ABSTRACT

The history of science information systems overlaps the history of science, the history of information systems (previously "documentation"), and the history of technology. It includes the usual genres of historical inquiry: biography, archeology, cliometrics (here, especially, bibliometrics and infometrics), oral history, and documentary research, with their differing strengths and weaknesses.

Information systems for science and technology have had a privileged existence because of industrial and military needs and government policies. Much of the pioneering work in science information systems was concerned with chemistry or pioneered by individuals trained in chemistry.

The past decade of work on the history and heritage of information systems is summarized. Several initiatives have been undertaken to encourage research and to build a supportive infrastructure, which is important if historical research in this area is to be sustained and to flourish. This conference is itself a significant part of that effort.

WELCOME

It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome you all in my capacity as President of the American Society for Information Science, founded more than sixty years ago in 1937 under the name American Documentation Institute to advance the development of information systems and services. In addition, I extend a welcome from the ASIS Special Interest Group in the History and Foundations of Information Science which, in the past several years, has nurtured attention to the history of information science.

My remarks are concerned with the history of information systems and services generally, but, of course, science information systems have had a privileged status because of industrial and military needs and government policy, and also, perhaps, because the domains of science appear more tractable for information systems than in the social sciences and humanities.

Much of the pioneer thought and work in the development of information systems was first done in relation to chemistry or by chemists. Among individuals one thinks of Wilhelm Ostwald and of Emanuel Goldberg in Germany and of Frits Donker Duyvis in the Netherlands. Among historically important information centers, one thinks of the Maison de Chimie in France and, of course, of Chemical Abstracts in the U.S.A.

INFORMATION SYSTEMS AS A TYPICAL FIELD FOR HISTORIANS

The history of information systems has the usual features, genres and specialties as other fields of historical study.

There are biographies of diverse kinds. Boyd Rayward's biography of Paul Otlet is a notable example of a biography of a person. Irene Farkas-Conn's study From Documentation to Information Science is a biography of an organization, the American Society for Information Science in its early years. Colin Burke's reconstruction of the development of the microfilm rapid selector (and the related comparators) by Vannevar Bush is a good example of a biography of a machine (Rayward 1975; Farkas-Conn 1990; Burke 1994).

As an example of a kind of archaeology I cite the short documentary by Robert Williams shown last night about Termatrex optical coincidence retrieval technology (Williams & Covey 1990).

Cliometrics, quantitative historical analysis, is very well represented by a recent study by Howard White and Katharine W. McCain (1998), who used co-citation analysis to illuminate the development of the field from 1972 to 1995. Their analysis reveals a field composed of two large groups, remarkably stable and remarkably separate from each other for twenty-four years.

Oral history of information systems has recently been supported by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Eugene Garfield Foundation in the form of Robert Williams' interviews with pioneers of chemical information systems.

Intellectual and cultural history is present here too, not least in the tensions before World War II between documentation and librarianship and, similarly, after World War II, between librarianship and information science. These were significant but complex phenomena still far from understood (Buckland 1996; Fayet-Scribe 1997; Williams 1997).

In the history of information systems, like any other field, we, too, have our mythic history, narratives that are even more mythic than history ordinarily is. The Memex phenomenon, with the engineer-administrator Vannevar Bush as an icon, is a good example. Bush is rightly famous. He led the technology effort for World War II, creating the atomic age, and was the father of the National Science Foundation (Zachary 1997). Yet he is best known in the field of information retrieval, even though his systems hardly worked, his ideas were not new, he did not really understand what he was talking about, and he chose not to acknowledge the priority of others (Fairthorne 1958; Buckland 1992; Zachary 1997, 51, 265). Nevertheless the citing of Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think" has been so intense that the citing itself has become an object of research (Bush 1945; Smith 1991). For some, such as Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson, this well-written essay was unquestionably a genuine, powerful, and productive inspiration. Bush, however, was not just any author, he was "the engineer of the American century," the engineer-administrator who epitomized success. To associate oneself with Bush, for example by linking one's one writings to his was to claim legitimacy and respectability among peers and funders. So, for others, invoking Bush's Memex was, in effect, a self-interested political gesture. J. C. R. Licklider, who was very successful in this environment, effusively dedicated his book Libraries of the Future to Bush, citing "As We May Think" as the "the main external influence that shaped the ideas of this book," even though he had not read the Bush's essay until after the book had been written (Licklider 1965, xii-xiii). Still other writers seem to have cited Bush because everyone else seemed to be doing so.

That the invocation of Bush was driven by the social and political, as much as intellectual considerations, is confirmed by the ahistorical positioning of Bush. The Memex is usually cited in isolation. Associating one's work with others without Bush's aura would not have had the same attraction in the competitive positioning in U.S. science and engineering. If the purpose of citing were simply to acknowledge priority, then others such Paul Otlet and Emanuel Goldberg, who had anticipated Bush's ideas would have been mentioned, but they were, by then, dead or very distant from the sources of power in the academic-government-industrial complex in the U.S.A. They were ignored and forgotten until resurrected by writers concerned with history, while Bush's work continues to be celebrated.

