End users point out the direct: From information transfer to information management

The objectives of the project were the planning, accomplishment, and evalua tion of suitable actions for a sustained supply of the scientific and techn ical collaborators of the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ) with natural s cience and technical information from external bibliographic and factual da tabases. It started with an analysis of information needs by interviews in the different departments. After an introductory course for the retrieval l anguage Messenger each interested scientist got a permission to access STN- data-bases; more than a third of the scientists have made use of it. The co sts for database searches could be estimated at about 400 DM per scientist and year. The usage was unfavourably affected by the command-oriented retri eval language and the costs of connection time of online services. Therefor e the trend leads to CD-ROM databases in the campus network. The number of document orders has increased three times by electronic delivery services. The infrastructure of the GFZ information supply has changed basically in t he course of this project: The conventional information transfer has been r eplaced by an efficient information management.