• First operation or public demonstration of Filmsort Aperture Cards, usually IBM punched cards with a microfilm insert. Are used mostly in engineering documentation applications ( Bourne & Hahn ).
• Jonkers Termatrex, Inc. develops its information retrieval system--an optical coincidence system using punched cards and a variation on descriptors.
• Emik Avakian develops AMFIS (Automatic Microfilm Information System).

• US Army Medical Library issues first annual catalog: Army Medical Library Author Catalog , with subject index, which replaces the Index Catalogue , started in 1880. Current Index to Medical Literature is improved and is made monthly, under the editorship of Taine.
• Library of Congress announces plans to compile the Union List of Serials using punched cards ( Gull, 1953 ).
• "Berkner Report" on scientific and technical information in the US is issued (Emard, 1976 ).
• An official act establishes the National Science Foundation (NSF) . NSF is assigned responsibility for exchange and coordination of scientific and technical information among US scientists and between the US and other countries (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• The Technological, Scientific, and Engineering Information Act, PL 81-776, authorizes the Department of Commerce to establish a central clearinghouse for scientific and technical information. This broadens the responsibility of OTS ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• Shaw describes the Rapid Selector in presentation at the University of Chicago's Graduate Library School’s conference on "Bibliographic Organization" (Shera & Cleveland, 1972 ). Shaw receives a $20,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to build cameras and processors for use in libraries ( Schultz & Garwig, 1969 ).
• Hans Peter Luhn devlops prototype of the Luhn Scanner for IBM . Its technology is based on IBM punched cards, run vertically through a specially adapted scanner, using photo-electric cells. It does not require fixed-field searching. It is first demonstrated at the World Chemical Conclave in New York City, September 1951 ( New tools, 1954 ).
• Polaroid begins to photograph CRT displays, leading to computer output microfilm (COM) ( Emard, 1976 ).
• The four major US federal documents centers (Central Air Documents Division, Dayton, OH; Navy Research Section of the Library of Congress; Technical Information Service of the AEC ; Division of Research of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) begin cooperation on the standards and practices in the handling of technical reports (Brownson, 1953 ). This work led eventually to COSATI?
• American Documentation, official publication of ADI , begins publication. Vernon Tate is first editor.  (Note: Dr. Eugene Garfield is in the process of compiling a complete bibliographic record and citation index to American Documentation and its successors; the period 1956-2004 is now listed at: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/histcomp/jasis-t/ ) 
• ADI establishes headquarters in the Library of Congress. Schultz & Garwig, 1969 ).
• BA receives contractual funding of $22,000 from the Office of Naval Research to speed up publication of delinquent indexes (Steere, 1976 ).
• Medical Sciences Information Exchange under the aegis of NAS-NRC is established ( Bourne & Hahn ).
• The Information for Industry Index to U.S. Patents (IFI/Plenum) begins publication using Mortimer Taube's Uniterm system for index terms.
• Smithsonian Science Information Exchange (SSIE) is established in Washington, D.C.( Bourne & Hahn ).
• 30 August - 6 September: In a paper delivered at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Harvard, Mooers uses (for the first time?) the term information retrieval. Title of paper is: "Information Retrieval Viewed as Temporal Signaling" ( Mooers, 1976 ). Paper is published in Proceedings, International Congress of Mathematicians, Cambridge, Mass., USA, Aug. 30-Sept. 6, 1950 (Providence, RI, American Mathematical Society, 1952, pp. 572-3.)
• Adams develops the concept of a clinical librarian, which advocates personalized service to users of medical information.
• IBM develops the Electronic Statistical Machine, Type 101. This is a punched card machine that is used in a wide variety of indexing and information retrieval projects over the next few years. First use of the machine for literature searching may have been at the US Patent Office. The Welch Medical Library Project also uses it (See below for details.) ( Jahoda, 1961 ). [Jahoda lists other projects that used it prior to 1961.]

