LESK furnished the following results. In the straightforward question search—the question being, what is the phosphorus oxygen bond distance and hydroxy phosphate?—the students were told that they could take fifteen minutes and, then, if they wished, give up. The students with paper took more than fifteen minutes on average, and yet most of them gave up. The students with either electronic format, text or image, received good scores in reasonable time, hardly ever had to give up, and usually found the right answer.

In the browsing study, the students were given a list of eight topics, told to imagine that an issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society had just appeared on their desks, and were also told to flip through it and to find topics mentioned in the issue. The average scores were about the same. (The students were told to answer yes or no about whether or not particular topics appeared.) The errors, however, were quite different. The students with paper rarely said that something appeared when it had not. But they often failed to find something actually mentioned in the issue. The computer people found numerous things, but they also frequently said that a topic was mentioned when it was not. (The reason, of course, was that they were performing word searches. They were finding that words were mentioned and they were concluding that they had accomplished their task.)

This question also contained a trick to test the issue of serendipity. The students were given another list of eight topics and instructed, without taking a second look at the journal, to recall how many of this new list of eight topics were in this particular issue. This was an attempt to see if they performed better at remembering what they were not looking for. They all performed about the same, paper or electronics, about 62 percent accurate. In short, LESK said, people were not very good when it came to serendipity, but they were no worse at it with computers than they were with paper.

(LESK gave a parenthetical illustration of the learning curve of students who used SuperBook.)

The students using the electronic systems started off worse than the ones using print, but by the third of the three sessions in the series had caught up to print. As one might expect, electronics provide a much better means of finding what one wants to read; reading speeds, once the object of the search has been found, are about the same.

Almost none of the students could perform the hard task—the analogous transformation. (It would require the expertise of organic chemists to complete.) But an interesting result was that the students using the text search performed terribly, while those using the image system did best. That the text search system is driven by text offers the explanation. Everything is focused on the text; to see the pictures, one must press on an icon. Many students found the right article containing the answer to the question, but they did not click on the icon to bring up the right figure and see it. They did not know that they had found the right place, and thus got it wrong.

The short answer demonstrated by this experiment was that in the event one does not know what to read, one needs the electronic systems; the electronic systems hold no advantage at the moment if one knows what to read, but neither do they impose a penalty.

LESK concluded by commenting that, on one hand, the image system was easy to use. On the other hand, the text display system, which represented twenty man-years of work in programming and polishing, was not winning, because the text was not being read, just searched. The much easier system is highly competitive as well as remarkably effective for the actual chemists.

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ERWAY * Most challenging aspect of working on AM * Assumptions guiding AM's approach * Testing different types of service bureaus * AM's requirement for 99.95 percent accuracy * Requirements for text-coding * Additional factors influencing AM's approach to coding * Results of AM's experience with rekeying * Other problems in dealing with service bureaus * Quality control the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion * Long-term outlook uncertain * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++