Dr. Howard Bleich

The speaker for the meeting was Dr. Howard Bleich, creator of Paperchase.He talked informally about the system, how it came to be created, what techniques were used at its inception, where it stands today, and then answered questions.Despite effort by several members present, we were unable to get a live connection to see Paperchase in operation.

Paperchase is in one sense an index of indexes, allowing the user quickly to find references to articles on a desired medical topic.Dr. Bleich began his talk by recounting his days as a medical student.A professor suggested snipping up medical journals and filing the articles by topic, instead of keeping the journals intact.Taking the professor's advice, he found that over time his files grew and grew, until he finally asked a programmer to write a program to help him find what was in the files.That was the beginning of Paperchase.

As word spread about his files, the house staff at the hospital where he worked began to visit his office at all hours to read the articles he had filed.Eventually he put his files into the hospital library, and added to the program all the references in the library.

Paperchase searches for references to the biomedical literature.
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Dr. Bleich was asked if they have done anything with automatic indexing, and replied that there is a Russian formula which factors medical concepts down to a "prime" concept.