SIBILLA: An implementation of an intelligent library management system

SIBILLA (Sistema Interattivo BIbLiografico con Liste Automatiche) is an interactive polylingual inquiry system for a bibliographic data base, part of a complete library management system, which runs at Roma University, as a prototype version. Sibilla speaks English, French, Germany and Italian and inquiries can be made equivalently in the four languages. There are no authority files, no prime or secondary keys and all bibliographic elements can be used in inquiries. Further, after training, it is linguistically tolerant, will generate appropriate keywords and classification indices, automatically. Also, it allows guided searches through exemplary titles and concepts, for perceived fields of interest. The aim of this paper is to describe the system, as it is very different from other existing ones, and to examine the large number of Operational Research OR procedures which have been incorporated in it.