value of an information 
- 54 - 
Another advantage is that we are able to put persons 
in touch who have the same or similar problems. This 
can often avoid a lot of double work. 
  
Of course, all stored documentation units out of 
a company's own know-how have to be kept secret. That 
means only permitted persons can search such material 
online. 
  
There is another sort of information material which 
is between own know-how and special literature, the 
  
volte actuality and storng-worthness of an information so-called grey literature like conference proceedings, 
reports dissertations and patents in the early stage. 
" ; E : 
d auct decir bow mco Grey describes all problems with the literature: 
b. constant decay of value + One does not know if there is any; 
C nb wh renti Ba os forts tend + one does not know where it is, who has printed it; 
epeenes er ^ up to now one had only poor possibilities to search 
d inf with varioble value for the present, swinging to such literature in data banks or other documentations. 
anstant vdue 
  
Figure 7 
But, meanwhile several big abstract producers are dedicated to grey literature 
to make it online accessible. I wonder whether this point is important for your 
organisation, especially for conferences proceedings. The coloured squares in 
Figure 8 (you find them also in the blue prospectus on your table) show the data 
bases implemented and processed by the host of Hoechst AG. The red one 
TEA-Hoechst is produced by ourselves as I told you already. Besides of indoor 
information our department evaluates 130 trade magazines and produces 4,000 to 
5,000 documentation doc units (abstracts) per year. The other data bases are pur- 
chased as tape services which are implemented in the storage. All data bases 
can be searched by the same STAIRS system. Now you may ask why we ourselves pro- 
duce a data base although those tape services are available besides of other 
online possibilities to a lot of other hosts. This we do due to high actuality 
and immediate availability of the stored documentation units. 
Documents which reach us today can be searched in our TEA data base after 3 weeks. 
this short term can hardly be reached by producers of large data bases. Another 
point is that the evaluation of those 130 trade magazines, as said, is done in 
accordance with the interest profile of our Company in the area of chemical en- 
gineering. If you look at Figure 9 you see 1,000 trade magazines may contain 
100% of the published knowledge of one technical area, in this case chemical 
engineering. But to watch and evaluate the publications for a special profile 
or up to a point which is sufficient for an overall information, you need not 
evaluate 1,000 magazines. In the picture, which is more or less qualitatively, 
you see 130 magazines cover already 70% of this knowledge area. This is a pos- 
sibility to optimate high level of information in spite of moderate expenditure. 
The total data bank contains now nearly 1,000,000 documentation units dating back 
to 1966 concerning the total area of chemical engineering and related engineering 
subjects. 
Figure 10 shows the switching of the various data bases in our data bank system 
and the feed of the TEA data base which is done by 4 departments who can, to- 
gether with another 12 departments, make online searches, too. Our data bank, 
Erb 4