• King County Public Library (Seattle, WA) issues the first (?) machine produced book catalog. Produced from punched (?) cards and is printed on an IBM Tabulator (Becker, 1976 ).
• James W. Perry and Robert S. Casey publish Punched Cards: Their Application to Science and Industry. A second edition appeared in 1958 with Madeline Berry and Allen Kent as co-authors.
• Mauchley and Eckert develop the first commercially available computer. Also the first to use stored programs and a compiler. First one delivered to the US Census Bureau. Name: UNIVAC I .
• At Johns Hopkins University's Welch Medical Library, Eugene Garfield develops machine methods for compiling Current List of Medical Literature (later merged with Index Medicus) and applies the IBM 101 punched-card sorter to search this database.
• In Great Britain, Derwent Publications, Ltd., begins patent abstracting services with Central Patents Index. Punched cards are used to construct the indexes.
• Taube offers a course on documentation at Columbia University's Library School (Taylor, 1976 ).
• IUPAC Commission adopts the Dyson notational system on a provisional basis.
• January: Mooers publishes an article on Zatocoding concept in AD ( Gull, 1987 ).
• 14 May: US DoD establishes ASTIA. This is the first major attempt to consolidate DoD information functions. This agency combines two existing document processing centers: Central Air Documents Office (formerly Documents Research Center) at Wright Field in Dayton, OH, which had the responsibility of processing captured German documents, and the Library of Congress Technical Information Division (formerly the Science-Technology Project) ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• 4 September: Mortimer Taube and Alberto F. Thompson of the AEC Technical Information Service present "The Coordinate Indexing of Scientific Fields" before the Symposium on Mechanical Aids to Chemical Documentation sponsored by the ACS's Division of Chemical Literature. This paper contains the first use of the term coordinate indexing (Smith, 1993 ).
• October: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel reports on the present status of research in mechanical translation ( Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• 30 December: AAAS holds a session at its annual conference in Philadelphia, PA on "Operation Knowledge." Saul Herner ( 1976 ) called this the first US based gathering of scientists, librarians, and documentalists to discuss the emergence of documentation/information science.

• Garfield publishes the first issue of Contents in Advance, a compilation of the contents pages of library and documentation journals. It ceases publication in 1954 or 1955 (Garfield, 1983 ).
• NSF establishes the Office of Scientific Information (OSI) to fund research related to the dissemination of scientific information ( Altman, 1993 ).
• University of Chicago holds a conference on the "Communication of Specialized Information." Discussion centers on changes taking place in librarianship and whether library schools and professional library organizations can encompass the interests of documentalists ( Schultz & Garwig, 1969 ).
• US Army Medical Library officially becomes the Armed Forces Medical Library.
• Dr. Jacques Samain (France) publishes illustrated booklet on his new system. Filmorex; booklet issued by Unesco. System uses discrete pieces of microfilm and complementary coding for selection. Pieces of microfilm contain code and full text; duplicates can be prefiled in various arrays to reduce search time (Taube & Wooster, 1958 ).
• The Institute of Scientific Information is established at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and in the following year begins publication of Referativnyi Zhurnal, Khimiya, a chemical abstracting journal. In 1955 the institute becomes the All-Soviet Institute for Scientific and Technical Information ( VINITI ), the centralized abstracting and indexing service for all scientific fields.
• Karl Heumann and Raimon Beard report on the U.S. National Research Council's (NRC) Chemical-Biological Coordination Center (CBCC) survey of the use of punched cards, classification systems, etc. in documenting work in the chemistry and biology fields.
• February: National Research Council issues a call for the comparative study of the best chemical notation systems for structural formulas (Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• Spring: Taube founds Documentation, Inc. Gull (1987 ) called it the "first private organization anywhere devoted to research and development in the field of documentation...". Firm begins with USAF contract sponsored by ASTIA. Gull joins the firm in July, 1952.
• June: Symposium on "Machine Techniques for Information Selection" is held at MIT, June 10-11. Perry (?), IBM , organizes the conference. Luhn presents the first version of the "Luhn Scanner" (referred to as the IBM Electronic Information Searching System).
• September: Robert A. Fairthorne writes an article on the operations of various types of automatic machines (could be a good summary of what is happening in the UK?) (Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• 26 September: ADI opens membership categories to individuals.

