The Ames Laboratory SDI system requires a minimum of human intervention. The adaptability of the system provides two major contributions to information dissemination. (1) The user benefits proportionately from the amount of effort he expends in setting up his profile and the diligence in sending back responses. (2) The document input has only to be machine-readable and is not restricted to certain established criteria concerning abstracting or writing. When the whole scientific and non-scientific communities adopt universal standards in literature writing a less adaptable system might be considered. (Author)