Brief History of Information Science

Saul Herner President, Herner and Company, 1700 North Moore Street,
Arlington, VA 22209
Information science is the product of convergences of ti. brary science,
computer and punched card science, R 81 D documentation, abstracting
and indexing, communi. cations science, behavioral science, micro- and
macro- publishing, video and optical science, and various other fields and
disciplines. The role and contribution of each participating segment is
reflected in certain basic and seminal writings, in the work of major actors
in the field, and in major events or developments. These con. tributing
sources are reviewed, analyzed, and related, as a means of tracing the
history of the field, from its pre and post-World War II beginnings to the early
1980s, to the near-term future.
It is difficult to place an exact date on the beginning of what we have come
to call information science. The field is the product of convergences of
various disparate disci- plines and activities: library science, computer
science (and its antecedent punched-card technology), docunien- tation of
research and development, abstracting, indexing, communications science,
behavioral science, micro- and macro-publishing, and video and optical
science, among others. The specific contributions of these seminal components are reflected in the publications in which they were first analyzed,
codified, or predicted; in the people responsible for bringing them to light;
and in major events or developments that give rise to them.
Some Basic Writings
As We May Think (1945). One of the earliest state- ments of the problems
and opportunities that brought the inadvertent founders of information
science together is contained in Vannevar Bushs As We May Think [l]. In
this evocative article, Bush, a highly imaginative and innovative technical
planner and administrator, first called attention to the important role of
information in the mas- sive research and development effort mobilized in
support,
of World War I1 and to the significance of information in a continuing and
expanding R & D environment. He sug- gested, some 35 years before the
fact, the availability of highly compact, cheap, and dependable devices
which would give rise to vast storage and switching capabilities that would
help foster effective use of the available infor- mation store. He predicted,
among other things, the fu- ture significance in library and information
processes of dry photography, microfilm, artificial intelligence, cathoderay displays, and logical selection from combina- tions of codes representing
subjects or other descriptive attributes of documents. He also described
Memex, his hypothetical device for storing and searching document
images by subjects and other desired attributes, storing search results, and
showing attribute or content associa- tions among searches. Perhaps most

important, by the very writing of his article, he conveyed importance and

prestige to this nascent, dimly appreciated field.
Royal Society Conference (1948). Another prinior- dial publication was
the proceedings of the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference 2.
Among the topics dealt with in the reports produced by the conference
were: the Format of Scientific Publications: Editorial Policy, Distribution, and
the Length of Scientific Communica- tions; Subject Grouping of Periodicals;
General Organi- zation of Scientific Publications; Delays in Publication and
Availability of Information; Scope and Quality of Ab- stracts; Techniques of
Abstracting: Cooperation Among Abstracting Organizations; Classification of
Docunients and Their Contents: Methods of Reproduction; Mechani- cal
Indexing; Training and Employment in Information Work; Guides to
Information: Translations; and Review Publications. The Royal Society
Conference brought to- gether, for the first time, some of the worlds most
eminent scientists (primarily United Kingdom and Common- wealth) to
discuss what was perceived as the full spectrum of library and information
issues as they related to the sci- ence and technology of the time. Two
immediate products of the conference were the establishment of the need
for author abstracts in scientific and technical papers and a study, by J. D.
Bernal, of how scientists seek and obtain information and how (and whether)
they use the tools and to them. A third, implied product was a new type of
information professional: the scientist steeped in information and library
techniques. The ramifications of these early developments are still very
much with us. Bibliographic Organization (1951). Edited by Jesse Shera and
Margaret Egan, this thin volume brought to- gether in anthological form the
thoughts of a group of con- ventional and new-wave librarians regarding
coming trends in classification, indexing, forms of publication, and searching
[3]. Bibliographic Orgariizatiori included two classic and prophetic papers by
Mortimer Taube and Ralph Shaw. Taubes paper, Functional Approach to
Bibliographic Organization, dealt, inter aliu, with the then-awakening
recognition of the need for special information collections to serve the needs
of increasingly specialized bodies of users. It described the growing
interrelationships and schisms among research libraries (large libraries of
rec- ord), special libraries, information clearinghouses, and information
analysis centers located in centers of subject expertise and manned by
subject experts. Taube dealt with the emerging significance of the
unpublished research report, theretofore largely ignored by the library community, as a vehicle of information. He also described what he called
bibliographic coordination, the precursor of coordinate indexing, which led
to the universally applied notion of inverted indexing, now the basis of most
com- puterized index and text searching systems. Shaws paper was entitled
Management, Machines, and the Bibliographic Problems of the Twentieth
Cen- tury. Contrasted with the length and presumption of his title, his basic
points were few, but nevertheless important and insightful. Shaw examined
the importance of the compression of distances in the elements of memory
and control units (at that time, punched cards, coded micro- film framessuch as in his prototype Rapid Selector- microcards, catalog cards, etc.). He

