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Harley E. Tillitt began experiments on storage and searching of a coordinate index using an IBM 701 Calculator soon after the machine arrived in September 1953 at the then Naval Ordnance Test Station, China Lake, California. By April 1954 Mr. Tillitt's program was operational, searching the library's coordinate index, which had been converted to a truncated machine readable form. In early May 1954 Mr. Tillitt presented the following paper, describing his system, at an IBM Computation Seminar at Endicott, New York. The paper is believed to be the first report on library-related computerization and is here printed for the first time because of its historic importance.
At the U. S. Naval Ordnance Test Station, an attempt has been made to use the 701 Calculator as a tool in the task of searching library files for documents referring to special subjects. The present system includes only reports which have been written in certain agencies throughout the country and does not include periodicals or books. Furthermore, the subjects are for the most part related to the development and testing of items of naval ordnance.
In any organization that includes research and development in its functions, it is economical in both time and money to be able to determine what has been done in a field before new programs are started. Scientists and engineers, therefore, are anxious to learn what is in the literature prior to starting some new task. Frequently, however, the labor of searching library files is so great or so unprofitable that it is either not done, or done very incompletely.
One of the reasons for the difficulty in searching is that the cataloging of reports may be such that important aspects of their contents are obscured. For example, the following report, Equilibrium Composition and Thermodynamic Properties of Combustion Gases, could logically be cataloged under one or more of several subject headings, which might or might not be appropriate, depending somewhat upon the technical skill of the cataloger. This particular report was filed in the China Lake Technical Library under two subjects: Gases and Physics. Both of these are standard Library of Congress subject headings, and are more or less descriptive of the report.
However, under each subject heading there were found to be several...