Opening remarks on the perspectives of a coordinated international research programme in information science; The intellectual architecture of information systems. A broad range agenda; A taxonomy of representations in information retrieval system design; How to know what is known: designing crutches of communication; From the stereotype approach of knowledge representation to a polymorphous concept of knowledge organization; The relevance of laplace's "rule of succesion" to knowledge representation; Some similarities and diffenrences between intellectual and machine text understanding for the purpose of abstracting; Design of a self-organizing documentation system; Text understanding as a knowledge-based process; Heuristic text parsing on 'TOPIC':, methodological issues in a knowledge-based text condensation system; Consensus in the medical sciences and the implications for information systems; The declining readability of scientitic papers as a factor limitting the transfer and use of knowledge.