showed that none of the devices and mechanisms then available could
support bibliographic searching until they became much more compressed
and speedier. In developing his thesis, he helped dash the hopes of many
who looked upon comput- ers as an imminent panacea. It took some 15
years after his paper before computers began to have significant im- pacts
on bibliographic organization and searching, and another 10 years before
they could be considered com- monly applied tools. Punched Cards: Their
Applications to Science and In- dustry (1951, 1958). The first edition of this
book was edited by Robert Casey and James Perry, the second edi- tion by
Casey and Perry, joined by Madeline Berry and Allen Kent [4]. For many
long-time workers in informa- tion science-including the writer-Punched
Cards, in its first and second editions, provided the first cohesive, perspective view of the applications of nonmanual, precom- puter processes to
the field. It took us from Joseph Jac- quards control card for textile looms in
1780, to Charles Babbages statistical punched cards, ca. 1840, to Herman
Holleriths pantograph punch and electric accountin resources available to
them. A third, implied product was a new type of information professional:
the scientist steeped in information and library techniques. The
ramifications of these early developments are still very much with us.
Bibliographic Organization (1951). Edited by Jesse Shera and Margaret
Egan, this thin volume brought to- gether in anthological form the thoughts
of a group of con- ventional and new-wave librarians regarding coming
trends in classification, indexing, forms of publication, and searching [3].
Bibliographic Orgariizatiori included two classic and prophetic papers by
Mortimer Taube and Ralph Shaw. Taubes paper, Functional Approach to
Bibliographic Organization, dealt, inter aliu, with the then-awakening
recognition of the need for special information collections to serve the needs
of increasingly specialized bodies of users. It described the growing
interrelationships and schisms among research libraries (large libraries of
rec- ord), special libraries, information clearinghouses, and information
analysis centers located in centers of subject expertise and manned by
subject experts. Taube dealt with the emerging significance of the
unpublished research report, theretofore largely ignored by the library community, as a vehicle of information. He also described what he called
bibliographic coordination, the precursor of coordinate indexing, which led
to the universally applied notion of inverted indexing, now the basis of most
com- puterized index and text searching systems. Shaws paper was entitled
Management, Machines, and the Bibliographic Problems of the Twentieth
Cen- tury. Contrasted with the length and presumption of his title, his basic
points were few, but nevertheless important and insightful. Shaw examined
the importance of the compression of distances in the elements of memory
and control units (at that time, punched cards, coded micro- film framessuch as in his prototype Rapid Selector- microcards, catalog cards, etc.). He
showed that none of the devices and mechanisms then available could
support bibliographic searching until they became much more compressed
and speedier. In developing his thesis, he helped dash the hopes of many
who looked upon comput- ers as an imminent panacea. It took some 15

