XX

Evolution of Computerized Bibliographies

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HEN Billings began to develop the Index-Catalogue in the 1870's he unwittingly converted the Library into a publishing house, half or more of whose employees would spend their working hours year after year preparing annual bibliographies. The manual indexing, arranging, and editing for the Catalogue continued for seven decades, diverting the staff from other important library operations. Not until the 1940's did the situation change as directors and editors seized new techniques for processing and transmitting information. DEVELOPMENT OF A MECHANIZED SYSTEM

FOR PRODUCING THE LIBRARY'S PUBLICATIONS

The repetitive sorting, filing, and photographing that occurred every month during the production of Current List of Medical Literature suggested that much of the work could be done by machines. During the 1950's as the number of journal articles continually increased, straining the facilities of the Library to publish Current List, editor Seymour Taine had many discussions with Director Rogers about the possibility of mechanizing the operation. He examined equipment being used by business firms and government agencies to process data and concluded that the methods and machines could be applied in the Library. He drew up a plan to abandon the "shingling" procedure for producing the List in favor of punched cards which could be sorted by machines and photographed by an automatic high-speed camera to make a photo-offset negative. Since the system would be made up of data processing equipment, Rogers and Taine hoped that it could also be used for the selective retrieval of bibliographical data.1

Rogers was unable to obtain appropriated funds to buy or rent machines, but at a meeting of the Board of Regents members suggested that he apply for a grant from the Council on Library Resources. Rogers did this, and on April 16, 1958, the council allotted $73,800 for the Library to undertake the work.2

In order to understand more fully the potentialities of available equipment Taine and other staff members attended courses on data processing at the International Business Machines school in Endicott, New York. A room in the Library building was soundproofed, air-conditioned, and otherwise prepared to accommodate equipment. Consultants were engaged to assist. An advisory

committee was appointed. Various tape operated typewriters, tabulating equipment, and other machines were evaluated for use, and the most satisfactory were ordered. The heart of the system was to be an Eastman Kodak Listomatic camera capable of photographing 230 punched cards a minute while adjusting its aperture to accommodate one, two, or three lines of text imprinted across the top of the cards.

Early in the experiment it was decided that the arrangement of citations in Current List would be changed. The grouping together of titles of all articles in a journal was almost a necessity for the "shingle" method of production, but here it would be preferable to place one complete citation on each punched card. The final publication would contain two sections; one would list citations under subject headings in alphabetical order, the other would list authors in alphabetical order.

There were a number of possible ways of arranging the flow of work, and much thought went into the development of the best system. Finally Taine settled on seven stages, starting with an indexer who scanned articles, translated foreign language titles, assigned subjects and subheadings, and typed this information on a form; an indexing assistant who added authors' names, other bibliographical information, and machine codes to the form; an input typist who turned out a proof copy and a coded punched paper tape; a key-puncher who punched subject and author cards; and an operator who ran tapes and cards through output typewriters to produce imprinted cards. The cards were sorted and interfiled by machines, then collated with cards bearing headings, subheadings, and cross-references. After corrections were made, the deck was

interfiled with a "program" deck containing the page numbers of the pages to be printed and other information. This complete deck was run through the camera, the film developed, cut into columns, the columns taped together into pages, and the pages sent to the printing firm.

Through the spring of 1959 Taine and his associates perfected the mechanized system, adjusting one part or another, replacing inferior components by better, removing bottlenecks and improving procedures. In May 1959 citations for the fourth volume of the Bibliography of Medical Reviews were typed on cards and filmed as a test of the new system. The published work, received from the printer in August, was quite satisfactory. The team then began to index for the first number of Current List to be published by the new system.3 While Rogers and Taine were happy with the success of the new publication system they were disappointed because it was not practical as a retrieval system. The fastest machine obtainable could sort 1,000 cards a minute. At that rate it would take 12 1⁄2 hours to sort a 5-year accumulation of 750,000 cards, much too slow. Also, there were risks that the massive decks of cards might be mixed if they were disturbed before cumulation.

Before the Library had the opportunity to publish the first issue of Current List using the new system, the List metamorphosed into the Index Medicus. The transformation came about this way. Since 1950 Rogers had sought to find a way in which the Library and the American Medical Association could cooperate in publishing bibliographies. The Library's Current List and the AMA's Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus together indexed about one-half of the world's medical literature, but they overlapped, so that about one-third of the citations in the List were duplicated in the Index. One of Rogers' suggestions to the AMA had been to divide the indexing of the world's literature with the Library, the AMA indexing all publications from the Western Hemisphere and the Library indexing everything from the rest of the world. Another suggestion was that the Library index all articles in foreign languages, the AMA all those in English. For various reasons none of the proposed methods of cooperation was acceptable.

After the mechanization experiment began Rogers saw another way by which the two organizations could cooperate. The Library could prepare the monthly index and the AMA could produce the annual cumulation. Every December the Library could alphabetize its accumulation of cards, photograph them, and send the film to Chicago, where the AMA could use it to publish the cumulation. The Library would benefit by not having to publish a cumulated volume, the AMA would benefit by not having to publish monthly volumes, libraries would benefit by having to purchase, handle, and shelve only one index instead of two, and readers would benefit by having to scan one index instead of two.

In June 1959 the AMA board of trustees and house of delegates endorsed the plan. The following month the Public Health Service and AMA signed an agreement under which the Library would publish a monthly bibliography, named Index Medicus, superseding the Current List and Quarterly Cumulative