University of Virginia Library

NASA Supplies Computers
For Faster Graduate Work

For the second year in a row,
graduate students in eight
Southeastern States will benefit
from an experimental program
co-sponsored by the National
Aeronautics and Space
Administration and the North
Carolina Science and Technology
Research Center, according to the
announcement made today by P.J.
Chenery, director of the Science
and Technology Research Center.

Candidates for masters and
doctoral degrees at selected
institutions in North Carolina,
South Carolina, Virginia,
Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia,
Florida and Mississippi will be given
an opportunity to back up
literature research for their degree
theses by computer searches of the
massive bank of technical and
scientific documents accumulated
by NASA in its own extensive
research programs.

About half of the available
material is in the form of
unpublished report literature, a
source few graduate students have
access to through normal academic
channels. One-third of the reports
are from foreign sources, said Mr.
Chenery, including the USSR and
Soviet-bloc countries.

Financial support from NASA,
he continued, enables STRC, a state
agency, to make information
retrieval searches available to
qualifying students at a very
nominal cost. Searching by
high-speed computer saves the
individual student an estimated
month of manual research at
university libraries, and, it is hoped,
will upgrade graduate research in
general.

Contrary to popular
conceptions of NASA research,
fields covered by reports range
from the expected aircraft and
structural mechanics through
electronics, fluid mechanics, and
physics, to such diversified topics as
law and psychology. The life
sciences are also included. STRC
has previously prepared computer
searches on some aspects of forest
life, entomology and even scuba
diving.

Mr. Chenery went on to explain
that engineers from STRC will serve
as coordinators of the projects,
aiding the individual student in
defining his exact interest and
translating that interest into
computer terminology. STRC utilizes the facilities of the giant
IBM 360 computer of the Triangle
Universities Computation Center,
housed in the STRC building in
Research Triangle Park.

"Careful defining of the precise
problem eliminates searching
through masses of irrelevant
material," Mr. Chenery continued,
adding that STRC maintains a
library of over 100,000 documents
on microfilm. "After locating by
computer the precise document
needed, it takes us about 30
seconds per page to reproduce the
report from microfilm," he said.

During the first year of the
program, 155 searches were run for
graduate students at 7 schools in
North Carolina and 11 schools in
other Southeastern states.
Questionnaires on the value of the
searches indicated a majority of
students found them extremely
valuable. Many indicated that the
searches turned up material
previously unknown: others used
the search system to verify research
already covered.

University faculty and
administrators have been briefed on
the program, Mr. Chenery states,
and full details will be available to
students through their faculty
advisors and department heads.
Institutions selected to participate
in the program include the
University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, Greensboro, and
Charlotte, North Carolina State
University, Duke University.