AbstractThe U.S. Geological Survey's extensive bibliographic contributions to the earth sciences began in 1887 with the publication of theBibliography of North American Geology. The back‐of‐the‐book indexing system for this and other serials is a partially controlled, 3‐level hierarchical scheme of subject headings. Beginning in 1962 computer compatible electronic typesetting equipment was used for bibliographic and abstracts publications with an eye to eventual automated storage and retrieval. A search for an existing retrieval system that could be integrated with the existing publishing program without re‐indexing and would also meet the myriad operational and hardware constraints of the Survey's computer center resulted, in 1968, in the adoption of GIPSY (Generalized Information Processing System) developed by the University of Oklahoma. A particularly noteworthy feature of GIPSY is the ability to search variable‐field, variable‐length records for words, word stems, and prefixes or suffixes. Moreover, retrieved records may be printed in pre‐defined formats or formatted as fixed‐field, fixed‐length records for direct input to other programs, which facilitates exchange of data with other systems. Initial user resistance to automated literature searching was partially overcome by reducing the unwieldy printout to conventional page size and presenting the output in a bibliographic format very similar to the published bibliographies. It was generally felt by the users that more than 10 years of coverage are needed in order for earth scientists to consider that their searches have a reasonable chance of being useful because of the relatively long half‐life of geologic literature. Searches of abstracts provided better recall of relevant documents than search