years after his paper before computers began to have significant im- pacts
on bibliographic organization and searching, and another 10 years before
they could be considered com- monly applied tools.
Punched Cards: Their Applications to Science and In- dustry (1951,
1958). The first edition of this book was edited by Robert Casey and James
Perry, the second edi- tion by Casey and Perry, joined by Madeline Berry and
Allen Kent [4]. For many long-time workers in informa- tion science-including
the writer-Punched Cards, in its first and second editions, provided the first
cohesive, per- spective view of the applications of nonmanual, precomputer processes to the field. It took us from Joseph Jac- quards control card
for textile looms in 1780, to Charles Babbages statistical punched cards, ca.
1840, to Herman Holleriths pantograph punch and electric accounting
tabulator and sorter, developed in 1880 for the U.S. Cen- sus Bureau, to
other marginal and interior punched cards, and beyond into primitive
computers. A paragraph from the preface to the second edition in 1958 is
illustrative: Some idea of the rapidity with which the field has grown may be
gained from the fact that the bibliog- raphy of uses [of punched cards and
related devices] contains 400 entries, compared with 276 entries in the first
edition [ 19511. This great increase is rcflect- ed in the extension of the
Practical Applications Section. . . . Here the reader will find a broad survey of
such important and unique uses as the Peek-A- Boo System; the Uniterm
System; mechanized cod- ing and searching techniques applied to
metallurgi- cal literature; the Zato-coding System; and . . . the use of
punched cards in linguistic analysis as ap- plied to ancient texts such as the
Dead Sea Scrolls. 14, p. iii] Another brief passage further reveals the thrust
and impact of the book: . . . some general principles are discussed which
may apply to types of mechanical devices not yet in- vented. [4, p. vl Indeed
they did.
Studies in Coordinate Indexing (1953-1959). This five-volume work,
edited by Mortimer Taube and Associ- ates, is made up largely of reports of
early basic and ap- plied research projects in information science conducted
by Documentation Incorporated, one of the first coninier- cial fiis dedicated
to library and information consulting and research [S]. While the full five
volumes provide an excellent review of early developments in information
science as they were happening, the first volume (1953) is probably the
most significant. In it, Taube elaborated and explained the notion of the
coordinate index and intro- duced its proprietary manifestation, Uniterm
indexing. Aside from providing an efficient, low-cost desk-top tool for storing
and searching inverted index entries, the Uni- term system, based on
document numbers posted on sub- ject (or other attribute) cards, did much
at the tinie to help librarians and other disseminators and users of information media to understand the principles and workings of information
retrieval outside of the traditional printed index and multiple filing of catalog
cards. The Uniterni system, based on free index terms drawn from the
texts being indexed, was also a precursor to text searching by computer .

Proceedings of the International Conference on Scien- tifk

Infomation (1958). Ten years following the 1948 Royal Society
Conference, the International Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI)
took place in Washing- ton, DC [6]. The 82 papers presented at ICSI by many
of the library and information luminaries of the tinie were divided into seven
broad areas: Literature and Reference Needs of Scientists: Knowledge Now
Available and Meth- ods of Ascertaining Requirements: Function and Effectiveness of Abstracting and Indexing Services; Effec- tiveness of
Monographs, Compendia. and Specialized Centers: Present Trends and New
and Proposed Tech- niques and Types of Services; Organization of Information for Storage and Search: Comparative Characteristics of Existing
Systems; Organization of Information for Stor- age and Retrospective
Search: Intellectual Problems and Equipment Considerations in the Design of
New Systems; Organization of Information for Storage and Retrospec- tive
Search: Possibility for a General Theory; Responsibili- ties of Government.
Professional Societies, Universities, and Industry for Improved Services and
Research. In addition to being broadly international in atten- dance and
representation, ICSI, in common with the Royal Society Conference, looked
into evolving develop- ments in the intellectual and mechanical aspects of
infor- mation organization and dissemination, us well us the needs, roles,
wid intermtiom of users. Regarding users, one thing that was missing in the
ICSI program, and con- tinues to be missing, is the concept of training to
make the most effective use of the available resources, mechanisms, and
techniques. Thus, the subject of responsibilities, was touched upon but not
brought to its logical conclusion by ICSI. It is perhaps reflective of the
complexity of system-user interface and the limited comprehension of the
fact that the user is an integral part of the overall infor- mation mechanism.
An interesting sidelight characteristic of ICSI was its tacit preoccupation with
Soviet scientific and technical in- formation apparati and processes. Not only
did it take place one year after the launching of Sputnik I by the Soviet
Union in 1957 (to the deep embarrassment of the United States), but it had
on its program some key mem- bers of the much-vaunted All-Union Institute
of Scientific and Technical Information. The prevailing wariness with the
Soviet Union was a strong factor in an accelerating emphasis and support at
the time of information pro- grams by such agencies as the National Science
Founda- tion, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Of- fice of
Scientific Research. In a very real sense, Sputnik helped launch information
science in the United States and elsewhere.
Information Storage and Retrieval: Tools, Elements, Theories
(1963). This work. by Joseph Becker and Robert Hayes, is distinctive in
several respects 171. First, it was, to my knowledge at least, the first
textbook that treated in- formation science as a discrete discipline (or
amalgama- tion of disciplines), and covered it in all its aspects, techni- cal
and behavioral. Second, it was based on one of the first full courses on the
subject, given over a period of years at UCLA, and thus field tested. Third.
it apparently em-boldened and stimulated ninny aspiring book authors,
giving rise to an ensuing array (flood?) of titles covering most major aspects

