On Line (1984)

[Music plays and image shows a wall of pictograms. Text appears: On Line]

Narrator – Terry Lane: People have been recording and storing information for thousands of years.

[Image changes to show rows of books]

[Image changes to show a person reading in a library]

Each year the amount of information stored increases at a staggering rate. The problem is how do we track it down when it’s needed?

[Image changes to show a group of people playing musical instruments]

Lyn Julian: Well my personal problem was that I was basically suffering from stage fright, so that every time I thought about performing I became nervous. When I left the orchestra I decided to research the topic and to use the third year essay as the means of researching stage fright, to see if I could overcome my own problems. I researched through all psychological books, medical magazines, medical indexes, dissertations that had been written by other students, delving into autobiographies of great musicians who I knew had to very often cope with nerves and sort of you know some sort of anxiety.

[Image changes to show Lyn Julian working with a man at a computer]

Male: And nervousness or anxiety, so we’ll put those in.

Lyn Julian: Right. Could we fit in behaviour modification at this point, please?

Male: Right.

Lyn Julian: I wasted about ten days ploughing through the library, and then I found out about online research, and within two days I had all the information I could possibly ever want.

Male: Right, you’ve got a reasonable number of hits there.

[Image changes to show a ship on the ocean]

David Russell-Head: Australia has traditionally used ships to resupply its Antarctic bases. This method is quite slow, and a faster way of course would be to use aircraft. You need ski aircraft though, and they’re very expensive.

[Image changes to show a ski aircraft taking off]

[Image changes to show David Russell-Head making ice shavings]

I’m researching the use of compacted snow so that runways can be made in Antarctica to be used by ordinary wheeled aircraft.

[Image changes to show David Russell-Head working with a woman at a computer]

Research like this needs to be done quite quickly, and that’s where online searching has proved so useful.

Narrator – Terry Lane: David Russell-Head of the University of Melbourne carried out much of his Antarctic research using a computer terminal at the Baillieu Library on the University campus.

[Image changes to show a computer image of the world]

In this case the information which David Russell-Head wants is stored on a computer some 12,000 kilometres away in California. Instructions are sent from the terminal to the computer via standard telephone links.

[Image changes to show computer image of telephone link from Australia to California]

The computer searches through its store of information then sends back whatever the researcher has asked for. Information is now stored on computers all over the world, and much of this is accessible through the use of terminals in Australia.

[Image changes to show computer image of the world and links to computer terminals]

[Image changes to show a computer terminal room]

Within each computer information is grouped into what are called databases, covering areas such as engineering, medicine, art, history, the biological sciences, the social sciences, law and education.

[Image changes to show a woman loading a tape reel onto a computer terminal]

So how does one actually use a terminal to search for information?

[Image changes to show David Russell-Head and a woman working at a computer]

David Russell-Head: I’ve looked at the Antarctic bibliography for some keywords, and these seem to be the most relevant, airfields, runways, ice runways, ice roads, snow roads.

Narrator – Terry Lane: The search is based on a system of keywords. The keywords are entered and the computer searches its document records.

[Image changes to show a woman entering data onto a computer]

Female: Permafrost.

David Russell-Head: No, I’m not interested in permafrost.

Female: We try… so we want snow; we want that combined with snow.

David Russell-Head: Yes.

Narrator – Terry Lane: By trying various combinations of keywords the search is narrowed down to just a few titles.

[Image changes to show data appearing on a computer screen]

David Russell-Head: Oh, these look good. Actually that one’s pretty good, but even this one I think would be…

Female: That looks… would it?

David Russell-Head: … quite good to look at. Can we have a look at this one, techniques for measuring the strength characteristics of natural and processed snow?

Female: Snow. That one there, number five.

David Russell-Head: Yes.

Narrator – Terry Lane: What the researcher now has is a comprehensive list of references in his specific area of interest.

[Image changes to show a computer printout]

It’s taken less than ten minutes to search through a database of approximately 100,000 entries. This contrasts markedly with the amount of time and effort that it can take to compile a list of references by traditional methods.

[Image changes to show people searching through reference cards]

[Image changes to show people searching through microfiche]

[Image changes to show people searching through books in a library]

[Image changes to show people working in a factory]

Manual searching would out of the question for a high technology company such as Varian Techtron. Doctor Chris Mullins.

[Image changes to show Doctor Chris Mullins]

Doctor Chris Mullins: All of the spectrophotometers manufactured here at Varian Techtron are used extensively throughout Australian industry and research, and by customers as diverse as the RAAF and hospitals.

[Image changes to show a man performing an experiment]

Something like one out of ten of every products is sold to the Australian market, but by far the larger number go the ex… to satisfy the export drive. Something like nine out of every ten products are sold overseas.

[Image changes back to Doctor Chris Mullins]

R&D is a very important area for online data searching, but it’s also necessary for us to keep track of what our competitors around the world are doing.

[Image changes to show Doctor Mullins walking through a factory]

In just a few moments we can learn the activity of our major American competitor and learn what important merges have taken place in the industry over the last few weeks.

