Royal Society Scientific Information Conference Research Articles

Some European Contributions to Information Science

EDITOR'S SUMMARYEuropean contributions to the field of information science are often overlooked or forgotten in the popularity and prominence of the Association for Information Science and Technology, previously known as the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Areas covered include information science theory, bibliographical descriptions, documentation theory, library science, classification, information retrieval, bibliometrics and standards. One noteworthy contributor to the field of information science as a whole is Karl Marx, who is credited as a “herald of the information society. Two international conferences, the International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington D.C. in 1958 and the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in London in 1948, are cited as recognizing the importance of the field. Another conference series highlighted here is the Conceptions of Library and Information Science, which promotes innovations from the European community and is maintained primarily by Europeans.

How I learned to love the Brits

As a child I grew up in awe of an English accent. That was not unusual for an American because so many movie stars spoke with an English accent. All during my high school and college days I instinctively believed that anyone who spoke with an Oxford or BBC accent was an authority. And even professors and intellectuals who adopted the Harvard version of an English accent held me in awe. Several of my professors at Columbia University deserved that sort of adulation since they were indeed experts in their respective fields. However, that all changed when I reached Johns Hopkins University in 1951, when I audited a course in statistics with Professor W.G. Cochran. The student who sat next to me was a Brit who spoke with great authority but after a few weeks I began to realize that most of what he said was nonsense. For the next few years I had little contact with Englishmen during my stay at Johns Hopkins but my boss at the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project reminded me regularly that he had studied Elizabethan medicine at Oxford. My next encounter with the English occurred after leaving the Welch Project. I was impressed by the performance of the editor of the Journal of Documentation, who stood up to the harassment from my then former boss. He was angry at me for submitting a paper to the Journal of Documentation without his permission. So much so that he asked the attorney for the university to write a ‘cease and desist’ letter but the editor did not buckle to his threats. So I can honestly say that my first published paper appeared in an English publication [1]. These stressful events occurred while I was enrolled at Columbia University School of Library Service. Of course, even during my two years in Baltimore the British influence on my career was felt strongly. My ‘bible’, so to speak, at that time was the one-volume, 700+ page Proceedings of the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference [2]. I mentioned the key role played by John Desmond Bernal in that meeting when I spoke about his impact on science policy studies and the field of information science at the recent symposium held at University College in Dublin in September 2007 [3]. Hopefully the Royal Society will soon post the full text of the Royal Society Proceedings to their website. A few years ago I was able to convince the National Academy of Sciences Press to post the full text of the two volumes of the 1958 Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information sponsored by the National Science Foundation [4]. The English connection picked up again in the spring of 1957 when much to my surprise I received an invitation to attend the Dorking Conference on Classification. My brief recollection of that conference follows, with thanks to Robert V. Williams (the co-coordinator of the Pioneers of Information Science Scrapbook [5], which includes my account titled Memories of the 1957 Dorking Conference,

Guest Editorial Meeting the challenge

It is a great privilege to be asked to contribute some comments to this special issue of JIS. I have enjoyed reading these papers, and seeing how much our field has moved on since the Journal of Documentation attempted a similar historical survey in 1994 [1], just as the internet was ‘taking off’. My first thoughts were of Jason Farradane, who played such a big part in founding the Institute of Information Scientists in 1958. The IIS has now disappeared within CILIP, and Jason would have been very dismayed at this development. I first encountered him at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference of 1948, where he spoke on ‘the scientific approach to documentation’. In 1952 he was one of the founder members of the Classification Research Group, where he was often defending a minority position, connected to his own ideas of relations between topics, to which Stella Dextre Clarke refers in her paper. He was a serious man, but the more I talked with him, and disagreed with him over many things, the more I liked him. In 1955, we were invited together to a meeting of the Aslib Aeronautical Group, at which Cyril Cleverdon spoke about his plans for retrieval evaluation (Cranfield1), which Stephen Robertson discusses in his paper. We spoke about faceted classification, and Cyril challenged us to prepare a scheme for aeronautics, that he could use in his test. With inordinate bravado, we accepted the challenge, and – after much advice from Cyril and his team – managed to produce one. In retrospect – given that it was compiled by two chemists – we were amazed that it performed at all. What else was happening around about 1958? There were printed publications of every kind. There were libraries – public, national, government, academic, institutional, industrial – and they were classified and had catalogues. We were much concerned with interlibrary loan, and Donald Urquhart had recently been told to drop all other work and start to plan a new national science lending library for the UK. There were printed indexing and abstracting periodicals, and bibliographies. An industrial firm might have, as well as a technical library, a centre for internal reports, a section dealing with patents, an ‘intelligence’ unit for commercial information, and a correspondence registry. Some of us were playing around with punched or edge-notched cards for ‘mechanized retrieval’. There were reported to be 1000 electronic computers in the USA, and 160 in Europe. Some firms were building structured computer files searched by ‘database management’ software.

Towards the schism: information officers at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 1948

At the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, in 1948, representatives of a growing body of scientific information officers sought to stake a claim to a new kind of professionalism. The paper examines the nature of the Conference discussion which presaged the formation of the Institute of Information Scientists in the United Kingdom. Current moves to foster a reconciliation between librarians and information scientists are possibly long overdue, but, as Cicero wrote, ‘to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child’.

Professor Bernal’s ‘insidious and cavalier proposals’: the Royal Society scientific information conference, 1948

For the 1948 Royal Society Conference, J.D. Bernal submitted a paper which proposed a provisional scheme for the central distribution of scientific papers. This provoked such a hostile and extreme reaction from both the learned society publishers and the national press that the paper was withdrawn in advance of the conference. It is extant in its Proceedings. This paper outlines the nature of the proposals, together with some contemporary reactions. Bernal‘s scheme certainly implied a revolutionary transformation of the status quo. However, his well‐known political beliefs probably played as instrumental a part in their rejection as the nature of the proposals themselves.

