No abstract

Handbooks as a group possess one unfortunate combination of characteristics. On the one hand, the very nature of their function makes errors and inconsistencies more serious in handbooks than in many other types of publication. On the other, because handbook content is so largely tabular and composed of relatively unrelated sections, mistakes are not as obvious from the context as in publications with greater over-all continuity of thought; thus errors are not as readily recognized in manuscript and proof. In the American Institute of Physics Handbook, avoidance of errors and achievement of complete consistency were further complicated by the magnitude of the copy (some 3500–4000 manuscript pages) and the fact that, to speed publication, production was begun on some parts before the entire manuscript had been completed.

What is a handbook? The word “handbook” seems to have received its start in life as the English form of the German “handbuch”, with the adoption not always having received complete approval. In his English, Past and Present (1871), Richard Chenevix Trent refers to this handbuch-to-handbook caper and says, “Possessing the word ‘manual’, we need not have called ‘handbook’ back from an oblivion of 900 years.” James A. H. Murray, in A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1901), gives the 900 A.D. definition of the Old English “handboc” as “a small book or treatise”.

The corrections given below comprise the second such list of errata for the American Institute of Physics Handbook (McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, 1957). The first compilation of changes appeared in the August 1957 issue of Physics Today (pp. 19–20) and the corrections were made in the second printing of the Handbook. The changes in this new list appear in the third printing. Notification of any further errors that come to the attention of readers of the Handbook will be gratefully received. Such information can be sent to Dr. Dwight E. Gray, Coordinating Editor, AIP Handbook, 306 Northwest Drive, Silver Spring, Md.

To investigate the value of externally available computer‐based bibliographic retrieval services in agriculture, 100 retrospective searches in response to real requests for information were carried out by computer. Seventy‐five of these were paralleled using conventional manual methods and the results were analysed and compared for efficiency, cost and staff time required. The databases most frequently used were CAIN (now AGRICOLA), BIOSIS and Chemical Abstracts Condensates (searched online using Lockheed Dialog), and Medline. Online searches took one‐sixth of the staff time required for manual searching and cost much the same. Online searches tended to have higher relative recall and lower precision than manual searches of the same database. The differences in performance are due to the different entry points available in the printed and machine‐readable forms of a database. Detailed knowledge of these will enable a choice to be made of the more efficient method of searching when both manual and online searching of a database is possible. Online searches were well received by users and their use could increase the output of library and information staff engaged in retrospective searching.