History of Information Science and Technology 1970-1980

1970

European Association of Information Services is established to coordinate and advance the interests of operators of computerized data services.
First multiple windows user interface. Englebart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) develop.
First large scale implementation of electronic mail. Englebart and the ARC develop.
US National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) is established to deal with national plans for library information services (Emard, 1976 ).
Airlie House Conference on Interlibrary Communications and Information Networks is held. This is a major conference that set new and important directions for development of computer and communications networks in the US. Joseph Becker is chairman of the conference and editor of the proceedings ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information (CFSTI) is renamed National Technical Information Service (NTIS) and is given responsibility as major clearinghouse for STI and statistical information (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Institution of Electrical Engineers’ INSPEC database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Excerpta Medica Foundation’s Epilepsy Abstracts database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn ).
AIP’s SPIN (Searchable Physics Information Notices) database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn ).
CFSTI's US Government Research and Development Reports (USGRDR) database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Edgar F. Codd , IBM San Jose Research Lab, writes his landmark paper (which had been preceded by internal IBM reports) on his basic ideas for a relational database system. (For additional background and a summary development history see: http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/far/ch6.html )
NAL’s Bibliography of Agriculture (CAIN) database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn) .
IAEA/AEC’s INIS/AEC database is made available for second-party use ( Bourne & Hahn ).
NTIS’s NTIS (USGRDR) database is made available for second-party use (Bourne & Hahn ).
Charlie Bourne becomes President of ASIS ( Bourne & Hahn ).
INTREX is the first online system that allows for input-output displays on a single screen (Bourne & Hahn ).
SUPARS, combined with Psychological Abstracts, makes online abstracts regularly available campus wide (17,000 people) for searching as well as output (Bourne & Hahn ).
Data Central is the first online system that highlights search output terms, use key-word-in-context (KWIC), and allows searches to page backward to page backward in the search output. Data Central's OBAR is the first large scale use of online text searching that retrieves full text statutory and case law (Bourne & Hahn ).
NASA's Lewis Research Center in Ohio creates Lewis-NASA Line Information Storage and Retrieval (LISR) system, which is also known as NASA-LISR, and makes it servicable (Bourne & Hahn ).
Justice Retrieval and Inquiry System (JURIS) pilot is available at the Justice Department in Washington, DC ( Bourne & Hahn ).
January: ASIS begins operation of the US Office of Education funded ERIC/CLIS clearinghouse, with responsibility for the acquisition and processing of documents related to libraries, information centers, information technology, etc. Contract is funded at cost of $180,000 annually. Contract is held until 1974 ( Redmond, 1985 ).
April: BIOSIS , CAS , and Engineering Index begin study of overlap of journal coverage ( Steere, 1976 ).
April: Atomindex, a bibliographic system for the peaceful applications of nuclear science, is distributed by the International Information System (INIS) in Vienna, Austria ( Bourne & Hahn ).
31 May: AIM-TWX becomes operational at the MLA conference (Bourne & Hahn ).
June: AUDACIOUS demonstrated at the Zentralstelle fur Maschinelle Dokumentation in Frankfurt ( Bourne & Hahn ).
July: Batelle Automated Search Information System (BASIS) is operational ( Bourne &Hahn ).
August: BIOSIS announces the availability of batch-oriented retrospective search service ( Steere, 1976 ).
December: Ohio State University's catalog records are converted to an automated circulation system. This is an early effort for online campus cataloging ( Bourne & Hahn ).
NAL’s Agricola database is made available for second-party use (Bourne & Hahn ).

