different from those of international organizations. The methods reported below, therefore, are an indication of the ways in which one institution has attempted to meet the problem of communication through literature. While they fall far short of solving the problem and will differ in some respects from the problems faced by other types of organizations, they may be of some interest.
Through intensive effort over a number of years, and through co-operative exchange arrangements with institutions of other countries, the Department of Agriculture has built up a large research collection of literature of agriculture and related sciences. However, that collection is housed in Washington, and four-fifths of the staff of the Department are scattered around the country outside of Washington. With our great expanses of land area, many of our agricultural workers are stationed at distances of two or three thousand miles from Washington, and they are no better equipped by the collection in Washington than is someone in South America who wants information services from FAO. Obviously, it is not possible to duplicate this great research library at all points in the United States. Yet the staffs of all the research stations must have access-to the information that is pertinent to their work. For example, with major sheep research stations in Idaho and New Mexico, the literature of sheep research, which cuts across a wide range of types of literature, is just as essential in these states as it is in Washington. Our solution to this problem has been a combination of regional branches, each with a limited potential for service but able to provide quick information service in the areas of information most commonly requested, with documentation services. Our documentation services, in theory at least, raise the research potential at all points to the same level so far as use of the knowledge contained in literature is concerned.
The Bibliography of Agriculture, which is issued monthly, lists every significant article and publication about agriculture received each month in the Department from all over the world. It is classified in accordance with the preferences of workers in the various subject fields and goes to all offices of the Department. By spending fifteen or twenty minutes once a month reading through the pertinent sections of the Bibliography of Agriculture, any worker in the Department can find out what has been published almost any place in the world that will help him do a more effective job. Then, if the publication is not available from a local library, he can write to the Department of Agriculture and get a photostatic copy of the article without charge. Thus, we have perfected a chain of current information services which is quite independent of the building up of multiple research libraries, and which works. During the average year the Department Library circulates more than 1,500,000 volumes, answers more than 200,000 questions, and supplies a million or more pages in microfilm or photostatic copies.
The same service is provided to those who are not members of the staff of the Department of Agriculture, except that they must either obtain the Bibliography on exchange or purchase it from the Superintendent of Documents for a moderate fee, and they pay a very modest fee for copies of articles required for their work.
In order to achieve these services, new bibliographical methods had to be devised which could handle the great mass of literature that pours into the Department of Agriculture Library annually. More than 900,000 pieces of periodical literature come in each year, and of these 300,000 must be added to the permanent collection. The latter group, representing the issues of some 18,000 different periodical publications and annual reports, must be individually handled by professional staff to select the articles to be indexed and to indicate under what subjects they are to be indexed. Since the Bibliography of Agriculture now covers more than 80,000 articles and books each year, the size of the task of issuing a truly current bibliography can well be imagined. Production of the Bibliography of Agriculture, which averages over 3,000 pages a year on a monthly schedule, requires close co-operation of all of the groups working together. The scheduling of this operation more closely resembles an industrial operation than one that is normally associated with libraries.
The chief shortcoming of the Bibliography of Agriculture rests in our failure to receive all the agricultural publications issued all over the world so that they may be included in this one comprehensive index. This is true in spite of the fact that we are quite willing to pay for publications in our field issued in the trade in other countries and, of course, are glad to extend exchange arrangements with institutions which will send us their publications in return for the publications of the Department of Agriculture. While the Bibliography of Agriculture not do the whole job of current information, it provides as complete a listing as possible so that abstracting journals and review journals have a firm base from which to select the material which needs to be abstracted or reviewed and are relieved from the necessity of providing a checklist of the world of literature.
However, information about what is available is only part of the job of communicating agricultural knowledge. It is very rare that an entry in the Bibliography will replace the need for access to the article itself. Rather, it stimulates the desire for the original article. Since complete collections cannot possibly be built up at all points in the country, and since loan of publications is a slow and uneconomical process for satisfying all needs, the Department of Agriculture Library has laid great stress on its photographic copying services. This process is now developed to the point where photostatic copies of articles can be provided more cheaply and more promptly than the original can be loaned. The express charges alone for lending a volume and returning it from any other library in the United States would be higher than the cost of supplying a photographic copy, which need not be returned.
