-
Period: to
Vannevar Bush
A respected MIT scientist and the head of the U.S. scientific effort during WWII -
Period: to
Hans Peter Luhn
a prodigious inventor with a broad range of patents joined IBM in 1941 and became a pioneer in development of computerized methods for handling texts and other IR methods in 1950s. Luhn pioneered many of the basic techniques now common to IR in general. Among others, he invented automatic production of indexes from titles and texts – Key Words in Context or KWIC indexing that lead to automatic indexing from full texts; automatic abstracting that lead to summarization efforts; and Selective Disse -
Period: to
Mortimer Taube
IR pioneer and entrepreneur, founded a company named Documentation Inc. devoted to development and operation of systems for organization and retrieval of scientific and technical information. -
Period: to
Cyril Cleverdon
A pioneer in IR testing, a librarian at the Cranfield Institute of Technology (now Cranfield University) in the UK. From the late 1950s till mid 1970s Cleverdon conducted a series of IR tests under the name of Cranfield tests. -
Period: to
Calvin N. Mooers
The term “information retrieval” (IR) was coined by mathematician and physicist Calvin N. Mooers (1919-1994), a computing and IR pioneer, just as the activity started to expand from its beginnings after Second World War. -
Lotka’s law
In 1920s Alfred Lotka (1880-1949, American mathematician, chemist and statistician) reported on the distribution of productivity of authors in chemistry and physics in terms of articles published. He found a regular pattern where a large proportion of the total literature is actually produced by a small proportion of the total number of authors, falling down in a regular pattern, where majority of authors produce but one paper – after generalization this became known as Lotka’s law. -
Period: to
Solla Price
British and American physicist, historian of science and information scientist, recognized as the father of scientometrics -
Period: to
Gerard (Gerry) Salton
A towering figure in advancing experimentation with algorithms for IR, a computer scientist and academic (Harvard and Cornell Universities) who firmly connected IR with computer science.
He is the founder of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). SIGIR became the preeminent international organization in IR with annual conferences that are the main event for reporting advances in IR research; as a result of global interest in I -
Bradford’s law or Bradford’s distribution
In 1930s Samuel Bradford (1878-1948, British mathematician and librarian) using relatively complete subject bibliographies studied scatter of articles relevant to a subject among journals. He found that a small number of journals produce a large proportion of articles on the subject and that the distribution falls regularly to a point where a large number of journals produce but one article on the same subject – after generalization this became known as Bradford’s law or Bradford’s distribution. -
first developments and activities associated with information science
-
First basic algorithms
-
Period: to
term “information retrieval”
Calvin N. Mooers: "Information retrieval is … the finding or discovery process with respect to stored information … useful to [a user]. Information retrieval embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, technique, or machines that are employed to carry out the operation." -
As we may think by Vannevar Bush
as we may thinkIn this article Vannevar Bush succinctly defined a critical and strategic problem of information explosion in science and technology that was on the minds of many, and proposed a solution that was a “technological fix,” and thus in tune with the spirit of the time. -
The National Science Foundation Act of 1950
mandates: “to foster the interchange of scientific information among scientists in the U.S. and foreign countries” (Section 3(a)3) and “to further the full dissemination of [scientific and technical] information of scientific value consistent with the national interest” -
Period: to
artificial intelligence reserch supported by the US government
-
Documentation Inc.
A company named Documentation Inc. founded by Mortimer Taube devoted to development and operation of systems for organization and retrieval of scientific and technical information. -
KWIC
Words in Context or KWIC indexing that lead to automatic indexing from full texts; automatic abstracting that lead to summarization efforts; and Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) to provide current awareness services that led to a number of variations, including today’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The demonstration of automatic KWIC indexing was the sensation at the mentioned 1959 International Conference on Scientific Information. -
Period: to
Cranfield tests
A series of IR tests under the name of Cranfield tests
One of the significant and surprising finding from Cranfield tests was that uncontrolled vocabularies based on natural language (such as keywords picked by a computer algorithm) achieve retrieval effectiveness comparable to vocabularies with elaborate controls (such as those using thesaurus, descriptors, or classification assigned by indexers). -
VINITI
All-Union Scientific and Technical Information Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR
VINITI implemented a massive gathering and bibliographic control of scientific and technical information from around the world, eventually covering some 130 countries in 66 languages; it employed thousands of scientists and engineers full and part time. In the framework of the cold war, VINITI was repeatedly brought up as a challenge needing a response. -
The 1958 National Defense Education Act (P.L 85-864) (the “Sputnik act”)
mandate: “The National Science Foundation shall [among others].undertake program to develop new or improved methods, including mechanized systems, for making scientific information available” (Title IX, Section 901) -
International Conference on Scientific Information
International Conference on Scientific Information, held in Washington,from 16. 18. November, sponsored by (US) National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, and American Documentation Institute, and attended by some 1,000 delegates from 25 countries. -
International Conference on Scientific Information
The 1959 Proceedings had seven areas covering the research, practice, and interests of information science at the time and illustrating the intellectual structure of the field by the end of 1950s. -
term “information science”
-
Journal Impact Factor
Garfield and colleagues provides a numerical value as to how often a given journal is included in citations in all journals over a given period of time, normalized for number of articles appearing in a journal. Originally, it was developed as a tool to help selection of journals in Science Citation Index but it morphed into a widely used tool for ranking and comparing of impact of journals. -
Science Citation Index
In 1964 ISI started publishing Science Citation Index created by use of computers. Citation indexes in social sciences and in art and humanities followed. -
Medline and Dialog
Online databases -
ASK
"Anomalous State of Knowledge" by Nicholas Belkin -
Period: to
OPAC
general library systems, covering library automation -
Kuhlthau Information Search Model
C. C. Kuhlthau creates a condept of IR -
Ellis’s Model of Information-Seeking Behavior
-
Digital libraries
digital libraries emerged in mid 1990s -
Webometrics
New science about Web entities -
Infometrics
Kvantitative reserch about information entities -
WEB
-
TREC
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). TREC, started in 1992 and continuing to date, is a long-term effort at the [US] National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), that brings various IR teams together annually to compare results from different IR approaches under laboratory conditions. Over the years hundreds of teams from dozens of countries participated in TREC covering a large number of topics. TREC is dynamic: As areas of IR research change so the topics in TREC. -
Period: to
Web Age
webometrics, extending the metric studies to the Web, visualization of knowledge domains, providing new method of presenting retrieval processes and results and also extending citation and metric analyses -
E-metrics
-
i-School Caucus
Late 1990s and early 2000s saw a movement to broaden and reorient information science education, spearheaded by a number of deans of schools with strong information science education. Some library and information science schools were renamed into Information Schools or i-Schools. An informal i-School Caucus was formed in 2005. By 2008 the Caucus included over 20 schools quite diverse in origin. -
SMART
Gerard (Gerry) Salton established, (entitled the SMART project) Salton and collaborators, mostly his students, ran IR experiments from mid 1960s to the time of his death in 1995. In the laboratory many new IR algorithms and approaches were developed and tested; they inspired practical IR developments and further IR research in many countries around the world.