1971

U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency announce the establishment of the Chemical Information System.
Japan Association for International Chemical Information is founded to increase the international flow of chemical information.
First commercially available microprocessor. Intel develops as the Intel 4004.
First regular use of a 8 inch floppy for magnetic storage by Alan Shugart at IBM .
UNESCO Intergovernmental Conference for the establishment of a World Science Information System (UNISIST) is held ( Emard, 1976 ).
COSATI is transferred from the President’s Office of Science and Technology (OST) to National Science Foundation (NSF). This is a loss of influence by COSATI, and it is abolished in 1972 ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
NASA , Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
U.S. National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE (Medical Literature Online) becomes operational ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Varian ADCO in Palo Alto, CA develops the Varian ADCO-626 system which rapidly retrieves information from a microfilm file. Do not know of any operational use of this system ( Bourne & Hahn ).
ORBIT II replaces General Purpose ORBIT, which was developed at SDC-Santa Monica ( Bourne & Hahn ).
DIALOG and CCm Information Corp. are the first to use license agreements and require royalty payments for their online database (Bourne & Hahn ).
April: MEDLARS fully operational in Australia ( Bourne & Hahn ).
May: OCLC first demonstrates its online search system (Bourne & Hahn ).
June: NLM awards SDC MEDLARS II contract ( Bourne & Hahn ).
26 August: OCLC begins first online operation ( Bourne & Hahn ).
September: LEADERMART (LEADER "MART" for the Mart Science and Engineering Library at Lehigh University) becomes fully operational. It is the first online service made available to any interested user and charge for use by the hour (Bourne & Hahn ).
September: PANDEX becomes the first publically available online search service through Lockheed Corp.( Bourne & Hahn ).
November 8-December 17: SUPARS II in operation at Syracuse University (Bourne & Hahn ).
Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. The @ symbol was developed shortly thereafter, March, 1972. By July, 1972, Larry Roberts had developed a process for managing e-mail.

1972

"Greenberger Report" on making scientific and technical information more available and useful is submitted to the US Federal Council for Science and Technology (Emard, 1976 ).
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) Act, PL 92-484, is passed and is created to study and assess impacts of technology and make recommendations (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Predicasts’ Predicasts database is made available for second party use (Bourne & Hahn ).
Commercial online systems, ORBIT ( System Development Corporation ) and DIALOG (Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation), become available in the United States.
INPADOC (International Patent Documentation System) is founded by the World Intellectual Property Organization and the government of Austria. Later integrated into the European Patent Office.
NLM, SDC MEDLINE and TYMNET are the first to provide a publically available data communication network online search service (Bourne & Hahn ).
ESRO adds METADEX (Metals Abstracts), GRA ( U.S. Government Reports Announcements), COMPENDEX, and NSA databases (Bourne & Hahn ).
JURIS available for in-house work at the Department of Justice (Bourne & Hahn ).
Petroleum Abstracts Search System (PASS) is started at the University of Tulsa (Bourne & Hahn ).
26 March: The New York Times decides for the first time to allow outsiders access to its research files through a planned online search system called New York Times Information Bank ( Bourne & Hahn ).
31 March: DDC online system is operational ( Bourne & Hahn ).
May: OCLC amends its articles of incorporation and offers non-profit organizations full membership status ( Bourne & Hahn ).
June: Karolinska Institut receives MEDLINE (Bourne & Hahn ).
June: Lockheed Retrieval Service formally announced at the Special Libraries Association annual meeting ( Bourne & Hahn ).
August: Pittsburg Information RETrieval System (PIRETS) is operational at the University of Pittsburgh University Computer Center (Bourne & Hahn ).
October: TOXicology Informational Conversational On-Line Network (TOXICON) made available online ( Bourne & Hahn ).
October: Data Corporation renamed Mead Technology Laboratories (MTL) (Bourne & Hahn ).
SPIRES-2 in service ( Bourne & Hahn ).
November: New York Times Information Bank is operational (Bourne & Hahn ).
November: BALLOTS II in production ( Bourne & Hahn ).

