Session V: Information Retrieval in Science: The Technical Aspects

• A Retrospective Review of Early Information Retrieval Systems (Madeline B. Henderson)
• Microfilm Technology and Information Systems (Susan A. Cady)
• The First Century of Mechanical Indexing: A Personal Remembrance (Herbert Ohlman)

Session VI: Science and Information: Some National Perspectives

• Soviet Scientific and Technical Information System: Its Principles, Development, Accomplishments, and Defects (Ruggero Giliarevsky)
• The Soviet Overseas Information Empire and the Implications of its Disintegration (Pamela Spence Richards)
• Restoration of the Japanese Academic Libraries and Development of Library and Information Science (Takashi Satoh)

Chemists have a long-standing appreciation for the value of recorded information. Many of the early efforts to improve information processing techniques were centered on chemical information problems. The pre-eminence of Chemical Abstracts as a secondary publication service was well established, but the control and effective use of other information resources were objects of much effort and interest on the part of librarians and information specialists, as well as of practicing chemists and research scientists. Such efforts and interest took the form of developing innovative techniques and experimenting with various available equipment for handling chemical information.

In the late 1950's the Office of Science Information Service in the National Science Foundation initiated a series of reports (Nonconventional Technical Information Systems in Current Use, 1957-1966) describing some of these innovative information systems. As principal compiler of the first reports, I visited many of the organizations operating such systems. A review of a representative sample of them illustrates the imagination and initiative displayed by the system designers. Thus, we can acknowledge the efforts of these pioneering individuals and also recognize their contributions to further system developments.

This paper will explore the ways in which the use of microfilm served as a precursor to later computerized information systems in business, education, and science. This accessible and inexpensive photographic technology allowed scientists, scholars and others to experiment with ideas for information storage and retrieval that were not ultimately realized until this decade.

Microphotography served primarily as a curiosity for more than seventy-five years after its invention in 1839 while photographic technology continued to evolve. By the early twentieth century the push of this advancing technology, readily available even to amateurs in the form of snapshot and home movie cameras, was augmented by the market pull of large bureaucratic organizations generating ever increasing quantities of paper documents. In 1926 George McCarthy, vice-president of a New York bank, invented a rotary microfilm camera for copying bank checks automatically. Soon thereafter McCarthy granted his rights to the Eastman Kodak Company in return for the presidency of Recordak, a new division created to manufacture and market the technology. This camera allowed for the creation of a microfilm industry to supply a virtual "machine tool of management" given its ability to record large volumes of documents very rapidly.

Microfilm was quickly adopted by banks in the 1930s and by other businesses, industries and government agencies. Libraries, anxious to expand access to resources required by a burgeoning research community, also adopted it. Although academic enthusiasts predicted that microfilm would revolutionize scholarship, the limitations of reading machinery precluded an unmitigated success. Foundations, corporations, and entrepreneurs made repeated efforts over decades to design better readers and printers. By harnessing microfilm during World War II for diverse purposes (V-Mail, espionage, document storage and preservation), the military increased popular awareness of the technology. From this period forward, the military served as patron, consumer, defacto standards setter, and arbiter for many facets of micrographics.

In the postwar period a highly competitive industry expanded into new areas. New formats (microcards, microfiche, aperture cards) and experimental retrieval machines that coupled microfilm with automatic searching mechanisms overcame some of the barriers to effective retrieval of filmed material. The National Microfilm Association, founded in 1944 and revitalized in 1952, sought to protect the industry from foreign competition, sloppy entrepreneurs, and opposition from the paper and printing industries. As computer use increased, microfilmers discovered that microfiche could offer an effective distribution medium for voluminous computer output. The permanent storage medium became the disposable one.

Although microfilm technology's continued existence is surely threatened by digital imaging technologies and online communications, this paper will show that throughout its trajectory as a technology and an industry, scientists, scholars, and business people were constantly trying to invent robust information retrieval systems. Microfilm's technical accessibility and low cost allowed for extensive experimentation that helped form patterns for emerging computerized systems.

Automatic indexing ideas go back at least 150 years, but not until the 1950's did this become reality. The tools were at hand even before WW II (punched cards and machines for handling them, paper-tape typewriters, teletypewriters, typesetting machines, etc.) but the application of these tools to natural-language processing only occured after the war's enormous stimulation of all things scientific and technical. Out of this effort came concordances to full texts, indexes to document collections, and automatic cataloging of libraries.

The author was fortunate to be among those who developed an automated indexing system: permutation indexing. This paper traces its development and that of similar systems during the late 1950's.

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This paper will describe the origins and development of the State system of scientific and technical information in the USSR, its accomplishments and its failures. It will also report on attempts to resurrect this system in the market conditions of today's Russia and will speculate on what would be necessary in order for these attempts to succeed.

