MONO91 Automatic Indexing chapter Mary Elizabeth Stevens National Bureau of Standards `I having been written by J. T. Madigan. - At any rate, both this program and Luhn1s KWIC program at IBM were apparently written relatively early in 1958. Citron et al (1958 [120] ) in presenting results of the SDC work and Ohlman in his chronological bibliography of permutation indexing (1960 [451])cite as at least partial predecessors the "rotated file" principles developed at the Chemical-Biological Coordina- tion Center (1954 [112]; Heumann and Dale, 1957 [270] and 1957 [271]; Wood, 1956 [649]). It should also be noted as a matter of historical background that a system for machine manipulation and compilation of permuted title-and-term-index records has been in productive operation since 1952. [OCRerr]2/ This earlier effort was not generally known to other investigators and was apparently first reported in the open literature as late as 1961. Notwithstanding such other efforts, it is conceded by almost all workers in the fields of automatic abstracting and indexing that the major credit for pioneering interest and impetus should be attributed to Luhn and Baxendale. Specific acknowledgements of their "pioneering work" and "first steps" have been made by many investigators both in this country and abrp[OCRerr]d--for example Borko and Bernick, [OCRerr]1Hines, 4/ Mooers, 5/ Pevzner and SWazhkin, [OCRerr] and Wyllys.111n particular, the Russian investigator Purto states: "So far as we know H. P. Luhn was the first investigator to suggest the concept of a set of significant words for the consideration of problems in automatic abstracting." 8/ Much of the early effort 1957-58, whether at IBM or elsewhere, was in fact spurred on by the International Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI) held in Washington, D.C., in November, 1958. The printed text of both the Preprints [478] and the final Proceedings [480, 481] was deliberately prepared, over the typographer's objections, so that a double space followed each period ending a sentence, in order to facilitate machine processing of this text. Thus the printers .... .. were faced with ... the necessity to prepare the final volume of the Proceedings from these preprints, and to arrange type composition amenable to computer analysis. The latter is an experiment. With an eye to the distant future, the Program Committee wished to make available the monotype punched tapes from the text for statistical studies with computers. We hope 1/ 2/ 3/ Carlsen, et al, "Information Control", 1958 [99], p.20. Veilleux, 1962 [624], p.81: "Consumer demand balanced against availability of man- power and machine time were the factors which led to the establishment of the per- mutation title word indexing project in 1952." Borko and Bernick, 1962 [OCRerr]77] p.3. 4/ Hines, 1963 [273[OCRerr], p 7. 5/ Mooers, 1963 L424][OCRerr] p.4. 6/ Pevzner and Styazhkin, 196[OCRerr] [472] p.3. 7/ Wyllys, 196[OCRerr] L650], pp. 6-7. 8/ Purto, 1962 [484], p. 2. 6