Main Page
Biographical Directory of Documentation and Information Science
About this project
This Biographical Directory of Documentation and Information Science is an international effort to document the lives and contributions of people and organizations who have made substantial contributions to the field.
This resource is designed to enable historical work in the field by identifying pioneering individuals and organizations significant to the development of Information Science, and providing locations of personal papers and archival records related to these individuals and organizations.
List of all pages.
DISCLAIMER: Note that most of the entries are stubs or otherwise need to be improved.
It also includes a list of known oral histories of information scientists.
History
"Pioneers of Information Science" was initiated by Dr. Robert V. Williams, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, School of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina in 1996. The objectives of that project were to locate and document the archives and personal papers of individuals and organizations from the U.S. and Canada that were significant to the development of Information Science and Technology in the 20th century.
From today’s featured article
Carlos Cuadra (1925–2022) was an American information retrieval specialist.
Cuadra served in the Navy during World War II, stationed on Manus Island, south of Japan. He was a radio operator, decoding Morse code transmissions, and then was appointed Dean of the College of the Admiralties, managing the on-island school and teaching bookkeeping and photography. After the war he received a BA (1949) and a PhD (1953) at the University of California, Berkeley. Cuadra interned at the Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Palo Alto, CA, and then worked as a Research Supervisor at the VA Hospital in Downey, Illinois, training clinical psychology interns and conducting research.
Cuadra joined the RAND Corporation in 1956, helping the U.S. Air Force to train radar operators to watch for incoming Soviet Union planes or missiles. In 1957 he moved into a RAND spin off, the System Development Corporation (SDC), where he prepared trainers for the U.S. Air Force’s Semi- Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) automated air defense system. He also studied automated fingerprint identification and information processing operations at the Central Intelligence Agency. At SDC he led the development of successive retrieval services.
Contributions and Editorial Policies
We invite contributions from all members of the information science community. We especially seek international contributions. If you would like to write an entry, please read about the scope of the project and create a short article (a stub) that includes the individual or organization that you wish to nominate and submit it to the editors at biographicaleditor at gmail dot com.
See also our Manual of Style [1] and Article Template page.
The wiki is governed by an editorial board who hold all responsibility for the content of the project.