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Abstract

The idea of computing with concepts as mathematicians manipulate variables in equations goes back at least as far as G. W. Leibniz (1663). Leibniz dreamed of a universal calculus, an ambiguity-free language, with which scholars could communicate ideas with mathematical precision. George Boole, in his investigation of the laws of thought, contributed to the realization of this idea by developing a calculus of classes (1847). A modern visionary who saw a practical application of Boole's work and further contributed to the idea of communicating by "computing" was Mortimer Taube (1910-1965), a member of the Library of Congress staff from 1944 to 1949 who later founded Documentation, Inc. He proposed communicating with a mechanized information store by combining concepts using the Boolean operators, AND, OR and NOT. The following selection contains one of the first presentations of a technique Taube called "coordinate indexing" and what later has come to be called "post coordinate indexing" or Boolean searching. This selection is interesting an three counts. It is interesting first of all because of its early date-1950. Though the idea of coordinate indexing had been anticipated in manual systems of the punched card sort, these systems were limited, relying for the most part an repeated application of the AND operator. To conceptualize the full power that could be achieved by Boolean search strategy in mechanized systems was an imaginative step forward. Second, the selection is interesting insofar as the idea of coordinate indexing is couched, indeed nearly hidden, in a somewhat ponderous essay an the compatibility of universal and special classifications and the merits of different methods of information organization. Ponderous though it is, the essay is worth a careful reading. The perspective it gives is enlightening, a reminder that the roots of information science reach far back into the bibliographic past. The third and perhaps most interesting aspect of this selection is that in it Taube looks beyond the technique of coordinate indexing to envisage its implications an bibliographic organization. (Now more than thirty years later we are still attempting to understand these implications.) What Taube saw was a new method of bibliographic organization, which, not ingenuously, he observed might seem almost bumptious in the face of a two thousand year history of organizing information. This "new" method was, however, being proposed elsewhere, albeit in different guise, by S. R. Ranganathan (q.v.) and his school. It was the method of organizing information using abstract categories called fields or facets. These categories, unlike those used in the great traditional classifications, were not locked in procrustean hierarchical structures, but could be freely synthesized or combined in indexing or retrieval. In short, Taube's voice was among those at midcentury supporting the move from enumerative to synthetic subject approaches. The fact that it was an American voice and one especially weIl informed about bibliography and computers is perhaps what led Jesse Shera to refer to Taube as "the Melvil Dewey ... of midtwentieth century American Librarianship," one who was able "to weld successfully conventional librarianship and the then-emerging information science."