On October 4, the Chief Executive of the British Library, Brian LANG, paid his first visit to NACSIS after years of contact. After listening to an outline of NACSIS, he talked with Director General INOSE to further deepen the relationships between the two organizations. A week later, on October 11, the Head of Research and Development of the British Library, Dr. Brian PERRY also visited NACSIS together with his assistant Dr. Terry CANNON, and they talked with Director General INOSE and Professors of NACSIS on various subjects of scientific information research.
We took the opportunity given by the presence of so many visitors to ask them to give lectures. On September 30, Dr. Urlich WATTENBERG, Institute fur Rechnerarchitektur und Softwaretechnik (FIRST), Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung MBH (GMD), gave a talk entitled "The Current State of Information Circulation in Germany" on problems relating to information circulation in post-unification Germany and Europe, with an additional discussion on related social aspects.
On October 3, Dr. Lou BURNARD of the Oxford Text Archive gave a talk relating to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) entitled "Using the TEI Guidelines for Information Interchange", in which he discussed the thinking behind the TEI and talked about the uses of network resources in the social sciences. On October 13, Prof. Gerard LOSFELD, Vice-preident de l'Universite de Lille III, and Ms. Katel BRIATTE, Ingenieur d'etudes au CNRS, gave a talk entitled "Le systeme d'information dans le domaine des sciences humaines" concerning joint research relating to the building of model systems, and related problems. This was given together with Maison Franco-Japonaise.
All of these lectures attracted intense interest as "hot topics" in the information science field. Of particular note was the way in which each lecture elicited enthusiastic questions and fruitful debate from the audience concerning how information systems should be set up in the social sciences and the various studies that surround the use of such systems.