of the field. Itlforniutiorr Slorrigr tirid Ketsievul, through its au- thors-one an
engineer and librarian and the other a mathematician and computer
systems specialist-reflects the variegated character of the field. It also
defines thefield as it existed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Witness its
major contents: the Librarian and Recorded Knowl- edge; the Documentalist
and the Development of New Techniques; the Information Framework and
the User; Printed Data and the Creation of a Machine Language; Analysis,
Logical Processing, and the Computer; Indexes, Documents, and the Storage
of Data; Interdisciplinary Character of Information Systems; Elements of
Usage; Elementary Organization; Elementary Equipment; Pa- rameters and
Implementation; Role of Theory; Theories of File Organization; Theories of
System Design. In its treatment of these topics, Znformation Storuge und
Re- trievuf is, for its time, an excellent summarization or his- tory of the
field.
Science, Government, and Momration (1963). Known in the
information community as the Weinberg Report, Science, Government,
and Znformution was conimis- sioned by the Presidents Science Advisory
Committee (PSAC) [8]. It had considerable impact at the time, relat- ing and
synthesizing the thinking of information leaders in government and the
private sector. Its heart consisted of two sets of suggestions, one from (and
for) the techni- cal community and one from (and for) agencies of the
federal government. The main points of the suggestions relating to the
technical community were, and remain, illuminating, technically and
historically: (1) Authors must accept more responsibility for infor- mation
retrieval (by their use of retrieval words in the texts, titles, and the
abstracts they write). (2) Unnecessary publication should be eliminated. (3)
Technical books must be improved (and gifted authors must be enticed and
rewarded financially). (4) Higher status should be given to writers of review
articles. (5) The best methods and media of communication should be
studied, identified, and ex- ploited. (6) Scientists and engineers should be
trained to express themselves more effectively. (7) The workings and
methods of information retrieval should be made familiar to working
scientists and engineers. (8) Greater and more effective effort should be
made to enlist and train able sci- entists and engineers as professionals in
information sci- ence. (9) New steps and techniques must be developed and
used to improve the information transfer chain. (Exam- ples cited include
citation indexing, scientific newspapers. permuted title indexes, and data
and information cen- ters.) ( 10) Subject- and mission-oriented depositories
of publications should be promoted. (I I) Specialized infor- mation centers
(information analysis centers) should be promoted. (12) Mechanization can
be important but not all important. (Here, the futility, in the early 1960s, of
trying to capture, for example, the Library of Congress card catalog in
machine-readable form, because of the cost of input, limited storage
capacities, and slowness of searching was recognized. But the probability of
reason- ably near-term remedies of these problems was given as a sound
reason for pursuing small- and large-scale mecha- nization effort and
support.) (13) Citation indexing (par- ticularly in combination with