These services are available to all co-operating countries. The Bibliography of Agriculture is sent to other institutions in exchange for their publications, and, in the case of those which do not have publications, may be purchased from the Superintendent of Documents for US$ 8 per year A microfilm copy of any article can be supplied for US$ 1 for each 50 pages.. Thus, theoretically, the Department of Agriculture Library makes its documentation services available to workers in agriculture not only in the United States but all over the world. The chief difficulty, of course, is the dollar shortage, which makes it very difficult for many foreign workers to obtain U.S. currency to pay for a microfilm. FAO could greatly advance technical knowledge of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries all over the world by encouraging a wider international exchange of publications so that the Bibliography of Agriculture will constitute a more complete guide to the knowledge of agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, and by finding a solution to the problem of currency restrictions on these petty cash transactions in scholarly equipment.
The program outlined, however well it takes care of current information service, does not take care of the problem of literature searching, which is still an arduous and time-consuming task. Extensive searches require the handling of one or more volumes of a hundred or more different indexing and abstracting services. Thus, a complete search of the literature may take anywhere from one to two-and-a-half man-years; and a large portion of this time is spent in merely handling the indexes and picking out the items that must be' examined, many of which will later be discarded because they prove to be not pertinent. After studying the potentialities of the various mechanized systems available, it became quite clear that new devices operating at much higher speed and much higher flexibility would be required to meet our real needs for extensive searching of literature.
An electronic machine recently developed in the Department of Agriculture Library, in its first model, stores 72,000 abstracts and 430,000 index entries to those abstracts in a quarter of a cubic foot. This means that a section of wall-shelving approximately eighteen feet long, seven feet high, and fifteen inches deep can hold 20 million abstracts or pages of periodical or book literature, together with 120 million index entries to that literature. The literature can now be searched at speeds in excess of 100,000 subjects a minute, and copies of the abstracts or pages of the literature can be made as the machine searches for the material.
The implications of this new machine for the improvement of communication among scientists and economists everywhere are fairly obvious. In the first place, at a cost of only US$ 100 a roll including both the abstracts and the index entries for the number of entries noted above can be reproduced in positive copy for running in other selector machines. It would be impossible to buy the paper on which to type this information for anything like that sum. Moreover, the machine now in the Department of Agriculture Library is the first of its type ever to be constructed; undoubtedly newer machines will be built which will be even cheaper and faster and which will greatly increase the ease of making available everything that is needed for fully adequate communication, from both current and past recorded sources.
It should be borne in mind, however, that the machine alone will not solve any problems. It is merely a device for electronically matching the information coded into the film with the information sought, and electronically reproducing the desired information when it is located. The machine does not think, and it will probably create as many problems as it solves. It will create problems because it makes possible new orders of organization of knowledge, and the question then becomes not only one of merely putting into the machine whole indexing and abstracting journals, but rather one of creating tools at new intellectual levels to provide higher levels of service to scholarship. In determining what is really needed for the advancement of learning, the co-operation of scientists all over the world will be required.
Our organization of knowledge in the past, whether it be the collecting of books in libraries or the indexing of them, has been based primarily upon physical considerations, or at least has been limited in large measure by physical considerations. For example, the common method of organizing patents in a patent office is to put a copy of each patent under each major subject. Thus, the U. S. Patent Office, starting with approximately 3 million patents, places a copy of each patent in six places, on the average. This results in a file of some 18 million patents, which is so large and cumbersome that an excessive amount of time is required in going from place to place, and it is very difficult and costly to make a complete search. Furthermore, each page of each patent might have ten different ideas on it, and, if we are going to achieve organization of ideas by the arrangement of copies of physical objects (i.e., the patents), the file would probably be in the neighborhood of 200 million or more copies The time required for running from place to place would thus be so great that it might be cheaper to create the knowledge all over again than to search the collection.
Our indexes in the past have similarly been limited by their character as physical objects. Take Chemical Abstracts as an example, because it is one of the best scientific and indexing services ever provided. We find that its index, which costs more than one-third of the total cost of the service, gives only about five index entries per abstract. If we should attempt to bring out every subject, the index might be ten times as large, and it would probably be economically impossible of achievement, in its present form. On the other hand, even if we could afford to publish so thorough an index, the time required to search through it might become so great that it would be more economical of the chemist's time for him to repeat the experiments rather than to use literature.