1973

Henry Small and Irina Marshakova independently develop the concept of co-citation analysis .
NATO's Computer Representation and Manipulation of Chemical Information is held at Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands.
"Anderla Report" from OECD forecasts information needs in member states in the year 1985. Report has significant impact on development of the information industry in the US and Europe ( Emard, 1976 ).
Lexis provides full text records of US court opinions in an online retrieval system.
First fully functional personal computer complete with monitor. Name: ALTO, Xerox PARC develops.
ABI/INFORM’s ABI/INFORM database is made available for second party use (Bourne & Hahn ).
Dialog is the first online search service to provide a regular newsletter and to advertise in journals ( Bourne & Hahn ).
BASIS is the first online search system that allows simultaneous users to search over one million records ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Eli Lilly's MEDDOC, a medical documentation service, operates in-house (Bourne & Hahn ).
12 February: OCLC activates the extended search function (Bourne & Hahn ).
February: New York Times Information Bank becomes publically available (Bourne & Hahn) .
February: CHEMCON is made publically available on SDC's Search Service (Bourne & Hahn ).
Spring: CANadian On-Line Enquiry (CAN/OLE), which is possibly the first bi-lingual online search system, is established through the joint efforts of the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) and the Computation Centre of the National Research Council (Bourne & Hahn ).
March: OCLC extends service to regional libraries outside Ohio (Bourne & Hahn ).
2 April: LEXIS becomes available to the public ( Bourne & Hahn ).
April: TOXICON renamed TOXLINE ( Bourne & Hahn ).
April: Cybernet Timesharing Ltd. in London develops an online experimental service called RETROSPEC-1 ( Bourne & Hahn ).
May: The Defence Scientific Information Service (DSIS) of Canada launches RETRO, which is perhaps the first bilingual online system (Bourne & Hahn ).
May: The first issue of Chronolog, DIALOG's newsletter, is published (Bourne & Hahn ).
May: Bob Metcalfe and David Boggs, who at the time were researchers at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), develop Ethernet .
September: AEC/RECON in daily operation ( Bourne & Hahn ).
September: DDC Online is redesigned and renamed DROLS (Defense RDT&E On-Line System) ( Bourne & Hahn ).
October: SPIRES-2 is serviced at Stanford University libraries (Bourne & Hahn ).
November: BALLOTS-2 production begins at Stanford (Bourne & Hahn ).
December: Wisconsin Information System for Education (WISE) is made available ( Bourne & Hahn ).

1974

Federal Paperwork Act, PL 93-556, establishes the Commission on Federal Paperwork to study procedures related to federal government information gathering, management, and use ( Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Privacy Act, PL 93-579 , is passed. Regulates federal agency use of information regarding individuals (Pinelli, et al., 1992
First widely marketed personal computer kit. Name: Mark-8, Jonathan Titus developer.
QL Systems Limited at Queen's University, Canada, is the first Canadian commercial online retrieval service ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Informatics gets an exclusive license to market Excerpta Medica (EM) database in North America ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Dow Jones News/Retrieval is servicable to brokers and investors (Bourne & Hahn ).
Information Retrieval by Interactive Search (IRIS) is established at ICI Ltd., U.K. ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Traitement de Textile Universelle et Selective or Textile Information Treatement Users' Service (TITUS) uses a multilingual thesarus and automatically translates results into four languages ( Bourne & Hahn ).
MEDUSA, later known as RETROMEDUSA, becomes an experimental online search service ( Bourne & Hahn ).
SPIRES/BALLOTS online display terminals publically available at Stanford University libraries ( Bourne & Hahn ).
The Washington Library Network bibliographic system operates in batch mode (Bourne & Hahn ).
LEXIS is the first online serch service that offers discounted online access for instructional use at academic institutions ( Bourne & Hahn ).
January: Informatics offers CHEMLINE, the first publically available online chemical dictionary ( Bourne & Hahn) .
January: Information Dynamics Corp. (IDC) in Reading, MA, offers their online bibliographic system to U.S. librarians. Their database, LIBCON, is available through the SDC Search Service ( Bourne & Hahn ).
February: Subject-Content -Oriented Retriever for Processing Information Online (SCORPIO), developed by the LC Computer Applications Office, is available online ( Bourne & Hahn ).
February: The University of Toronto Library Automation System (UTLAS), a Canadian bibliographic cataloging information system, is made available (Bourne & Hahn ).
March: SDC's ORBIT III is the first to publically offer online document orders (Bourne & Hahn) .
September: TOOL-IR in operation at Tokyo's University Computer Center (Bourne & Hahn ).
October: OCLC identifies Lockheed's DIALOG, SDC's ORBIT, and Batelle's BASIS as the only systems that can perform subject searches (Bourne & Hahn ).
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP).
BBN opens Telenet , the first public packet data service (a commercial version of ARPANET)