permutation indexing) should be pursued. (14) Compatibility in indexing language, formats, processes, and conventions are impor- tant, particularly
where mechanization is a factor. (15) Government support of private-sector
technical publica- tion is necessary. (Page charges are seen as a means of
meeting the cost of private-sector publishing, but are not considered
ultimately viable, given strong objections from the scientific and technical
community.) One outgrowth of the Weinberg Report was the estab- lishment
of the Committee on Scientific and Technical In- formation (COSATI), which
exerted major influence over federal information policies and programs
during the 1960s and 1970s.
Scientific and Technical Communication (1969). Published by the
National Academy of Sciences/National Academy of Engineering and edited
by a staff working under the NAS/NAE Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (SATCOM), this volume and its under- lying studies and
deliberations were structured somewhat like the 1948 Royal Society
Conference [9]. They were a partial update of that conference and ICSI, and
somewhat complementary to the Weinberg Report. Among the sub- jects
dealt with, and about which recommendations were framed, were the
following: Primary Communications (forms and growth, originators and
users, meetings, pre- prints and technical reports, serials, translations); the
Basic Access Services (document access, bibliographic control, abstracting
and indexing); Consolidation and Pre- processing (synthesis, review, data
compilation, informa- tion analysis centers, industrial information services,
spe- cialized or tailored services, networks); New Technologies and Their
Impact (document production and reproduc- tion, document dissemination,
processing of machine- readable records, on-line interactive systems, other
sys- tems approaches): Copyright Problems and Implications. While SATCOM
delved extensively into matters of national and international policy, its
analyses of new in- formation technologies were most significant, historically
and predictively. Two sections, on machine-readable rec- ords and on-line
interactive systems, were among the first summarizations of the
proliferation of databases and their impending broad on-line accessibility.
Interestingly, at the time of the SATCOM report (1969), there were around 35
nationally available computerized databases (and they were usually not
called databases but machine- readable bibliographic records). They were
searched in the batched mode. On-line systems were almost exclu- sively
experimental. Only the System Development Cor- poration offered a small
variety of commercially accessible databases, which were mounted and
searched via various types of software, of which ORBIT was one. The
number of on-line databases and the number of vendors making them
available have since proliferated. On-line software, on the other hand, has
diminished in variety and become more-or-less standardized (although their
names or acro- nyms seem to accelerate constantly).
Information Retrieval On-Line (1973). One sign of the approaching
maturity of on-linc access (in addition to its increasingly aggressive
marketing and broadening use) was the publication of Lancaster and Fayen's

