MONO91 Automatic Indexing chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards Application 0£ the indexing principle by use of clerical procedures that today can be accomplished by machine was suggested a little more than a century ago. A British librarian, Andreas Crestadoro, advocated the permutation of the words in titles in 1856, claiming that thus the subject matter index would follow the author's own definition of the contents of his book. He prepared such "concordances of titles" for several different library collections. 1/ Within a generation, punched card machines had been invented, but they were not to be used for library and documentation purposes for some decades yet. 2/ Keppel, writing in 1937 of his vision of the library 21 years in the future, says: "When it comes to using the cards, I blush to think for how many years we watched the so-called business machines juggle with payrolls and bank books before it occurred to us that they might be adapted to dealing with library cards with equal dexterity. Indexing has become an entirely new art. The modern index is no longer bound up in the volume, but remains on cards, and the modern version of the Hollerith machine will sort out and photograph anything the dial tells it . . "3/ By 1945, Bush had prophesied Memex [93], and in the 1950 Windsor lectures Ridenour referred to an RCA development, the so-called "electronic pencil", a proposed reading aid for the blind intended to convert printed characters to a suitable coded form. He went on to suggest: We shall have to arrange for cataloguing to be done by machine, without human interaction except in terms of setting up once for all the system on which the cataloguing is performed... It is only a step from this device (the electronic pencil) to the electronic catalogue, which will read text for itself, recognize key symbols and phrases with which it has been provided, and con- struct appropriate catalog entries for the text it reads.'L4/ It has only been in the past decade or so, however, that there have been any serious efforts directed to the use of machines for automatic indexing. In the period 1957-1958, Luhn first presented and published several provocative papers dealing with such challenging possibilities as "auto-abstracting", "auto- encoding" and "auto-indexing" (Luhn, 1957 [385]; 1958 [374]; 1959 [371] ). Luhn's work on the permutation of signifi- cant words in titles, abstracts, and complete text, the Keyword-in-Context or KWIC 1/ 2/ See pp.[OCRerr]9-22 of this report. 3/ 4/ See Crestadoro, 1856 [146]; see also Farley, 1963 [192]; Metcalfe, 1957 [416]; and Ohlman, 1960 [451]. See Keppel, 1939 [316], p. 5. See Ridenour, 1951 [500], p. 26. 4 Linder, 1960 [362];