Myer Mike Kessler

Myer Mike Kessler (1917-1997) was a US pioneer of information science.

Myer M. Kessler (holding booklet) Credit: MIT Museum

Life

Myer Mike Kessler was born in Odessa, Ukraine. He earned B.S. (1939) and M.S. (1940) degrees in biophysics from MIT and a Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University (1948).  He worked for the former National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., taught physics at Brandeis University, and worked on developing radar and military guidance systems at MIT's Radiation Laboratory and Lincoln Laboratory. He worked at MIT from 1954 to 1976 and died on August 13, 1997.

Contributions

Kessler was interested in citation analysis, application of ideas management, and instruction and technology in the administration of academic libraries.

Kessler also conducted studies with American Institute of Physics on citation analysis for laser literature.

Technical Information Project

In 1962 Kessler was named director of MIT's Technical Information Project (TIP), in which he devised a system for retrieving articles and documents by searching for a word or words in a text rather than by looking for titles, authors, key words or subject classifications. He first demonstrated the technology with an IBM 7094 mainframe computer in 1964. This early influential online search system has been credited with several milestones in the development of the field (Bourne & Hahn 2003).

Bibliographic coupling

Kessler is credited with inventing bibliographic coupling. Two documents are bibliographically coupled if they both cite some other document. "Coupling strength" is higher if two or more documents are cited by both. Similarly, two authors are bibliographically coupled to the extent that the reference lists of their respective oeuvres contain references to the same one or more documents. Bibliographic coupling is useful for finding related research. Bibliographic coupling is similar to co-citation, which is when two documents are both "co-cited" if they are cited by one or more other documents.

Publications

• "Technical information flow patterns." In Papers presented at the May 9-11, 1961, western joint IRE-AIEE-ACM computer conference, pp. 247-257. 1961.
• "Bibliographic coupling between scientific papers," American Documentation 24 (1963), pp. 123-131.
• "Bibliographic coupling extended in time: Ten case histories." Information storage and retrieval 1, no. 4 (1963): 169-187.
• "Comparison of the results of bibliographic coupling and analytic subject indexing." American documentation 16, no. 3 (1965): 223-233.
• "The MIT technical information project." Physics Today 18, no. 3 (1965): 28-36.
• "Some statistical properties of citations in the literature of physics." Statistical Association Methods in Mechanized Documentation (1965): 193-198. [1]

Further reading

• [Brief obituary] MIT News, August 27, 1997 [2]
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Papers

MIT Libraries Department of Distinctive Collections (Cambridge, MA), 1946-1994. 2 cubic feet (2 record cartons). Includes: Myer M. Kessler papers: correspondence, reports, reprints, proposals, papers, and conference materials, including documents from sessions 1-10 of the International Conference on Information Science. Also included in the collection are files from the Technical Information Project (TIP) including user manuals, progress reports, and programs. Finding aid: [3].