Ii!foritziitioii Retrieval On-Line [lo]. For its time, Iifi~riii(itivii Rrtric.vtii OnLine was tantamount to a handbook or brief encyclo- pedia on the subject,
detailing the following: basic charac- teristics, equipment used, search
methods and cotiveii- tions, file designs, descriptions of then-extant
systems, performance-evaluation criteria and methods, applicable indexing
and vocabulary control, on-line applications, and other considerations.
Progress between 1973 and now (1983) is indicated in part by the fact that
on-line searches were then based al- most exclusively on index terms or
descriptors. A few sys- tems offered text-searching capabilities. but these
were primarily experimental and generally limited to Lvords in titles. In the
course of comparing manual searching and that based on batched-mode
punched-card and coniputer searches, Lancaster and Fayen suggested. but
did not quite articulate, an interesting irony: Aside from speed. perceived
physical convenience, and single-stcp niulti- variable combinations (which
are required in a minority of cases), on-line searches offer exactly the sanic
advantages as manual searches of card catalogs and printed indexes. Both
permit direct access to desired search attributes; both provide interaction,
browsing, and heuristics in searching (through cross references and other
devices); both can be invoked by multiple users at the same time (by all
who have copies in the case of printed indexes); both can be in- voked
directly by the user (albeit sometimes with expert guidance); and both
involve niininial delay of access. One other useful "by-product" of Ii!
fhritzu/iori Rt~tri~ivil On-Line is a delineation of five eras in retrieval
systems. ending in 1973. Pre-1940: printed indexes and card cata- logs;
1940-1949: semi-mechanized systems such as edged- notch and peek-a-boo
(optical coincidcncc) cards or matrices and microfilm searching; 1950- 1959:
interior punched cards for data processing and limited retrieval. early
computer systems. and additional microimage sys- tems (e.g., Minicard,
Filmorex. FMA): 1960-1969: batch- processing computer-retrieval systems,
experimental and primitive operating on-line systems, and more advanccd
microimage systems (e.g.. WALNUT); 1970-1973: dini- inution of batch-mode
and expansion of on-line systems1.
Libraries and Librarians in an Age of Electronics (1982). Lancaster helps
bring matters up to date in this volume, which summarizes and synthesizes
his and other writings on the near-term implications of advances in
computer and communications technology [ 1 11. The book goes far beyond
the "Libraries and Librarians" in its title.
A sampling of the chapters making up the book is provoc- ative: Computers
and Publishing; A Paperless Communi- cation System; the Disembodiment of
the Library; Does the Library Have a Future? As its title implies, it is made up
of well-reasoned and documented conjecture and ex- trapolation. Their
1

One might interpolate, with respect to the pre-1940 era. that the most significant
development of the 19.30s WIS the waikibility 01 riich publications as the New York
Times on inicrofilni. 'l'his had a very pro- found effect on the retrospective use of the
7imc.s and other proiiiiiiciit publications of rccord, particularly it1 public iiiid large
rc\c;irch libraries.

underlying bases provide rich insight as to the recent and earlier past of
information science. Continuing his discussion of on-line systems, Lancaster shows, via his own statistics and those of others, that such systems
have arrived with a vengeance. Batch- mode searches have all but
disappeared; an increasing number of libraries and information centers are
dropping their subscriptions to ink print abstracting and indexing services in
favor of on-line versions, taking into account the fact that most users go
back five years or less when making a search (a very old but generally
ignored finding); and the cost of purchasing and storing massive collections
of sporadically used printed matter is becoming less and less justifiable 2. We
are now entering an era of new forms of publication and communication
between the information apparatus and the user. Video and optical disks
containing primary and secondary information are coming on the market,
and their availability and use are likely to accelerate rap- idly, as
mechanisms for production and reading become cheaper and more broadly
available. Newer specialized reference and abstracting and indexing
services are al- ready beginning to bypass ink print, disseminating di- rectly
from the computer to the users terminal and print- ing off-line only on
request. The computer has long since replaced the teletype as the preferred
form of rapid com- munication of information products and services. The following scenario, already tested, refined, and being imple- mented by the
Central Intelligence Agency, according to Lancaster. tells the story and
brings us up to 1983: (1) Messages coming into a central computer are disseminated directly to the terminals of analysts with no intermediate paper
copy. Dissemination is con- tinuous for some messages, based on analyst
interest profiles, and one-time or limited-time for others. (2) Analysts read
incoming messages on-line and then (a) dispose of them, (b) reroute them
to other ana- lysts, or (c) store them in personal electronic files. (3) Analysts
communicate with one another on-line in one-to-one or conference mode.
(4) On-line terminals give analysts access to their own information files,
those of their parent branches, agency-wide files, and a wide variety of
external databases. (5) Files of documents are accessible for searching via
descriptors or in full-text. (6) A docitment-delivery system allows the full
text of any item to be communicated to a user terminal or in microform.
Document files are interfaced with computation programs so that data can
be extracted from text and manipulated in various ways. Analysts compose
intelligence reports on-line with the aid of text-editing facilities and
disseminate these reports, as appropriate, over the on-line net- work. In
short, for those who can comprehend, abide. and af- ford them, paperless
publishing, communications. and libraries are already upon us
Some Main Actors

Supplementing tmcastcrs \tati\tics. in 1979 there were 528 na- tionally acce\sihlc
cimiputcrircd databases, the bulk of which were coni- niercially available on-line.
More than 60% of these were being pro- duced by for-profit private sector
orgmiiations [ 121.

