The Shape of Things to Come - Considerations of the Likely Developments in Medical Communication

Abstract

Documents have been the conventional carriers of information since the invention of the printing press. After the Second World War indexing and abstracting services converted their typesetting tapes into electronic databases. These were initially supplied to customer organisations on magnetic tape, sometimes as frequently as weekly. After conversion into a customer’s internal format, standardised subject profiles of interest for researchers were matched (in batch mode) with the content of the latest supplement that had been delivered.