[Image changes back to Doctor Chris Mullins]

Patent searching, too, is another useful application of online data searching, and we’ve been able to save many thousands of dollars of research and development money, and considerably shorten R&D project time, by learning what important technological developments have taken place in the industry.

[Image changes to show Doctor Mullins speaking to a worker]

Narrator – Terry Lane: Why is it then, if online searching has so many advantages, that some people seem reluctant to use it? Peter Judge of the CSIRO.

[Image changes to show Peter Judge]

Peter Judge: Part of the problem is that people don’t realise the potential of these systems. There’s perhaps even an element of distrust of computers. But the point is that the computer will search for information in the particular way that the researcher tells it to. That’s where the combined skills of the researcher and the operator of the terminal are really rather important.

[Image changes to show Margaret Findlay dialling on a telephone and then working at a computer]

Allison Holbrook of the Australian Council for Education Research.

[Image changes to show Allison Holbrook]

Allison Holbrook: One of my particular areas of research interest is the effect of handwriting on the marks awarded to student essays. During the course of my research I used online searching extensively. One of the databases I used was the Australian Education Index, which is on a computer in Melbourne. I didn’t actually do the search myself; I took that job to Margaret Findlay, our librarian, who has the expertise in that particular area.

[Image changes to show Margaret Findlay]

Margaret Findlay: We’ve linked measurement with handwriting, and you can see that we’ve now got four documents in the database which might be of interest to you.

[Image changes back to Peter Judge]

Peter Judge: It might not seem cheaper at first glance, after all a search could cost anything from a couple of dollars to $200 or more, but then if the alternative is somebody taking a week to dig out the information by ordinary manual methods then the cost of searching is a week’s salary. Now I’m not saying that online searching is desirable all the time, or entirely by itself, it has to be integrated with other methods of searching as part of one’s overall search strategy.

[Image changes to show a library and a person working at a computer]

Narrator – Terry Lane: Nowadays there are terminals everywhere, university libraries, college libraries, public libraries and government departments. It’s much easier now for people, even private individuals, to have access to a terminal.

[Image changes to show Peter Guy working at a computer in an office]

There are commercial information brokers, as they’re called, who provide online searching services, and in business and industry many firms have taken the step of installing their own terminals.

[Image changes to show a computer printout]

Peter Guy of the stockbroking firm of Cortis & Carr.

[Image changes to show Peter Guy]

Peter Guy: We subscribe to a Canadian computer bureau, and at this minute we are hooked up to their computer in Toronto. This gives us access to data which is only hours old, a huge database consisting of share prices and interest rates, and many other things, and we can not only access the data, but we can use our software to also do graphs of that data.

[Image changes to show a computer printout]

Most of the graphics we do on the computer graphic system we wouldn’t even attempt to do manually, not only because of the sheer volume of the data involved, but also because of the complexity of the calculations. If we tried to do some of these graphs manually the delay in getting the graphs into the hands of our clients would be so long that the use would be very limited.

[Image changes to show Peter Guy using a portable computer terminal]

In addition to the system here, we can use a portable computer terminal to access into the system from anywhere around the world.

[Image changes to show a computer diagram image]

Narrator – Terry Lane: Presenting information as graphs or diagrams can be easily combined with online retrieval.

[Image changes to show Joyce Spark working at a computer]

Joyce Spark carried out research for her masters degree at the Victorian College of Pharmacy. Her interest was to identify drugs that could be used to combat malaria, cancer, and bacterial infection. She obtained information about the structure of molecules from a database held on a CSIRO computer. A program on the College’s own computer converted the information into structural diagrams.

[Image changes to show a printout of structural diagrams]

The database can be used to identify a molecule, or if that’s not possible, to look at molecules with similar structures.

[Image changes to show a computer printout of a molecule]

[Image changes back to Peter Judge]

Peter Judge: Online searching is really of immense value in research, and I’m sure that as more and more people become aware of this the use will increase even more. One of the reasons for this of course is that as the university students who are being exposed to these techniques in university come into the workforce, they bring these new habits of information searching with them, and of course even secondary students are now getting exposed to computers and this is going to change the whole world we live in.

[Image changes to show students viewing computer images in a classroom]

[Image changes back to Peter Judge]

But perhaps a final point, the purpose of a computer isn’t to give us more information, the computer is dealing with far more information than ever we’ve had before, but it’s the power of selectivity that we’re using here. What we want from it is in fact less information, but so much more relevant.

[Music plays and image changes to show Joyce Spark working at a computer]

[Image changes to show a computer screen with changing images]

Narrator – Terry Lane: It’s not a new technology, it’s been around for years, but the proliferation of terminals has made it more accessible than ever before, and the provision of cheap national and international lines of communication has made available a massive amount of computerised data to a wide range of users.

[Image changes to show a group of people playing musical instruments]

[Text appears: Music – Lyn Julian Trio; Photography – Roger Seccombe ACS; Sound – Robert Kerton; Script – Hardy Stow; Graphics – John Best; Narrator – Terry Lane; Editor – Tony Paterson; Producer – Nick Pitsas. A CSIRO film, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia. Copyright © 1984.]