Organisational snapshot, 1982

Derwent's operations were organised in the following manner at this time, based at Rochdale House and two other sets of premises in the Holborn area of central London.

Patents Technical Division

The 160 full-time staff of this division were mainly responsible for technical input into the patents services – classification, abstracting, editing and coding. They were assisted by some 270 outside technical abstractors, across the full range of technology and languages.

Divisional duties also included control of incoming documentation (11,000 patents per week), typing for OCR scanning (70 home typists) and makeup of masters for printing (7500 per week).

Brian Comfort was Divisional Director, with Sylvia Newey in charge of Alert Abstracting, Herbert Winning of Documentation Abstracting, Peter Norton of Chemical and Polymer Coding, and Mike Pope of Electrical Patents Index.

Literature Division

The 60 full-time, mainly graduate, staff were responsible for production and sales of Ringdoc, Pestdoc, Vetdoc  and CRDS; and for production only of Biotechnology Abstracts. They were assisted by around 100 outside technical abstractors and 15 home typists.

Henry Birnbaum was Divisional Director and Mike Harvey Technical Director. Ian Shaw managed Ringdoc, Grace Crowhurst Pestdoc, Alan Finch CRDS and Neil Larque Biotechnology Abstracts.

 Data Processing / New Products Divisions

A staff of 40 were responsible for all machine input, programming, computer processing and online file maintenance and development.  Mike Brooks was Divisional Director,  Bob Hope was Technical Director and Martin Simonis was Manager, Computer Services.

They were working in close liaison with two members of the New Products Division in the development of a statistical analysis service and an automated microfilm retrieval service.   Mike Dixon (soon to be leaving to head up Derwent Inc. in the United States) was Divisional Director, and Charles Oppenheim Director, Research and Development.

Production Division

Responsible for producing all the hard-copy deliverables, the work of this division, led by Mike Whiffin, is described in a separate account sourced from a couple of years later here.

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