• Garfield begins work on his idea about a citation index for science, basing his idea on discussions with W. C. Adair, former VP of Shepards Citations .
• Biological Sciences Information Service is established in the NRC. Is transferred in 1954 to Smithsonian ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• ASTIA issues Title Announcement Bulletin . Later title is Technical Abstract Bulletin (TAB). This is the first consolidated announcement medium for DoD documents ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
• First IBM electronic digital computer. Name: IBM 701.
• First British electronic computer in regular commercial use. J. Lyons Co., England, develops. Name: LEO.
• The Medical Science Information Exchange continues to expand its scope and amount of work which leads to its transfer (in 1953) to the Smithsonian Institution and its redesignation on BioSciences Information Exchange ( Bourne & Hahn ) .
• 3 March: Symposium on "Machine Methods in Scientific Documentation" is held at Johns Hopkins University, Welch Medical Library. Garfield presides at the meeting. Attendance at 300. Those in attendance include: Clapp , Saul Herner , Luhn , Mauchley, and Shaw . Demonstrations are given of the IBM 101 (Garfield, 1987 ).
• August: Bailey, Lanham, and Leibowitz report on an experiment in mechanized searching of patent files, using punched cards in medicinal compositions, at the Patent Office.
• September: G. Miles Conrad is appointed Editor of BA (Steere, 1976 ).
• ASTIA Reference Test is conducted comparing coordinate indexing and subject headings (Gull, 1987 ).

• In France, Jacques-Emile Dubois does initial work on the DARC (Description, Acquisition, Retrieval, and Correlation) system.
• UNIVAC I becomes commercially available.
• Optical scanners are introduced.
• American Bar Association forms a Technical Aids to Law Committee to study the use of punched cards, computers, etc. for use in legal research (Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• US Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, CA, develops a post-coordinate, batch-oriented retrieval system using the Taube Uniterm system on an IBM 701 calculator on an ASTIA file of 15,000 documents. It mimicks a manual search of a Uniterm card file. It can add new information, delete information on discarded documents, match search requests against a master file, and produce a printout of document numbers. Only able to do Boolean ‘and’ search strategy. Uses coordination of document numbers listed under descriptors ( Kilgour, 1970 ). Gull (1987 ) called this the first subject search ever made by a digital computer.
• US Patent Office reports that research and development on photographically recorded disks storing digital information in binary code form is taking place at several organizations. Jahoda ( 1961 ) briefly summarized these, mentioning: Recall Film Index System by Recall, Inc.; Film Library Instantaneous Presentation by Benson-Lehner Corporation; Automatic Micro-Film Information System (AMFIS) by E.A. Avakian; Magnavox Film Data Recorder by Magnavox, Inc.
• The first demonstration and instance of computer-based searching of a bibliographic file on a regular basis occurrs at the Naval Ordance Test Station (NOTS) at China Lake, CA.
• January: Garfield reports on his analysis of the IBM 101 statistical punched card machine for use in information handling. Is published in American Documentation (Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• January: Report in American Documentation on use of the UNIVAC Fac-Tronic machine for use in doing library reference work. Concludes that it will work but too expensive ( Perry, et al., 1956 ).
• Fall: VINITI publishes Referativnyi Zhurnal: Biologiia (Soviet Union). By 1957, it is publishing 108,000 abstracts annually ( Steere, 1976 ).
• November: Eastman Kodak announces the development of the Minicard System. System uses 16x32mm pieces of photographic film on which coded areas and image (document) areas appear. Photoelectric cells complete the searching. System receives considerable attention because of its claim for handling large volumes of information ( Jahoda, 1961 ).
• Wiswesser develops his line notation system (WLN), which is used in the CROSSBOW (Computerized Retrieval of Organic Structures based on Wiswesser) system ( Weisgerber, 1997 ).

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