Royal Society Scientific Research Articles

The challenges of hydrogen and metals.

The Royal Society Scientific Discussion Meeting 'The challenges of hydrogen and metals' was held in Carlton House Terrace, London, UK, on 16-18 January 2017. This is the introductory article to the discussion meeting issue which includes contributed papers and seven discussion papers. Here, we introduce the motivation to hold the Meeting and give a brief overview of the contents. We conclude with acknowledgements.This article is part of the themed issue 'The challenges of hydrogen and metals'.

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.

Spatial transformations: from fundamentals to applications.

This paper forms the introduction to this themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A on 'Spatial transformations', arising from the Royal Society Scientific Discussion Meeting held in January 2015. The paper begins with a review of the concepts and history of spatial transformations, followed by a discussion of the contributions from the papers in this themed issue. A summary of the advantages and current limitations of spatial transformations concludes the paper, with the key challenges identified at the Scientific Discussion Meeting also given.

Making light work: illuminating the future of biomedical optics

In 1996, the Royal Society held a Discussion Meeting entitled 'Near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging of living systems'. In 2010, this topic was revisited in a Theo Murphy Royal Society Scientific Discussion Meeting entitled 'Making light work: illuminating the future of biomedical optics'. The second meeting provided the opportunity for leading researchers to reflect on how the technology, methods and applications have evolved over the past 14 years and assess where they have made a major impact. Particular emphasis was placed on discussions of future prospects and associated challenges. This Introduction provides an overview of the state of the art of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and biomedical optics, with specific reference to the contributed papers from the invited speakers included in this issue. Importantly, we also reflect on the contributions from all of the attendees by highlighting the issues raised during oral presentations, facilitated panel sessions and discussions, and use these to summarize the current opinion on the development and application of optical systems for use in the clinical and life sciences. A notable outcome from the meeting was a plan to establish a biennial international conference for developers and users of NIRS technologies.

Making light work: illuminating the future of biomedical optics

In 1996, the Royal Society held a Discussion Meeting entitled ‘Near-infrared spectroscopy and imaging of living systems’. In 2010, this topic was revisited in a Theo Murphy Royal Society Scientific Discussion Meeting entitled ‘Making light work: illuminating the future of biomedical optics’. The second meeting provided the opportunity for leading researchers to reflect on how the technology, methods and applications have evolved over the past 14 years and assess where they have made a major impact. Particular emphasis was placed on discussions of future prospects and associated challenges. This Introduction provides an overview of the state of the art of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and biomedical optics, with specific reference to the contributed papers from the invited speakers included in this issue. Importantly, we also reflect on the contributions from all of the attendees by highlighting the issues raised during oral presentations, facilitated panel sessions and discussions, and use these to summarize the current opinion on the development and application of optical systems for use in the clinical and life sciences. A notable outcome from the meeting was a plan to establish a biennial international conference for developers and users of NIRS technologies.

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’.

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.

Librarians and the language barrier

The issue of language as a barrier to the work of librarians in post‐war Britain was pinpointed in the report of the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference in 1948. Concerning the work of information officers, it stated:

CONCLUSIONS

The discussion may be summed up under four headings, only one of which is classification; the other three are Politics, Finance and Management. We may begin with Politics, for many of the problems have their basis in politics. There is a sense of dissatisfaction with UDC among a number of important people: important, that is, in the sense that their views carry weight in international circles. In 1948 the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference came to the conclusion (as a similar meeting did in 1896 in relation to Dewey's classification) that there was no satisfactory classification for science and technology, and that they would easily solve the problem by devoting a little thought to it; we are still awaiting their results. The UNISIST meetings were again largely meetings of scientists; Dr Coblans has assured us that they did not in fact come to any definite conclusions, but one gets the feeling that many of those present did not favour UDC. There is already some feeling—stemming I believe largely from ignorance—in the United States that UDC is not the scheme they are looking for; very few libraries there use it, and there is no guarantee that it would become popular even if the full English edition became available. The Eastern Europeans use UDC, but would they welcome the suggestion that the English edition should become the key edition?

NATIONAL REPORTS AND INFORMATION POLICY

The planning of pure and applied research, with its related questions of scientific information policy, has become an accepted commonplace even in countries where free enterprise is the dominant practice—a sort of general panacea. It is rather paradoxical that some of us who were pleading for this sort of approach in the late thirties may now be just a little disappointed. I would like to remind you that Bernal's The social function of science when it appeared in 1939 was considered revolutionary and Utopian by some and plain subversive by others. Some of the invective and abuse at the time, about the dangers of co‐ordination and control, were still echoing during the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference in 1948.

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.

SUBJECT ANALYSIS IN EIGHTY‐ONE CONCEPTS

At the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference in 1948 I presented a method of multilateral classification based on an analysis of compound concepts into their constituents and the subsequent synthesis of these constituents, taking as an example the Universal Decimal Classification notation.

ACTION TAKEN BY ASLIB TO IMPLEMENT THE CONFERENCE'S PROPOSALS

Mr Wilson said that his brief was to explain, as far as possible, what action Aslib itself had taken to implement the proposals made at the Royal Society's Scientific Information Conference held in 1948, but he would also like to comment briefly on the opportunities for service which now confronted Aslib, largely because of the wider appreciation of information services resulting from that conference. Aslib's response to the conference's proposals had been conditioned by cramped quarters and straitened finances until the beginning of 1950 and even, in some measure, until the middle of 1951, but the following table (showing those recommendations which had been directed towards Aslib, or which Aslib had taken up, or which he thought Aslib might reasonably have taken up) would show what had been achieved and what left undone. To save space, the recommendations have been paraphrased, and progress given in note form.

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)