What Every Librarian Should Know about On-line Searching

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This good beginner’s handbook to online searching covers such topics as the development of computerized information retrieval, machine-searching by the various commands (especially for BRS, DIALOG, ORBIT, CAN/OLE, MEDLARS, the New York Times, Info-Globe, the QL Systems), the development of strategies for searching, along with seven case studies, and costs (unfortunately, this is an area that changes rapidly, but the names and addresses are still useful).

Because the manual is looseleaf, with an index, it is easy to locate particular procedures and to insert additional ones, eliminating obsolete pages as the months go by. This is a very handy reference tool to be kept at or near the terminal.