Mention has already been made, in discussions of their writings, of some of

the primary chroniclers. innovators, and prognosticators of information
science. There are others who are better known by their monuments than
by what they have written. Calvin Mooers, in company with Taube, Perry,
Casey, Kent, Berry, Shaw, Shera, and others, is surely one of the founders of
information science. He is generally credited, among other
accomplishments, with coining the terms information retrieval and
descriptors, and was one of the first to rationalize the retrieval and system
design processes. Mooers was an early experimenter in the use of marginal
punched cards with superimposed random number codes in retrieval. He
helped crystallize the notion and causes of false drops or false
coordinations in search products and advanced means of preventing them.
He was one of the earliest proponents of what he called reactive
typewriters. now known as word processors and on-line terminals [ 13,141.
Hans Peter Liihti is probably the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in
this field. Among his inventions are: self-demarcating code words. autoencoding (indes- ing based on statistical associations), auto-abstracting,
multiple-attribute searching via IBM cards and card sort- ers, selective
dissemination of information (SDI) systems, Keyword-in-Context (KWIC)
indexing. thesauri of inclex- ing and retrieval terms, automatic production of
tree relationships among classes of index terms. and machine- readable
book catalog records [ 151. Many of his ideas, developed in the era of
punched cards, have carried over to computers and are still fundamental in
the applications of computers to information and library science. Eugene
Gutjield, another of our great inventors, is bcst known for Cirrrerit Contents.
the Scic~ricc. Cittrtiori Itidrs. and the Sociul Science Citcitivti Itidex 3. He was
onc of the earliest experimenters in the automatic manipulation of indexes
through punched card techniques. He was also one of the earliest, and most
successful, proponents of the spin-off , producing dozens of new
secondary services froni the Citation Index databases. In many respects, he
is responsible for the existing information industry, based as it is primarily
on the repackaging and redissemination of existing files. Through the
structure of the Citation Index, which shows citation relationships among
similar and dis- parate publications, he helped revitalize the somewhat
dormant field of bibliometrics. Roger Sumtizit can be reasonably called the
Father of On-Line Systems. While there certainly were many early efforts
in the direction of remote searching of computer- readable files (such as
MITs Project MAC and SDCs ORBIT), it remained for Summit and his
colleagues at Lockheed to bring them to broadly accessible, commer- cially
viable fruition. This development took place in two stages. The first was the
installation of a DIALOG on-line system in 1967 at the NASA Ames Research
3

Innate modesty precludes niy nientioning that. in addition to his own fertile
imagination, Shcpirdi Ci/t/fifJ//.s. and othcr influence\. one of the sources of the
ideas that led to the Scicvrct. Ci/u/io/i //rt/rs and all that followed was a finding from
a sttidy I conducted ;it thc John\ Hop- kins University (while a colleague there of
111.. Garficld) that ;I priniary means by ushich scientists bccaine awarc of useful
puhlicatiori~ i\ tlinwgh cited references. This is a rare exoniple of an applic:ition of ii
rc\~iIt BI user studies. which usually lead only to niorc iwr \ludic\

