John Wallace Murdock

John Wallace Murdock (1922-2017)

Life

John Wallace Murdock was born on March 17, 1922 in McKendree, West Virginia. He received a BS degree cum laude from Marshall University, Huntington, WV, in 1949 and a Masters of Science in Nuclear Technology from Iowa State University.

After serving in the US Army as an Officer during the Second World War, Murdock worked for the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, in several roles: Physicist, Information scientist; Battelle: Principle physicist, Electrical Engineering Division, 1951-53; Assistant chief, Information Management Division, 1953-60; Associate department manager, Department of Economic and Information Research 1960-70; Manager, Information Systems Section, 1970 onward. Projects inluded assignments to harvest intelligence for US government missions in South Vietnam, South Korea (KIST), Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia (SRSI) and US Library of Congress (Translation of Russian T&S documents).

Murdock launched the International Science Data Center, Inc. in 1987. He was also Professor of Information Technology at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He died on November 11, 2017 in Columbus, Ohio.

Contributions

Murdock ran early Battelle extracts systems for major science-technology information centers. His main interests included information systems and communication. He was project manager for Battelle's BASIS (Battelle Automated Search Information System) which served multiple data sets.

Publications

• ""A comparison of the functions of libraries and information centers." With Charles A. Brophy Jr. Library Trends 14, no 2 (Winter 1966): 3467-352. [1]
• "A general model of information transfer: theme paper 1968 Annual Convention." With David M. Liston Jr. American Documentation 18, no. 4 (1967): 197-208.
• Murdock, John W. "Dynamic texts." Theory into practice 12, no. 3 (1973): 179-183. [ http://www.jstor.org/stable/1475325]
• "Numerical data indexing." Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences 20, no. 3 (1980): 132-136.

Further reading

• "John Murdock Obituary". Columbus Dispatch Mar. 15-17, 2018. [2]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp 315-318