Origins of coordinate searching

An experiment using coordinate title word searches

“…From daily printouts of circulation records at the Walter Royal Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 749 titles were taken and then searched on the 4‐million entry catalog at the library of the University of Michigan. The principal finding was that searches produced titles having personal authors 81.4% of the time and anonymous titles 91.5% of the time; these figures are 15 and 5%, respectively, lower than the lowest findings presented in the previous three articles of this series (Kilgour, 1995; 1997; 2001).…”

“…The technique selected for known‐item searching in this, and in the previous experiments, does not mimic bibliographic searching in any way, and is relatively new, having come into being in the mid‐1930s (Kilgour, 1997, p. 340). It is important to emphasize that words employed in coordinate searching have no meaning, although they do have specific locations, for example “Kilgour” appearing in a MARC 100 field.…”

‘So wide and varied’: The origins and character of British information science

“…We can identify, from the primary and secondary literature, three main forces driving the development of the new subject in Britain: the documentation movement; special libraries; and the need for better treatment of scientific and technical information. These have to be seen in the context of the time, with a number of other, more general, influencing factors identified by Robinson [18], including: the perceived 'information explosion' or 'publication explosion' [19,20]; the availability of new technological tools to handle information [19][20][21]; the new 'information theory' of Shannon and Weaver, which offered the prospect of a sound theoretical basis for a science of information [2,22]; and an increased awareness of information as a resource for governmental, industrial and military applications [23,24]. However, it is the three forces noted above which, together, gave British information science a unique character, and we consider each of these in turn.…”

“…It is also true that most work on information technology, initially mechanized documentation systems and later computer applications, was centred in the USA [21]. It is telling that Vickery's 1994 enumeration of American contributions in the early years of Journal of Documentation [52] show that these all dealt with aspects of document technology.…”

History of information science

“…That led to searches for quick and ideally inexpensive ways to index and retrieve materials, including patents and even pictures. New methods and new terms appeared: uniterms, inverted files, keyword in context (KWIC), and keyword out of context (KWOK) (Austin, 1998; Gull, 1987; Kilgour, 1997; Ohlman, 1999; Stewart, 1993).…”