1975

Lockheed establishes Dialog online retrieval system.
First digital microcomputer available for personal use. MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) develops.
CA annual author and keyword subject indexes are computer produced.
First mass produced and marketed personal computer (kit and assembled). Name: Altair 8800 , Roberts, Yates, and Bybee developers.
First "IBM Personal Computer," the IBM 5100 . Sales and marketing of this are not successful.
"Chartrand Report" on the role of NSF in federal management of scientific and technical information is prepared for the US Senate ( Emard, 1976 ).
NLM accepts SDC's MEDLARS II ( Bourne & Hahn ).
The Information Industry Association (IIA) awards Lockheed (and in turn, SDC) the Information Product of the Year Award ( Bourne & Hahn ).
West Publishing's West Computer Law Retrieval System is publically available ( Bourne & Hahn ).
ESRO provides, for the first time, online search capability in Arabic through the National Documentation Centre in Rabat, Morocco (Bourne & Hahn ).
Dow Jones News/Retrieval is possibly the first online search system to provide real-time updates ( Bourne & Hahn ).
Info Globe, the online information division for Canada's Globe and Mail, begins servive ( Bourne & Hahn ).
January: American Energy Commission (AEC) changes its name to Energy Research and Development Association (ERDA) ( Bourne & Hahn ).
February: OCLC adds online indexes that allow one to search by ISBN, ISSN, and CODEN codes. The average responsse time is 20 seconds, considered considerably long ( Bourne & Hahn ).
June: BALLOTS teminal made available to the public for the first time (Bourne & Hahn ).
June: SDC is the first organization to offer a toll-free 800 number for its DIALOG users ( Bourne & Hahn) .

1976

First highly successful personal computer is marketed. Name: Apple II .
NSF OSIS becomes Division of Science Information. Focus of the office is now on promoting information science research instead of STI related services (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Herman Skolnik becomes the first recipient of the Skolnik Award of the ACS Division of Chemical Information .
CA Search, a file of CA references and indexing, is introduced and soon becomes the most widely used chemical database in the world.
CAS ONLINE becomes operational on a pilot basis.
BCN-2 started as a non-profit national eduational organization in Illinois (Bourne & Hahn ).
Public access to the DOE/RECON online service ( Bourne & Hahn ).
ILO/ISIS is possibly the first online search system to allow input in one language and output in another ( Bourne & Hahn ).
University of Dortmund uses DOBIS software in order to support online cataloging. It makes the sotware available to major libraries worldwide (Bourne & Hahn) .
BALLOTS is renamed Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) (Bourne & Hahn ).
OCLC offers dial-up capability to its users ( Bourne & Hahn ).
April: West Computer Law Retrieval System is renamed WESTLAW (Bourne & Hahn) .
April: Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (JICST) provides an online search servicec called JOIS-I (JICST Online System-I) (Bourne & Hahn ).
April: IDC files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy ( Bourne & Hahn ).
31 May: The European Space Agency (ESA) is established (Bourne & Hahn ).
October: The Boston Globe, through its contract with MTL, becomes the first newspaper to automate its library ( Bourne & Hahn ).
December: SDC announces its first volume discount plan (Bourne & Hahn ).

1977

Molecular Design Limited , a supplier of computer software for chemical and pharmaceutical companies, is founded by Stuart A. Marson, Steve Peacock, and Wipke.
Aspen Systems of Rockville, MD, provides ASPENSEARCH V online (Bourne & Hahn ).
OCLC becomes OCLC, Inc. ( Bourne & Hahn ).
October: ERDA changes its name to the Department of Energy (DOE) (Bourne & Hahn) .

1978

NSF Division of Science Information becomes the Division of Information Science and Technology (Altman, 1993 ).

1979

White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services (WHCLIS) is held (Pinelli, et al., 1992 ).
Info Globe, the online information division for Canada's Globe and Mail, is publically available ( Bourne & Hahn ).

INFORMATION SCIENCE IN THE 20TH CENTURY

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