T3 
  
INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMERTRY AND REMOTE 
ission VI 
symposium held in Mainz, FR Gc rmany, 22 - 25 September 1982 
  
  
ACCES S TO LITERATURE 
HAVINC SEEN RETRYIEVED 
  
Hannover, FR Germany 
  
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Modern information retrieval facilitates the access to abstracts of publications. 
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But the information needed is rarely contained in an abstract. So all kinds of li- 
terature searches are a first step only, and all references retrieved are of little 
help, when there is no easy way to get the full texts. Several online literature 
Gatabanks are offering online ordering of documents. This service, however, in 
its present state is still far from the ideal. A few of the largest and most im- 
wt 2 
  
  
portant document delivery centres (suppliers) are described. Possible improve- 
ments in document delivery by new technical means and their application in the 
near future are shown. 
  
Once upon a time there was a scientist. He published the findings of his re- 
search in one of the few recognized journals. He read all these journals, and 
he recommended the right paper to the right colleague, who was too busy to look 
en into the one journal that contained his own papers. And he lent books or 
single issues of periodicals to his friends, always getting them back. 
  
He never realized that he did the job of three specialists: of the scientist 
and author, of the information specialist, and of the librarian. Of course, he 
complained about the vast amount of papers published each year. But he was not 
as dissatisfied as were his three successors. They called the still "vast amount 
of paper" an "information explosion" and made a job of it, all three of them. 
The three specialists made a different progress each since the old days. The 
scientist made a great step ahead in his science, but in writing his papers he 
only changed from penholder to typewriter - and a typist, of course. He still 
had to form phrases in his head, perhaps in English instead of German or Spanish, 
but his general difficulties had not become neither less nor minor. 
The information specialist had abandoned all hope to gain a reputation as a 
Scientist. He read papers, made an abstract, sometimes a very clever one, and 
collected his abstracts into a specialized periodical he called an "abstracts 
journal". He was very proud of this, although very few people ever used it. The 
libraries bought them and shelved them until they were thickly covered with dust. 
Their main disadvantage was that it prooved to be laborious, tedious, and aw- 
fully time-consuming to find the paper read some years ago or to discover a 
new line of development in some unknown part of the world in an obscure journal. 
In the last 15 years, however, he made a tremendous progress. Instead of a typewriter 
he used a computer. And now he is able to bury you under vast amounts of references. 
While he cannot do anything against the "publish or perish" method, he has con- 
vinced everybody that the contrary is tbe ideal. So he now feeds his compute: 
Bibliographic quotation : 
Tehnzen, J. : Access to literature having been retrieved. In: Int. Archive of 
Photogrammetry, 2!- VI, pp 57 = 62, Mainz 1982