An information world apart: the Royal Society scientific information conference of 1948 in the light of 1998

The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference of 1948 was a top level attempt to look at scientific and technical information in the light of the post‐war growth of the literature. Some of the large number of recommendations have been made irrelevant by advances in technology, and some, for example those relating to bibliographic control of books and comprehensive collecting of scientific literature, have been overtaken by action. Most recommendations, however, are unfinished – some unfinishable – business. The recommendations relating to control over the number and format of journals and co‐operation between abstracting journals were never realistic. Issues that are still live include library co‐operation and copyright. The 1948 conference may have had few direct effects, but it helped to create a climate where improvements were easier to make. Political and technological changes in the world since then have led to a very different environment, in which information is held to have a commercial value, the private sector plays a greater part, and market forces rule. A similar conference in 1998 would have a very different agenda.

Some post-war models of the information chain

Reviews the literature of the information chain, analogous to ecology’s food chain, taking the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 1948, as the seminal point. Describes eight successive models of the information chain each incorporating contemporary thoughts and experiences. Each model is labelled with the year to which it may be said to refer: Distribution of Scientific Information 1948; Document Network 1967; Dissemination of Scientific and Technical Information 1978; Structure of Scientific Literature 1979; Ecosystem of Scientific Communication 1980; Information Chain 1988; Information Chain 1989; Pathways of Information Flow 1993. Although of wide applicability, the focus of interest for information scientists tends to be the communication of learned information.

DONALD URQUHART, 1909–1994

Donald Urquhart, the longest‐serving member of our Editorial Board, died on 2nd December 1994. Physicist, metallurgist, war‐time administrator, he became — much to his own surprise — a librarian at the Science Museum Library in London. He transferred to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research technical information section in 1948, and played a prominent role in the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference held in that year. The most significant event in his professional life occurred one afternoon in November 1956, when he was asked to stop everything he was doing, and to start planning a library. Already discussed for some years, the uk National Lending Library for Science and Technology was now to become more than a dream, achieving full reality at its official opening at Boston Spa in November 1962. He continued as its Director until retirement in 1974. Donald's account of its development is the major concern of his autobiography.

RESEARCH ON USERS' NEEDS: WHERE IS IT GETTING US?

Since Bernal made his pilot survey of the use of scientific literature for the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, at least three dozen other investigations have been reported of the needs of scientists and engineers for information, of their information gathering habits, and the use to which they put information.

A REVIEW OF THE RESULTS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION CONFERENCE, 1948

I accepted Mr Wilson's invitation to speak on the results of the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference gladly because the conference seems to me to have had important results. In reviewing those results I want to try and indicate both what was achieved as well as what remains to be done and what new problems have risen to the surface. I also want to tell you of some of the things we are doing in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) and to invite your comments on them. To that I must add a caution that this is not an official paper. What it contains are my personal views.

LIST OF COMPENDIA AND DATA TABLES IN PHYSICS

At the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference held in 1948, among the many important matters concerned with the dissemination of scientific information discussed was the problem of compiling and supplying satisfactory compendia and data tables for the various fields of scientific research. At its conclusion the Conference recommended in this connexion that

The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 21 June-2 July 1949 (Book Review)

The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 21 June-2 July 1949 (Book Review)

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

<i>The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, 21 June-2 July 1948: Report and Papers Submitted</i>.

Information Services Committee

ARISING out of the Scientific Information Conference held last June, the Council of the Royal Society has set up a Standing Committee on Information Services. The terms of reference are : (1) to advise on means of improving existing methods of publishing, abstracting, indexing and distributing scientific information and, in particular, to advise on the implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference ; (2) to report to the Council of the Royal Society.

University and Research Section of the Library Association

THE University and Research Section of the Library Association held its twelfth week-end conference during September 10–13 at the University of Birmingham. It was attended by ninety members, with Dr. Arundell Esdaile in the chair, and colleagues from Australia, Denmark, India, Sweden and Venezuela were present. The conference was welcomed to Birmingham by Dr. Wilfred Bonser, University librarian, who outlined the plans for the new University Library to be erected at Edgbaston. The chief speaker at the conference was Dr. S. R. Ranganathan, president of the Indian Library Association and formerly librarian of the University of Madras. Taking as his theme "The Challenge of the Field of Knowledge", Dr. Ranganathan pointed to the declaration made at the Royal Society Scientific Information Conference that in future librarians must be regarded as equal in standing to fellow men of science employed in research, industry and administration, and that they should receive comparable training facilities, rank and emoluments, as marking a definite advance. He showed how difficult it is for the librarian to satisfy the many needs of scholars—and especially of scientific workers—as the various fields of knowledge continually expand and overlap, particularly as seen from the point of view of library classification schemes. He demonstrated the principle and practice of the scheme known as Colon Classification, of which he is author. During the week-end, visits were paid to the various sections of the University and other libraries at Birmingham, and the information departments of the Austin Motor Works and of Imperial Chemical Industries (Metals Division). The formal business of the annual general meeting of the Section on September 12 was followed by an account by Mr. C. C. Barnard, librarian of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, of a visit to Hanover in May of this year as a representative of the Section at a conference of German librarians. The Medical Sub-Section held a meeting devoted to a symposium on cataloguing problems in medical publications, and also visited the Birmingham Medical Institute.