Center, to search some 300,000 records stored at the Lockheed Palo Alto
Research Laboratory. This was followed by addi- tional installations in other
parts of NASA, as well as other agencies in the United States and Europe.
The sec- ond stage was the mounting of a broadened range of computerreadable databases and the founding of Lock- heeds DIALOG, which helped
make commonplace the on-line searching and storing of computer-readable
refer- ence and bibliographic resources by libraries and infor- mation centers
throughout the United States and the re- mainder of the industrialized world
[17]. Frutik B. Rogers, physician and librarian, did much to bring to reality
many of the possibilities of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. At his operating
base, the National Li- brary of Medicine, which he directed from 1949 to
1964, he oversaw the development of MEDLARS (Medical Liter- ature
Analysis and Retrieval System), the first computer- based system combining
page composition and the stor- age and retrieval of literature references; he
put into place the first national and regional library network: and with
MEDLARS, he laid the groundwork for the nationally ac- cessible MEDLINE
and its various specialized offshoots 1181. Perhaps as a fitting gift,
MEDLARS became opera- tional in 1964, at the time of his retirement from
the Na- tional Library of Medicine.
Epilogue and Apologia
This short attempt at a historical summary of a field as complex and
amorphous as information science is perhaps presumptuous. There is no
question that in my coverage of the main writings of the field I have left out
much more than I have included. The same can be said of pivotal events
and developments. With respect to main actors, many omitted names
immediately come to mind (and these are only a partial list): Robert
Fairthorne, one of the earliest and most astute analysts of modern
information science, and one of the first and few to distinguish among
codes, words, messages, and information-concepts that are still constantly
confused; E. J. Crane, who shepherded Chemical Abstracts for 43 years,
during which it became the most prominent information tool of science and
tech- nology and a model for existing and ensuing secondary services and
databases in other fields; Melvin Duy, who solidified the notion of the
integrated information clear- inghouse and helped establish the first working
examples; G. S. Simpson, who gave life (and early documentation) to the
concept of the information analysis center combining information sources
and interpretive talents: Cyril Clever- don, who, through the Cranfield
experiment and preci- sion and recall, introduced and demonstrated the
qualita- tive and quantitative evaluation of indexes: Donald Kitig, an early
(and current) evaluator and statistical historian and prognosticator; Gerard
Salton, developer (ca. 1961) of SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis
and Re- trieval of Text), which extended Luhns notion of indexes and
searches based on the computer manipulation of natural-language texts;
John Muuchley , co-designer and developer during World War I1 of ENIAC,
the first elec- tronic full-scale computer, and a major force in the ini- tial
application of computers to information problems: Thomas Allen, who,

perhaps more than anyone, demon- strated via his gatekeeper concept
that (1) the behav- ioral and societal aspects of information communication
are critical and (2) that the user is indeed a vital part of the information
mechanism; Frederick Kilgour, who devel- oped and implemented the Ohio
College Library Center (OCLC), now the Online Computer Library Center, the
first operational national computer-based interlibrary net- work: Henriette
Avram, who brought computer technology to bear in the rationalization,
preparation, and use of the traditionally art-bound library catalog card: and
Ctirfos Cuadra, who helped bring information science maturity, perspective,
and recognition through the Atitiirul Review q/ Information Science and
Technology, and continues to probe the impact and significance of on-line
databases from the user viewpoint. My main solace and redemption for what
I have left out of this article is that, given the dynamics of the field, 1, or
someone else, will undoubtedly be performing this task again, and covering
much the same territory. One endur- ing characteristic of information
science is its circularity. Consider, for instance, Taubes free indexing of
the 1950s which many conservatives in the field viewed as tantamount to
free love. Now, in the 1980s, both are ac- cepted and embraced with rising
enthusiasm. The computer terminal, the key to high technology in
information science and other fields, is now giving rine to new cottage
industries. Abstractors, indexers, editors, and others like them, are, with
increasing frequency, do- ing their daily work in their homes on terminals
attachcd to their employers computers. To complete the circle, we at
Herner and Company are experimenting with a method of beating the high
cost of terminals installed in operators homes and of conimunicating with
them on a real-time basis. We are trying out the idea of providing our field
abstractors and indexers with standard-font portable typewriters, having
them type their copy, and mailing or delivering it to us, so that we can
convert it into computer-readable form via an inex- pensive optical character
recognition device. Can we, in fact, ever get rid of paper?