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  • A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976
  • Martin Campbell-Kelly (bio)
A History of Online Information Services, 1963–1976. By Charles P. Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+493. $45.

This is an important and encyclopedic contribution to the histories of information processing and information science. It is the story of the development of on-line information services—the ancestors of systems such as ProQuest, Westlaw, LexisNexis, and Dialog, which have become ubiquitous during the last decade with the rise of the Internet.

Charles Bourne and Trudi Bellardo Hahn focus on the formative years of information services. As they succinctly explain, the story begins in the early 1960s, when computers offered a technological solution to the problem of manually searching extremely large numbers of information sources. Early solutions typically involved a user sending a search query via post, and the results of the search being returned by post a few days later. The computer systems usually stored indexes, not documents; the texts that searches located had to be printed from microfilm sources. By about 1970, the development of time-shared computers, large-capacity storage disks, and computer networks provided the capability for real-time searching and downloading of full-text documents.

The book is long and very detailed, consisting of five hundred wide-format, double-column pages. It opens with a list of more than two hundred abbreviations and acronyms of "associations, organizations, government agencies, and specialized terminologies," which gives a hint of the complex history that follows. Indeed, this is much more of a reference work than a historical narrative for a reader with a general interest in the subject. However, such complexity is also a strength. There are lots of histories of different aspects of the on-line world, from airline reservation systems to the Internet. Apart from a few honorable exceptions, these books tend to treat their subjects as sui generis rather than the outcome of a Darwinian struggle among many competing technological solutions to a widely perceived problem. Bourne and Hahn provide an antidote to such teleological tendencies; here we see scores of players fighting to have their visions adopted.

The book is structured as a series of overlapping chronological narratives. The first one-third covers early experimental systems and prototypes. [End Page 661] Organizations involved in developing systems included private and governmental research organizations such as Lockheed, the Systems Development Corporation (SDC), IBM, MITRE, SRI, the Library of Congress, and lots of smaller entities. Also covered are university-based projects ranging from big hitters such as MIT, SUNY, and Syracuse University to lesser-known players such as Queen's University, Belfast, and Tokyo University. The heart of the book consists of four detailed histories: two of commercial systems, Lockheed's DIALOG and SDC's ORBIT, and two concerning the application domains of law and medicine. Few of the systems described (with the exception of Dialog) are well known under their original names, but they were the foundations on which today's information services were built through merger and consolidation. The book's conclusion describes the public, demand-side reception of information services, and their eventual commercial exploitation.

Beneath the welter of acronyms and details, Bourne and Hahn explicitly address a set of research questions: the comparative roles of technological push and pull; the bibliographic nature of the information provided; the role of evaluation in shaping the services; and the relative importance of private and government funding. Some of these questions will be of interest to historians of technology in general, others mainly to specialists in information retrieval.

Encyclopedic as this book is, it is also somewhat frustrating, because it tells only half a story: a relatively brief thirteen-year period in the development of information services, when on-line information was scarce and expensive. Today it is ubiquitous and cheap. We do not learn how this transformation came to pass. This book has the same kind of limitation as would a history of transport that leaves out the airplane, or a history of data processing that leaves out the personal computer. Excellent as it is, it would have been even better if it also told this...

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