A generalised interactive system for the acquisition of structured data

This paper describes a system that is being developed for the acquisition of bibliographic data in a scientific library. Details are given of the hardware and software used, followed by examples from an input and editing session. Within the system, the structure of the data is fully general and is defined by tables from which re-entrant routines extract the sequencing, validation criteria, and messages for each field. The system is interactive, and prompts the user for the structure of each record and provides error diagnostic information. (3 refs).