Overview of the History of Science Information Systems
Overview of the History of
Science Information Systems
Michael Buckland
Abstract
This overview is an introduction to the history and heritage of science
information systems and a discussion of historiography of this area. His-
tory is narrative of events in time past. The continuing consequences of
those events are heritage, which includes our collective memory, our un-
derstanding of history. The heritage of information systems is of additional
significance because the systems’ design and characteristics have long-
lasting effects.
The history of science information systems overlaps the history of sci-
ence, the history of information systems (previously documentation), and
the history of technology. It includes the usual genres of historical inquiry:
biography, archaeology, 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 poli-
cies. 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 en-
courage research and to build a supportive infrastructure, which is impor-
tant if historical research in this area is to be sustained and to flourish.
This conference is itself a significant part of that effort.
Welcome
I t is an honor and a pleasure to welcome you all in my
capacity as president of the American Society for In-
formation Science, founded more than sixty years ago
in 1937 under the name American Documentation In-
stitute to advance the development of information sys-
tems and services. In addition, I extend a welcome from
the ASIS Special Interest Group on the History and
Foundations of Information Science, which, in the past
several years, has nurtured attention to the history of
information science.
3
3
My remarks are mainly concerned with the history
of information systems and services generally. However,
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 pioneering thought and work in the
development of information systems was first done in
relation to chemistry or by chemists. Among individu-
als one thinks of Wilhelm Ostwald and Emanuel Gold-
berg in Germany and of Frits Donker Duyvis in the
Netherlands. Among historically important informa-
tion centers one thinks of the Maison de Chimie in
France and, of course, of Chemical Abstracts in the United
States.
Information Systems as a
Typical Field for Historians
The history of information systems has the usual fea-
tures, 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 (Rayward, 1975). Irene Farkas-
Conn’s study From Documentation to Information Sci-
ence is a biography of an organization, the American
Society for Information Science in its early years (1990).
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 (1994).
As an example of a kind of archaeology, I cite the
short documentary by Robert Williams on Termatrex
4 Michael Buckland
optical coincidence retrieval technology (Williams &
Covey, 1990).
Cliometrics, quantitative historical analysis, is well
represented by a recent study by Howard White and
Katharine McCain (1998), who used co-citation analy-
sis 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.
The Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Eugene
Garfield Foundation have recently supported oral his-
tory of information systems with pioneers of chemical
information systems in the form of Robert Williams’s
interviews.
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 phenom-
ena still far from understood (Buckland, 1996; Fayet-
Scribe, 1997; Williams, 1997).
In the history of information systems, like any other
field, we 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 fa-
mous. He led the technology effort for World War II,
creating the atomic age, and was the father of the Na-
tional 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,
p. 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
by linking one’s own writings to his was to claim legiti-
macy 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 Bush’s essay until after the book had been written
(Licklider, 1965, pp. xii–xiii). Still other writers seem to
have cited Bush because everyone else seemed to be do-
ing so.
That the invocation of Bush was driven by social
and political, as much as intellectual considerations, is
confirmed by the ahistorical positioning of Bush. 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 as Paul Otlet and
Emanuel Goldberg, who had anticipated Bush’s ideas,
would have been mentioned. They were, however, dead
by then or far removed from the sources of power in the
academic-government-industrial complex in the United
States. They were ignored and forgotten until resurrected
by writers concerned with history, while Bush’s work
continues to be celebrated.
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 be its origins and its culture. History,
which consists of attempts to create narratives of what
actually happened, is a part of the heritage.
Heritage has special significance in technical fields
because techniques and technology have lingering ef-
fects. Once an information system has been adopted,
there is a vested interest in it, and little opportunity may
be left for alternative designs. Information systems, once
adopted, create legacies. We have to live with the conse-
quences of the data collection, data categorization, and
data-processing decisions of the past because it is im-
possible or unaffordable to make retroactive changes.
Even the adoption of improved practices is inhibited
because changes could create incompatibilities or incon-
sistencies with the inherited data and systems.
An Unusual Relationship:
History and Information Systems
Anyone concerned with information systems must nec-
essarily be interested sooner or later in information. And,
for anyone interested in information, history has a spe-
cial attraction because history is concerned with analyz-
ing, weighing, and interpreting the available evidence,
especially documentary evidence. Information systems
are concerned with the selection, representation, and
 Overview of the History of Science Information Systems
preservation of available evidence, especially documents.
“No documents, no history,” wrote the historian Fustel
de Coulanges, but the creation, survival, and accessibil-
ity 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 reminis-
cences are influenced by many factors, including how
the interviewer posed questions. 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. Ver-
batim 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 apprentice-
ship of every historian. The whole process is highly acci-
dental: 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 both-
ered 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 is the writing of
history.
Documentary resources are similarly accident prone:
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 well they are un-
derstood. In the writing of history it is not only a ques-
tion of which sources are to be privileged by the histo-
rian but also which sources are available to be privileged
or have been privileged by the information systems pro-
fessionals responsible for selecting, collecting, retaining,
and representing them.
Historians and Pioneers
A 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 usage 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 infor-
5
mation systems have been able to attend this confer-
ence. Even better, some of them will be presenting pa-
pers, performing the role of historian as well as that of
pioneer.
Antecedents
The emergence of a systematic body of history of infor-
mation systems is a recent development, and this con-
ference has some important, direct antecedents. Up to
1991 there had been little attention paid 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 titled “Information Science be-
fore 1945,” and a session has been 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 discus-
sion and have encouraged the development of a com-
munity of interest.
