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Foundation of Library and Information Science

Notes processing by digital computer, with electrical telecommunications. It is becoming fashionable
to call this combination ‘telematics’. Telematics – computers and communications – may be used
for many purposes.

Example: Renewal of driving licenses, remote medical diagnosis, teleconferencing, credit
transactions, airline reservations. Our particular concern is its use in the provision of information
on demand, whether the information is bibliographic reference; a record of the availability of
an item in a library, publisher’s store, or database; a loan request or loan record; an acquisition
order; directory information; factual data; full text; a facsimile; a computer program; or any
other kind of recorded information that may be required. In this context, we may distinguish at
least the functional components.
In all these functional areas, there has been, and are continuing, incessant development in the
volume of facilities available and their cost performance, thus affecting the strengths of a society.

Notes Future memory devices (such as magnetic bubble memories, holographic stores,
video discs, charge-coupled devices) may push the storage capacity to 1011 or even 1013
bits, reduce the access time to one microsecond or less, and accelerate the data transfer
rate. At the user end of the telecommunication network, there are an ever-increasing
number of terminals (to say nothing of the use of adapted television sets).

Much more programming capacity and memory (the two being loosely termed ‘intelligence’) is
being built into terminals with cheap keyboards, printers, and local storage. Voice output and
input are coming into use. Image transmission by videophone is developing.

The ever-increasing capacity of telecommunication channels is charted by Martin (1977, 1978).
He indicates associated developments: a drop in the effect of distance on the cost of data
transmission; easier and cheaper facsimile transmission of documents; cheap satellite links
handling data and facsimile with facility. The lowered costs of data transmission are facilitated
by developments of multiplexing and switching techniques to permit large-scale sharing of
transmission channels. At the user end, one coaxial cable into the home or office could serve all
transmission needs.
Databanks with 1013 bits of directly accessible storage are common. Such storage is used for
photographs, drawing, and documents in image forms, as well as for digital data. Much
telecommunication usage is for access to the numerous data banks rather than merely access to
processing power, which could be obtained for local minicomputers. The cost of storing
alphanumeric data in large electronic storage units is now much cheaper than storing the data
on paper in filing cabinets, or even in the form of printed books. In addition, the cost per bit
continues to fall. Information retrieval systems permitting a fast and efficient search of library
databases – books, reports, corporate data, patents, legal documents, etc. – are now in common
use.
Major advances have occurred in the digitization of facsimile images. (Character recognition
techniques are employed for print, and other techniques for corporate logos and signatures.)
Typical facsimile pages, which used to be compressed into 200000 bits, can now be compressed
into 20000. LSI chips became available for this compression. Hence, many documents are stored
and transmitted in ‘non-coded’ image form. A terabit (1012 bit) storage can store 50 million
pages of documents in image form. Hence, massive information retrieval and library systems
come into existence, many in government, which permit their users to carry out computerized
searches for information.

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