History of the Vision
The goal of having a comprehensive collection of science information easily available to researchers and students has been
expressed repeatedly for decades.
- 1945: Dr. Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, issued a report in 1945 to
President Roosevelt, entitled "Science - The Endless Frontier." His views also appeared in a paper called "As We May
Think" in the July 1945 Atlantic Monthly. He called for scientists to make more accessible the vast store of knowledge
and thus extend man's physical and mental powers. From his experience working with some six thousand leading
American scientists in the application of science to warfare, he observed their information and communication needs. He
saw great potential for focusing their knowledge in a new direction and developing instruments to give command over
information. Dr. Bush called for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge. Following the
lessons of World War II, the theme emerged from that report that scientific progress was essential for the good of the
country, and science was a proper concern of government. This led later to the creation of the National Science
Foundation in 1950, an agency that was initially very important for the scientific and technical information (STI)
enterprise.
- 1958: Senator Hubert Humphrey declared that a new age of science had dawned and it was "the Information Age." He
was one of the great heroes of the information science community. The launching of Sputnik was a wake-up call to the
Nation's science enterprise, and it spurred a great awareness of the value and importance of scientific and technical
information management. In the Senate Subcommittee on Government Reorganization, Humphrey demanded to know
what the Executive Branch was doing to manage the masses of information being generated by billions of Federal
research and development dollars. He stated: "the scientist should have at his fingertips the knowledge of prior
experiments. He should have access to research elsewhere which may still be in progress and has not yet been
published." Though the technology driving the Information Age has changed dramatically, the search for knowledge
remains constant.
- 1958: President Eisenhower issued a plan to meet the information needs of scientists. The most comprehensive approach
had an estimated cost of $50 to $100 million, which was 0.1% of the Federal budget. Today, by using the new
technologies, much the same thing could be done for 0.001% of the Federal budget -- 2 orders of magnitude LESS.
Though a comprehensive collection was impractical in 1958 and not achieved, it is practical and feasible in 2000.
- 1963: The Weinberg Report, issued in 1963 and entitled "Science, Government, and Information," was named after Dr.
Alvin Weinberg, Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The report asserted that the transfer of information was an
integral and inseparable part of the research and development process. At that time an information overload was already
being predicted as a threat to science. Weinberg's panel found that scientists were "being snowed under by a mound of
undigested reports, papers, meetings, and books." Scientists needed help in finding the buried gems. The proposed
solution was the creation of information centers, and the recommendation received broad acceptance. Nationally, more
than 300 science information centers were formed to manage the scientific "information revolution." Now it is possible
to link to information centers for access by scientists anytime, anywhere.
- 1960s: Also during the '60s, national goals and objectives in science and technology called for coordination and genuine
cooperation between the Federal government, universities, and the private sector. The Committee on Scientific and
Technical Information (COSATI) was established to develop among the Executive Agencies a coordinated but
decentralized STI system for scientists, engineers, and other technical professions. COSATI was the national focal point
for coordinating the development of a national network of independently operating but, at the same time, cooperating
STI systems. Though the established organizations have changed, the need for coordination and cooperation among
Federal Agencies still exists so that we may achieve a common goal for the scientific community.
- 1965: In Joseph Licklider's book, "Libraries of the Future," he made an unusually accurate forecast about electronic
publishing. By extrapolating trends in processing, storage, and communication, Licklider predicted that digital libraries
would become practical around the year 2000. Licklider's forecast was right, and a complete shift of scholarly
publishing to an electronic format is finally becoming feasible as a result of developments in computing and
communications. [Licklider, J. C. R., Libraries of the Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Note: This book was
dedicated to Dr. Vannevar Bush for his pioneering article "As We May Think," which gave the author inspiration to
prepare this work sponsored by the Council on Library Resources. At that time, the exploding size of the corpus of
knowledge versus the capacity of computer memories and the speed of computer processors was a major concern.
Licklider provided the term procognitive systems to name the system of the future that he predicted would bring many
disciplines together, blending computer sciences, behavioral and social sciences, library sciences, and information
storage and retrieval studies to form a system that benefits mankind.]
- 1976: "A National Approach to Scientific and Technical Information in the United States" by Joseph Becker and Robert
Hayes, a report on a study funded by NSF in1974, suggested the Federal government has a responsibility to take steps to
ensure scientific communication. It summarizes SATCOM and three other historical policy documents with their
recommendations, and it dealt with both science information and information science. Suggestions include to put the
field of science information in step with the new directions of science through a national framework for
STI.
- 1983: "The package that lets me have my library with me, to read when I want and need to read, when I need to search,
when I want and need to do my work without clock watching, will be the breakthrough that ... is next for our
information systems." This was the desire of John Creps, Jr., Miles Conrad Lecturer at the NFAIS annual meeting
in1983. [John E. Creps, Jr., Engineering Information, Inc. (Retired) New York, New York, "STI, A Psychohistorical
Evaluation," delivered March 2, 1983, in "Abstracting and Indexing Services in Perspective: Miles Conrad Memorial
Lectures 1969-1983," pp. 279-288, Information Resources Press, 1983.]
- 1989: More recently, a 1989 report entitled "Information Technology and the Conduct of Research," issued by the
National Academy of Science, showed a reawakening within the research community that technology could
significantly enhance the communication of information and knowledge. However, the report acknowledged serious
impediments at that time -- such as network protocols, standards, software, etc. The major recommendation was "that
the institutions supporting the Nation's researchers, led by the Federal government, should develop an interconnected
national information technology network." Thus were the beginnings of the information superhighway.
- 1991: Commissioned by the American Physical Society, the Report of the APS Task Force on Electronic Information
Systems - termed "the Loken report" - called for the development of a National Physics Database to integrate "all of the
world's scientific literature information in an electronic information system." The APS recognized that the new
information technology offered the Society an unprecedented challenge and opportunity to further the mission of
advancing and diffusing the knowledge of physics. Dr. Harry Thacker, a member of the APS task force, recently said,
"I've often thought that the only thing we got wrong in the report was the time scale. We thought we were talking about
2020 and it turned out to be more like 2000." [Published in the Bulletin of the American Physical Society Vol. 36, No.
4, p. 1119 (1991).]
- 1994: A year or so later, the Association of American Universities established a task force to examine new options for
the collection and dissemination of scientific and technical information (STI), particularly to focus on the concept of a
distributed national science and technology library. The Report of the AAU Task Force on a National Strategy for
Managing Scientific and Technical Information, issued in 1994, promoted establishment of a system of national
repositories for scientific research and not-for-profit electronic outlets for STI. The group recognized that new
technological tools for research, electronic networks, and networked information had transformed information exchange
among scientists. They shared a vision of scientists having desktop access to campus, national, and even global STI,
regardless of its physical location.
- 1999: "Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future," issued in February 1999 by the President's
Information Technology Advisory Committee, reported on future directions for Federal support of research and
development for information technology. The report includes a PITAC vision, "An individual can access, query, or print
any ... magazine, data item, or reference document ... by simply clicking a mouse. ...," for transforming the way we deal
with information. It also included a vision for transforming how research would be conducted "... in virtual laboratories
... accessing information in digital libraries. All scientific and technical journals are available on-line, allowing readers
to download equations and databases and manipulate variables to interactively explore the published research." It also
envisioned information technology enabling government information to be easily accessible, regardless of physical
location.
These reports reiterate that our concept of a comprehensive collection of information has been attractive to the physical
science community for decades.
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