Technology's Great Need: Information Retrieval

Abstract

Early man's first limitation was language; with the invention of writing, he became literacy-limited; with printing, he eventually became literature-limited as the amount of knowledge grew beyond his capacity to keep up with it. Now he can work his way out of the masses of paper that beset him only if he does not become information-retrieval-limited. Our conventional indexing tools are already overloaded, however, and we must provide new means if we are to avoid this final limitation, which eventually would make it more profitable to take a chance on duplicating research effort than to search existing literature. Centralized repositories are one answer, and better communications facilities are another, but only the surface of the problem has thus far been scratched.