But if Bush had little direct part in the history of the development of information systems, he has had a very large part in the heritage of the field. This conference is very properly concerned with heritage as well as history. Heritage is what is passed down, what is perceived by each generation to its origins and its culture. History, attempts to create a narratives of what actually happened, is a part of the heritage.

Heritage has especial significance in technical fields because techniques and technology have lingering effects. Once an information system has been adopted, there is a vested interest in it and there may be little opportunity left for alternative designs. Information systems, once adopted, create legacies. We have to live with the consequences of the data collection, data categorization, and data processing decisions of the past because it is impossible or unaffordable to make retroactive changes. Even the adoption of improved practices is inhibited because changes could create incompatibilities or inconsistencies with the inherited data and systems.

AN UNUSUAL RELATIONSHIP: HISTORY AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Anyone concerned with information systems must necessarily be interested, sooner or later, information, and, for anyone interested in information, history has a special attraction because history is concerned with analyzing, weighing, and interpreting the available evidence, especially documentary evidence. Information systems are concerned with the selection, representation, and preservation of available evidence, especially documents. "No documents, no history," wrote the historian Fustel de Coulanges, but the creation, survival, and accessibility of documents is an accident-prone matter. So is their content. Consider, for example, oral history transcripts, sometimes the best or only available documentary source for past events. The content and shape of the reminiscences are influenced by many factors including how questions were posed by the interviewer. The spoken words are more or less edited in the creation of transcripts. When recording oral narratives, one can almost see the story being constructed as the narrator strives to make sense of what is remembered of what happened long ago. Verbatim quotations from fifty years ago are liable to come out differently worded at different times. This does not invalidate what is recorded, but, rather, requires one to respect what they are, informed reminiscences. They are themselves a form of history, partial narratives. Collecting oral history should be part of the apprenticeship of every historian. The whole process is highly accidental: who survived, what they knew, what they recalled, what they imagined, what they chose to relate, how they chose to express it, and, of course, whether anybody bothered to record them. Oral histories depend not only on frail memories but also on the happenstances of who survives to tell their tale and whether anyone is around motivated enough to record them. With oral history, one is conscious of how accidental the writing of history is.

Similarly with documentary resources: wars, fires, floods, modesty, shortages of space, and many other factors cause documents to be lost. What history is written will depend on whose papers are kept, whose have been destroyed, who cares enough to read them, whether they can be found, and how ell they are understood.

In the writing of history it is not only a question of which sources are to be privileged by the historian but also which sources are available to be privileged or have been privileged by the information systems professionals responsible for selecting, collecting, retaining, and representing them.

HISTORIANS AND PIONEERS

An historian is someone who narrates an account of what happened in some past event. At this conference we are using the term pioneer to refer to those who were there, who participated in those past events. This reminds us that historians are, ordinarily, people who were not there when the events they describe took place. We are very pleased that several pioneers of science information systems have been able to attend this conference. Even better, some of them will be presenting papers, performing the role of historian as well as that of pioneer.

ANTECEDENTS

The emergence of a systematic body of history of information systems is a recent development and this conference has some important, direct antecedents. Up to 1991 there had been little attention to the history of information systems. In 1991 a few people decided to do something about it. They organized a historical session at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science entitled "Information Science before 1945" and there has been a session associated with each Annual Meeting since. These sessions, organized by, among others, Irene Farkas-Conn, Trudi Bellardo Hahn, and Robert Williams, have provided a forum for discussion and have encouraged the development of a community of interest.

Creating a community is like gardening. You cannot make plants grow, but the growth of plants can be helped or hindered. The nurturing of a community interested in the history of information systems has been consciously cultivated by a series of steps taken, largely within or through the American Society for Information Science, to build a supportive infrastructure. An initiative by Robert Williams to establish a Special Interest Group for history resulted in the expansion of an existing group concerned with theory to form the present Special Interest Group on the History and Foundations of Information Science. It seemed wise that those concerned with ideas should be historically informed and that historians should encouraged to address the history of ideas.

Another investment in infrastructure was the creation of a database of pioneering individuals and organizations: who they were and what was known about the location of their personal and professional papers. The idea was that by identifying both research-worthy targets and documentary resources would not only facilitate the work of those already active in the history of information science, but also encourage historians in adjacent areas to broaden their interests to include the history of information systems. Under the leadership of Robert Williams the Pioneers of Information Science in North America database came into being (Williams 1998).

Understanding of the history of this field has been inhibited by the lack of a systematic guide to existing writings, so a survey was prepared, published in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology for 1995, and recently updated (Buckland & Liu 1995, 1998).

Special issues of existing journals provide a forum and help to build a community. Both the call for papers and the papers themselves receive wide attention. W. Boyd Rayward guest-edited a special issue of Information Processing and Management in 1996 with six substantial articles (Rayward 1996). This was followed in 1997 by a two-part historical issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, containing fourteen articles and two bibliographies (Hahn & Buckland 1997). The authors were from eight different countries and, I surmise, had been largely unaware of each other's work. One of the pleasures of recent years has been encountering individuals with an existing interest in the history of information science who had been toiling more or less in isolation.