Creating a community is like gardening. You can-
not make plants grow, but the growth of plants can be
helped or hindered. The nurturing of a community in-
terested in the history of information systems has been
consciously cultivated by a series of steps taken, largely
within or through the American Society for Informa-
tion Science, to build a supportive infrastructure. An
initiative by Robert Williams to establish a Special In-
terest 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 con-
cerned with ideas should be historically informed and
historians should be encouraged to address the history
of ideas.
Another investment in infrastructure was the cre-
ation of a database of pioneering individuals and orga-
nizations: who they were and what was known about
the location of their personal and professional papers.
The idea was that identifying both research-worthy tar-
gets and documentary resources would not only facili-
tate the work of those already active in the history of
information science but would also encourage histori-
ans in adjacent areas to broaden their interests to in-
clude the history of information systems. Under Wil-
liams’s leadership 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
6 Michael Buckland
writings. Therefore, 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 Informa-
tion Processing and Management in 1996 with six sub-
stantial 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 four-
teen articles and two bibliographies (Buckland & Hahn,
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 en-
countering 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, p. 180).
In the absence of a textbook on the history of infor-
mation systems the next best thing seemed to be a vol-
ume reprinting a selection of the recent research litera-
ture, 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 editors and au-
thors waived royalties, and Elsevier charged less than its
standard fees for reprinting.
In this way a small but growing international re-
search community is beginning to emerge. We hope that
this group will continue to grow and become a viable
self-sustaining community.
This Conference
This conference is planned to be more than an opportu-
nity for a small community to come together. The in-
tent is to build a broader community. The conference
itself is a way to hoist the flag, a way to tell people en-
gaged in the history of science, the study of science prac-
tice, the history of technology, the history of comput-
ing, 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 out-
side. We are inviting neighbors in, in order to build a
broader community.
The year 1998 is auspicious in that it is the anniver-
sary of two major milestones. It is the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the Royal Society Scientific Information Confer-
ence held in London in 1948 (Royal Society, 1948). It
is also the fortieth anniversary of the International Con-
ference on Scientific Information, sponsored by the
National Science Foundation, the National Academy of
Sciences, and the American Society for Information Sci-
ence, previously named the American Documentation
Institute (National Academy of Sciences, 1959). This
conference is cosponsored by the Chemical Heritage
Foundation and by the American Society for Informa-
tion Science, and we are very grateful to the Eugene
Garfield Foundation and the National Science Founda-
tion for their encouragement and financial support. The
National Science Foundation grant includes an obliga-
tion to plan what steps to take next.
Let us hope that in the future, forty or fifty years
hence, people will look back on the 1998 conference in
Pittsburgh as a milestone as significant 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 & Management, 32,
63–76. Reprinted in Hahn & Buckland (1998), 181–192.
Buckland, M. K., & Hahn, T. B. (Eds.) (1997, April & September). Special
topic issue: History of documentation and information science. Jour-
nal of the American Society for Information Science, 46, 285–288,
775–842.
Buckland, M. K., & Liu, Z. (1995). History of information science. Annual
Review of Information Science and Technology, 30, 385–416.
Buckland, M. K., & Liu, Z. (1998). History of information science. In T. B.
Hahn & M. Buckland (Eds.), Historical studies in information sci-
ence (pp. 272–295). Medford, NJ: Information Today. (This is an
updated version of Buckland & Liu, 1995).
Burke, C. (1994). Information and secrecy: Vannevar Bush, ultra, and the
other Memex. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
Bush, V. (1945, July). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176, 101–108.
Fairthorne, R. A. (1958). Automatic retrieval of recorded information. Com-
puter Journal, 1, 36–41. Reprinted in R. A. Fairthorne (1961). To-
wards information retrieval (pp. 135–146). London: Butterworths.
Farkas-Conn, I. S. (1990). From documentation to information science:
The beginnings and early development of the American Documenta-
tion Institute–American Society for Information Science. New York:
Greenwood.
Fayet-Scribe, S. (1997, September). 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.
 Overview of the History of Science Information Systems
Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46, 782–
793. Reprinted in Hahn & Buckland (1998), 181–192.
Hahn, T. B., & Buckland, M. K. (Eds.) (1998). Historical studies in informa-
tion science. Medford, NJ: Information Today.
Licklider, J. C. R. (1965). Libraries of the future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council (1959). Pro-
ceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information:
Washington, DC—November 16–21, 1958. Washington, DC: 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 (FID 520). Mos-
cow: VINITI.
Rayward, W. B. (Ed.) (1996). Information Processing & Management, 32,
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: Royal Society.
Smith, L. C. (1991). Memex as an image of potentiality revisited. In J. M.
Nyce and P. Kahn (Eds.), From Memex to hypertext: Vannevar Bush
7
and the mind’s machine (pp. 261–286). San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
White, H. D., & McCain, K. W. (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, September). The documentation and special librar-
ies movement in the United States, 1910–1960. Journal of the Ameri-
can Society for Information Science, 46, 782–793. Reprinted in Hahn
& Buckland (1998), 173–179.
Williams, R. V. (1998). The pioneers of information science in North America.
In T. B. Hahn & M. Buckland (Eds.), Historical studies in information
science (pp. 269–271). Medford, NJ: Information Today. The data-
base is at http://www.libsci.sc.edu/bob/isp/isp.htm.
Williams, R. V., & Covey, H. C. (1990). The Jonkers Termatrex machine:
Background and demonstration. Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Distance Education Division. VHS videocassette.
Zachary, G. P. (1997). Endless frontier: Vannevar Bush, engineer of the
American century. New York: Free Press.