The beginnings of the Soviet system for scientific and technical information date from the founding in 1952 of the Institute of Scientific Information at the Soviet Academy of Sciences (after 1955 the All-Soviet (and now the All-Russian) Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI)). In 1953 VINITI's review journal (Referativnye Zhurnal), first appeared; and in 1956 publication began of Ekspress Informatsiia (Express Information), with short translations of articles in foreign journals; in this year also began The Results of Science and Technology (Itogi nauki i tekhniki). Gradually VINITI became a center around which developed branch information centers in industries and in regional capitals, including the central libraries of the Soviet republics and provinces (oblasti). In 1966 the Supreme Soviet issued a decree "On the State System of Scientific and Technical Information" formulating the basic principles for the formation of the system and of the relation between its central, branch, and regional organs. The fundamental plan called for: a single state-run system; the coordination of the system's structure with that of the state economic administration; a scope including the main sources of information in all branches of knowledge useful to the national economy; the determination of the relation between the different organs of the system; the inclusion in the system of scientific and technical libraries; the adoption of a standard classification system (UDC); the use of modern technology; the complete financing of the system through the state budget; and international cooperation (especially with the companies belonging to the Council for Mutal Economic Assistance).

Many of these fundamental plans never came to fruition, but by the mid-1960s the system counted 2,500 member organs, and by the mid-1970s 11,500. In the opinion of many foreign observers -- including Americans -- the Soviet system at that time operated at a high level and was a factor in the success of many Soviet areas of development, notably the space program and the aviation and armaments industries. VINITI at this time was annually publishing short reviews of one million articles from 25,000 journals in 65 languages. These reviews were the main resource of the system's many organs, which repackaged the information to serve the particular needs of their users, whether engineers or scientists.

However, from its very beginning, the system suffered from flaws that increasingly diminished functional efficiency. The Soviet Union spent ten times less annually on scientific and technical information support activities than the US, even though the number of specialists working in the field were almost the same. The result was that ultimately only about half of Soviet scientific workers got access to a quarter of the world's scientific and technical results -- and then only two years after they were published. By contrast, in the US 90% of all published material became universally accessible almost immediately upon publication. The economic mechanism of the country did not stimulate enterprises to master new methods of production, thus the available information was basically underutilized. Only about 30% of all machinary construction met world standards (and that was mainly in defense production). The command administrative system underestimated the importance of fundamental science as the basis of economic progress, and the technological base in the civilian sector became obsolete. The branch organs of the system were subordinate to the different ministries of the industries they served, which constantly called on the information centers to perform routine clerical functions which reduced their efficiency and that of the whole system. The transition of Russia to capitalism requires a totally new system of scientific and technical information. While previously the system was Soviet-Union wide, it must now be national (Russia).

Corporate and social-service information must be prioritized over information serving the state. The state's role in the new system should be limited to the sectors of fundamental science, health care, education, community services, and defense. At the same time, a few of the principles of the old system may be found to be still appropriate in the new conditions.

Immediately after the founding of the Comecon in 1951, the Soviets began to organize meetings of information workers from socialist countries. Soviet experience had great appeal for developing countries because of Soviet success in transforming a largely illiterate population into a seeming industrial powerhouse. America's image was tarnished in the non-white world by continuing legal segregation. Much of the Soviet assistance in encouraging centralization and standardization of information practices abroad were channeled through the International Center for Scientific Information in Moscow. Its stated purpose was to develop the International System for Scientific and Technical Information, which Moscow saw as a vehicle for the inexpensive collection, organization, and dissemination of scientific and technical information throughout the socialist world. The system did ultimately create a set of standards for information formats and numerization for all Comecon countries. The USSR also sent out its own experts for on-site technical assistance to information centers in, for example, Hanoi and Havana. Probably the most important method of assistance was the free education the USSR offered thousands of students within the Soviet Union.

World War II esssentially destroyed the Japanese social system. The academic world also suffered great losses. One of the officials who worked for academic reconstruction was Shigenori Baba. Born of a noble family in 1909, Baba enjoyed reading classics and learning foreign languages. He was interested in Christianity and baptized in his youth. He majored in electrical engineering in college with studies in physics. He worked as a researcher for the Furukawa financial combine, where he produced a large number of scientific abstracts. As his achievement was recognized by the government, he began to work, in the last stage of the war, for a governmental organization that controlled all scientific information.

After the war, he worked for the Ministry of Education, where his achievements were extensive: development of a union catalog; founding district library conferences; improvement of university librarians' status; making of thesauri of technical terms; and introduction of the idea of documentation to university libraries.

He was an academic as well as a government executive official. He was sent to Europe to study documentation, and this led to his theory of documentation which was based extensively on mathematics. His academic career is best known as a result of his work as a professor for the National College of Library Science. His major accomplishments were: bibliographical analysis by quantitative method that became the present bibliometrics; his unique bibliographical equation; the making of "Union Index;" translation of the South East Asian languages; and thesaurus of technical terms in eight languages with Czech entries.

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