Mortimer Taube

Mortimer Taube (1910-1965) was an American librarian and information service entrepreneur.

Life

Mortimer Taube was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on December 6, 1910. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1933, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1935 with a dissertation on Causation, freedom and determinism. He also earned a certificate of librarianship from Berkeley in 1936.

Taube worked as a teaching fellow and as a librarian at various colleges before moving to the Library of Congress in 1944. He held diverse positions at the Library, one of which was head of the Science and Technology Project from 1947-1949. He was a member of the Research and Development Board of the Department of Defense in 1948. Taube spent time as a consultant in science documentation, and was an editor of the journal American Documentation in 1952-1953.

In 1952, with the foundation of his company Documentation, Inc., Taube took a leadership role in the documentation field. The tremendous explosion of scientific literature during and after World War II overwhelmed existing indexing and retrieval methods. New methods, including machines to search for and store information, were needed. Taube's company helped to meet this need. He developed the system (and later the theory) of coordinate indexing, and helped to establish its use as a major tool in library and documentation work.

Taube's writings provoked considerable discussion in the library press, and contributed to recognition of him internationally. Of Taube's series Studies in Coordinate Indexing, particularly Volume 5 (Emerging Solutions for Mechanizing the Storage and Retrieval of Information), Frank B. Rogers commented, "Taube's writing is of brilliant clarity ... loaded with seminal ideas of great power."

Mortimer Taube died suddenly of a heart attack on September 3, 1965. His colleague and friend Maurice F. Tauber, who considered Taube one of the library and information science professions' most valuable members, said of him, "his contributions will remain with us as landmarks in the growth of information science."

Contributions

Uniterm System

Taube argued that complex specialized topics could not be efficiently searched in either general classification systems or in alphabetic indexes with inverted headings and/or subdivisions. Instead he promoted his own proprietary coordinate keyword procedures which he named the "Uniterm system." He used “coordinate” to mean post-coordinate (choosing combinations of separate search terms at the time of each search) to to be distinguished from pre-coordinate (where a combination of terms were established as a single, complex heading at the time of indexing, long before any searching, as the Library of Congress Subject Headings are).

Taube also argued for logical (Boolean, set theoretic) coordination which he distinguished from grammatical or semantic relationships as used, for example, in the "relational indexing" of Jason Farradane or the "semantic factoring" of James W. Perry.

Taube’s “Uniterm system" assigned a unique identifying code to each document and created a file of "feature cards," one for each index term (keyword or key phrase) used. Indexing was achieved by adding a document ID number to the feature card for each assigned index term. A search using a single index term was trivial: The feature card would have a list of all documents indexed with that term. Complex searches combining ("coordinating") two or more index terms were performed by separating the two or more feature cards for those terms then scanning those feature cards for document IDs found on all of them. This process was well suited for implementation on optical, punch card, and digital computing machinery, but it could be done by simple visual inspection. Listing the document ID numbers in columns according the right-hand digit and other techniques could significantly reduce the time and effort of visual scanning.

Publications

Numerous selected works by Taube are in the Wikipedia article about him [1]. Many papers concerning coordinate indexing are included in Studies in Coordinate Indexing. by Mortimer Taube & associates. Washington, D.C.: Documentation Inc., 1953-1965. 6 vols. ISSN 0585 6655. Each volume reprints a set of papers and technical reports, most authored or co-authored by Taube, promoting [post-]coordinate indexing and use of Uniterms.

• Causation, freedom, and determinism : an attempt to solve the causal problem through a study of its origins in seventeenth-century philosophy. London : G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1936. Based on his doctoral dissertation.
• "A note on the pseudo-mathematics of relevance". American documentation 16, no 2 (April 1961): 69-72.
• The state of the art of coordinate indexing, by Josephine J. Jaster, Barbara R. Murray, and Mortimer Taube. Washington, D.C.: Documentation Inc, 1962.
• Computers and common sense: The myth of thinking machines. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
• An evaluation of the use studies of scientific information. [Washington, D.C.] : Documentation Inc., [1958] [2]

Award

• Special Libraries Association. Distinguished Contributions to Special Librarianship, 1952.

Further reading

• "Mortimer Taube" Wikipedia [3]
• Shera, Jesse H. "Taube, Mortimer (1910-1965)." Dictionary of American library biography, ed. by Bohdan S. Wynar. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1978, pp 512-13. Somewhat critical.