At the present, a chemist must spend anywhere from two days to a week or more searching Chemical Abstracts alone before he undertakes an experiment. If he had to spend ten times as long handling the tremendous mass of index volumes which would result from indexing every idea, he would have very little time to spend in his laboratory.
Thus, it appears obvious that all of our organization of knowledge: has been conditioned by physical considerations, both in terms of the bulk that we could afford to produce and the time spent by the user in going from place to place or in handling the great number of index volumes. In fact, in each case there has been a compromise between what we can afford to do as against what we should do in terms of communicating the knowledge contained in recorded form.
Since the electronic selector can run to a hundred thousand places faster than we can go to one, it substantially eliminates the searching time on the part of the scientist; and, since it can store 4,400 cubic feet of information, as normally filed, in one cubic foot of film, at very low cost, it should substantially eliminate the other physical considerations. Thus, for the first time, we can contemplate the possibility of organizing knowledge rather than organizing physical objects. However, in order to organize knowledge more intensively, we shall have to learn first what is really needed for the advancement of science or for the purposes of the operation of international organizations, and this will require a great deal of thought on the part of all subject specialists concerned. Thus, the possibility of improving communication through machines will become a probability only if we work together to determine what is needed so that we can tell the machine what to do.
Conclusions
It would appear that the problem of communication through the use of literature is one of the most vital problems facing any international organization or large national organization; that the printed record is one of the most important tools of communication; that effective use of the printed record is a two-fold use, requiring both the dissemination of the knowledge created by the organization through the medium of its own publication and the stimulation by the organization of the flow of knowledge useful to the purposes for which it exists, regardless of the form in which this knowledge appears or the source of its issuance; that the point of view in studying effective use of the written record must be changed from that of building up collections of physical objects to the building up of techniques for communication; that, in order to achieve practical solutions to the problems of two-way communication of the knowledge contained in the written record rather than accessibility of physical objects as such, greater thought must be given by the specialists in all disciplines to what it is they really need for the advancement of science; and, finally, that new tools are now at hand which have possibilities for improvement of communication. These machines cannot achieve any significant advance in the organization of knowledge, however, until our thinking has progressed far enough to enable us to tell the machines what we really want them to do.
FAO has a vital concern in the improvement of communication. It should work actively and closely with all national and international bodies in determining what is needed to overcome all barriers to the free flow of knowledge and in developing new mechanisms for the communication of knowledge in order to raise the level of research by dissemination of knowledge on the production, consumption, and utilization of agricultural commodities.
Personalities
Susilo Hardjo Prakoso has been appointed Head of the Forest Service of the Republic of Indonesia. He succeeds J. Fokkinga, who remains as an adviser.
The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture recently presented a Distinguished Service Award to Lyle F. Watts, Chief of the Forest Service, for 08 effective leadership in advancing the conservation of forest resources, both in the United States and internationally. A Superior Service Award has been presented to Reed W. Bailey, Director of Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, Ogden, Utah, for creative thinking and dynamic leadership in research in watershed management, especially in the fields of rangeland rehabilitation and' flood and erosion control.
Lord Robinson has been reappointed Chairman of the Forestry Commission of the United Kingdom; Lord Radnor and J. M. Bannerman have been reappointed to membership, and Professor John Walton has been appointed as a new member. Sir Samuel Strang Steel, who has been a Forestry Commissioner since 1932, and Sir William Taylor, who has been a member of the Commission since 1919 and who was recently knighted for his services to forestry, have retired.
Sir Gerald Lenanton, Deputy Chairman, was recently elected to succeed T. A. Storey as Chairman of the Timber Development Association, Ltd., in Great Britain. Sir Gerald, who was knighted in 1946, was Deputy Timber Controller from 1939 to 1941 and Controller-General, North German Timber Control, 1946-47. He is also Chairman of the Timber Agents and Brokers Association.
The death of Gaston Delevoy, one of the great specialists on' the Belgian Congo, has been announced. M. Delevoy spent a great part of his life in the, Congo, and his best-known work in the massive Woods of the Katanga. For some years he was Director of the Belgian Forest Research Station at Groenendael, and after his retirement from this post be remained technical to the special Katanga Committee. His death, at the age of sixty-five, came as the result of an accident suffered in the course of a mission for this Committee.