Meanwhile, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, with the help of the Eugene Garfield Foundation, has been supporting oral history work by Robert Williams among pioneers of chemical information systems: Dale Baker, Melvin S. Day, Eugene Garfield, Madeleine Berry Henderson, Saul Herner, and Claire Schultz (Hahn & Buckland 1998, 180).

In the absence of a textbook on the history of information systems, the next best thing seemed to be a volume reprinting a selection of the recent research literature, with some new material. Preparation of this volume, Historical Studies in Information Science, has been timed for it to become available at this conference (Hahn & Buckland 1998). ASIS, Wiley, and the authors waived royalties and Elsevier charged less their standard fees.

In this way a small, international research community is beginning to emerge, small but growing. The hope is that this community will grow and become a viable self-sustaining community.

THIS CONFERENCE

This conference is planned to be more than an opportunity for a small community to come together. The intent is to build broader community. The conference itself is a way to hoist the flag, a way to tell people engaged in the history of science, in the study of science practice, in the history of technology, in the history of computing, and other neighbors that we are here.

The message, however, is not only to assert the existence of this field but to reach out. We have invited speakers from outside. We are inviting neighbors in, in order to build a broader community.

The year 1998 is auspicious in that it is the anniversary of two major milestones. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference held in London in 1948 (Royal Society 1948). It is also the fortieth anniversary of the International Conference on Scientific Information, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Society for Information Science, then still named the American Documentation Institute (National Academy of Sciences 1959). This conference is co-sponsored by the Chemical Heritage Foundation and by the American Society for Information Science and we are very grateful to the Eugene Garfield Foundation and the National Science Foundation for their encouragement and financial support. The National Science Foundation grant includes an obligation to plan what next steps to take.

Let us hope that, in the future, forty or fifty years hence, people will look back on 1998 the 1998 Pittsburgh conference as a significant milestone, in its way, as those of 1948 and 1958.

REFERENCES

Buckland, M. K. 1992. Emanuel Goldberg, electronic document retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 43:284-294.

Buckland, M. K. 1996. Documentation, Information Science, and Library Science in the U.S.A. Information Processing and Management 32: 63-76.Reprinted in Hahn & Buckland 1998, 181-192.

Buckland, M. K. and T. B. Hahn, eds. Special topic issue: History of Documentation and Information Science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46 (April 1997): 285-288 & (September 1997): 775-842.

Buckland, M. K. and Z. Liu. 1995. History of Information Science. In Historical Studies in Information Science, ed. by T. B. Hahn and M. Buckland, 272-295. Medford, NJ: Information Today. Updated version of Buckland & Liu 1995.

Buckland, M. K. and Z. Liu. 1995. History of Information Science. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 30:385-416. Revised as Buckland & Liu 1998.

Bush, V. 1945. As we may think. Atlantic Monthly 176:101-108.

Burke, C. 1994. Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Fairthorne, R. A. 1958. Automatic retrieval of recorded information. Computer Journal 1:36-41. Reprinted in R. A. Fairthorne. 1961. Towards Information Retrieval, 135-46. London: Butterworths.

Farkas-Conn, I. S. 1990. From Documentation to Information Science: The Beginnings and Early Development of the American Documentation Institute--American Society for Information Science. New York: Greenwood Press.

Fayet-Scribe, Sylvie. 1997. The cross-fertilization of the U.S. public library model and the French Documentation model through the French professional associations between World War I and World War II. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46 (September 1997): 782-793. Reprinted in Hahn & Buckland 1998, 181-192.

Hahn, T. B. and M. K. Buckland, eds. 1998. Historical Studies in Information Science. Medford, N.J.: Information Today, Inc.

Licklider, J. C. R. 1965. Libraries of the Future. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. 1959. Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information: Washington, D.C.-- Novmber16-21, 1958. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council.

Rayward, W. B. 1975. The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. Moscow: VINITI. (FID 520).

Rayward, W. B., ed. 1996. Information Processing and Management vol. 32, no. 1 (1996): 1-88. Special issue on the History of Information Science.

Royal Society. 1948. Scientific Information Conference (21 June - 2 July 1948): Report and Papers Submitted. London: The Royal Society, 1948.

Smith, L. C. 1991. Memex as an image of potentiality revisited. In From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, ed. by James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, 261-86. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

White, H. D. and K. W. McCain. 1998. Visualizing a discipline: An author co-citation analysis of Information Science, 1972-1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 49: 327-355.

Williams, R. V. 1997. The documentation and special libraries movement in the United States, 1910-1960. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46 (September 1997): 782-793. Reprinted in Hahn & Buckland 1998, 173-179.

Williams, R. V. and H. C. Covey. 1990. The Jonkers Termatrex Machine: Background and Demonstration. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Distance Education Division. VHS videocassette.

Williams, R. V. 1998. The pioneers of Information Science in North America. In Historical Studies in Information Science, ed. by T. B. Hahn and M. Buckland, 269-71. Medford, NJ: Information Today. The database is at http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/isp/isp.htm

Zachary, G. P. 1997. Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: The Free Press.