Here, an overview will be given of the history of the information retrieval service in NACSIS from the viewpoint of the preparation of databases, the introduction and acceptance of outside databases, and the improvements in retrieval systems.

1. Preparation of Databases
From its initial establishment, NACSIS has embraced as one of its objectives the formation of databases of scientific information unique to Japan. With the cooperation of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture, universities, and academic associations and based on its own independent surveys, it has prepared original databases for use by its users.

The preparation of databases unique to Japan is important for enabling Japanese scientific information to be efficiently utilized by Japanese researchers themselves and, at the same time, is effective in meeting rising overseas interest in the scientific information of this country. It has therefore been actively promoted.

Before starting the NACSIS-IR service, NACSIS began constructing two original databases - one on "grant-in-aid scientific research" and a "dissertation index" - in fiscal 1986. Starting from 1990, it offered a "scientific papers" storing the full text of papers carried in Japanese academic journals. Toward this end, it developed a system able not only to record the text of the papers, but also store tables and figures and the pages of these papers in the form of image data and to fax the same to users upon request. This was at the time an unprecedented database internationally in that it could call up a true full text database including tables and figures. NACSIS continued to construct new databases such as one on "academic conference papers" and a "directory of researchers". It is currently maintaining 15 databases which store a total of about 1.16 million records of information.

2. Introduction of Databases
In parallel with the construction of Japan's own databases, NACSIS, in view of its nature as an inter-university research institute, introduced large-scale databases difficult for individual universities to obtain on their own.

(1) Overseas Databases
Before the start of the NACSIS-IR service in fiscal 1987, the forerunner of the NACSIS, the Center for Bibliographic Information of the University of Tokyo, surveyed and selected several databases to be introduced from abroad.

As a result, it decided to introduce four databases: the "Life Sciences Collection" of abstracts of papers in the field of life sciences, "MathSci" of abstracts of papers in the field of mathematics, "ISTP&B" of index information of the records of conferences in all scientific and technical fields, and the full text of papers carried in the "Harvard Business Review" - a leading U.S. journal in the field of business management.

Further, it was decided to transplant the "COMPENDEX" and "Ei Engineering Meetings", used for on-line information retrieval through the Computer Center of the University of Tokyo, including preprocessing use software and retrieval software. Work for transplanting them was performed in fiscal 1986. In this way, when the NACSIS-IR service started on April 1, 1987, it offered information from six foreign databases.

Even after the start of the service, upon consideration of requests by users and the balance among academic disciplines, NACSIS studied the addition of further new overseas databases. As a result, it decided to add four new ones: "EMBASE" of abstracts of papers in the field of medicine, "SciSearch" of citations with abstracts (natural sciences), "Social SciSearch" (social sciences), and "A&H Search" (arts and humanities). These began being offered to users as part of the service in fiscal 1988.

From the inception of the service of foreign databases to the present day, the NACSIS-IR has undergone several changes as a result of the evolution of the systems for supply of data by the organizations producing the databases etc.

A particularly major change came with the merger of "COMPENDEX" and "Ei Engineering Meetings" in April 1991. This merger resulted in a change of name of the database as well to "COMPENDEX PLUS". As a result, the service was reduced to nine overseas databases.

Other major modifications were (1) the change in the retrieval software for the "Harvard Business Review" to one for a full text database, (2) the addition of current reports and related fields to "MathSci", (3) the incorporation of "research front" data into "SciSearch", (4) the addition of back data to "SciSearch" and "Social SciSearch" and simultaneously the addition of abstract information to the newly input data, (5) the addition of back data to "A&H Search", and (6) the addition of back data to "EMBASE" for a change of the Thesaurus retrieval functions.

(2)Domestic Databases
To promote the mutual utilization of databases, NACSIS introduced databases produced by other organizations in Japan as well. For example, starting January 1993, it started offering the "Japanese Periodicals Index" and the "List of Conference Proceedings in Science and Technology" prepared by the National Diet Library and starting fiscal 1996 the "Private Grants-in-Aid Research" database prepared by the Foundation Center.

3. Databases Received From Organizations, Researchers, Etc.
Most of the databases prepared by university and or researchers under grants-in-aids of the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture etc. for promotion of disclosure of research findings were based on information from the excellent research of the researchers themselves and were very specialized in nature. Strong requests were made for the disclosure of those findings from researchers in the same fields. When NACSIS was created as the central organization for The Scientific Information System, it was asked to take on the role of disclosure of these databases. In response to this, it began a project for incorporating databases provided by university and other researchers in fiscal 1991.

When starting this project, NACSIS developed a "standard system" for somewhat automatically reformatting the databases, originally prepared by different equipment in various formats, for provision by the NACSIS-IR service, producing an index, etc. so as to convert the databases to the NACSIS-IR format as efficiently as possible. Since the start of this project, NACSIS has received 24 databases from researchers or research institutes starting with an "Index for General Information of Home Economics Research" from fiscal 1993.

4. Improvement in Retrieval Systems
The retrieval system of the NACSIS-IR was developed using the Hitachi Ltd. "Orion" as a search engine and was developed based on the TOOL-IR information retrieval system used at the Computer Center of the University of Tokyo. Successive improvements have been made to the search functions etc. as follows:
¥ Addition of on-line help functions
¥ Addition of "REQUEST" command (ILL request function from NACSIS-IR)
¥ Improvement of search speed by transition from ORION to MR90 (successor search system to ORION)
¥ Addition of "MENU" commands etc.
¥ Addition of multifile retrieval function (function for searching through several databases at single time)

5. Outlook
Rapid progress is being made in so-called open systems of computer hardware and operating systems. It is now becoming practical to use even large databases, which had been thought of as requiring large-sized general purpose computers in the past, on such open systems. In view of this, it was decided to make the NACSIS-IR system open as well. Work has begun on development of this. At that time, it was decided to adopt SGML as the standard format for the NACSIS-IR databases as a whole, including not only full text, but also indexes, abstracts, etc. Further, the search engine of Canadian Open Text Co. was selected for the development effort.

In addition to the former command type interface, further, the GUI type search system for accessing by MOSAIC type clients using IP connections, now spreading rapidly as a new communications environment, is under development. The NACSIS intends to continue forming and offering scientific information databases to deal with the advances made in communications and information processing technology and the changes in user demands.