Roger Kent Summit

Roger Kent Summit (b.1930) pioneered online information services.

Image of Roger Kent Summit

Life

Roger Kent Summit was born in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan. He studied at Stanford University, earning a BA in Psychology, 1952; MBA, 1957; and a PhD in 1965 with a thesis on "Simulation of a management decision process utilizing a computer model of the aerospace industry".

Summit was a Communications Officer in the US Navy from 1952 to 1955 and joined the Lockheed Corporation’s information processing staff in 1960. He first developed the DIALOG online information retrieval system while working at Lockheed Corporation in 1962. In 1968, Lockheed entered into a contract with NASA to use DIALOG as the Administration’s online information retrieval system. Eventually, DIALOG was established as a commercial information retrieval business within Lockheed’s Palo Alto Research Laboratory in 1972 before being spun-off as a wholly-owned subsidiary in 1981.

In addition to the DIALOG information retrieval system, Summit also developed various DIALOG derivatives such as the Remote Console (RECON) system for NASA, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and the European Space Agency, and the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) project, a national information database of education-related literature. Summit retired in 1991.

In 1988, Knight-Ridder, Inc., had purchased DIALOG from Lockheed. DIALOG was later sold to MAID in 1997, to the Thomson Corporation in 2000, and in 2008 to ProQuest, which became part of Clarivate in 2021.

Contributions

Summit was a major figure in the development of the online information retrieval service industry. Summit foresaw the need to give the public access to online systems. He realized that this could become a business. He was the designer and product manager for the DIALOG online information retrieval system at its inception in the early 1960's and continued successively as Manager, President and CEO until his retirement in 1991.

Publications

Summit authored numerous articles on information science, online information retrieval, and library information technology. A list to 1990 is in Online review Roger Summit Festschrift issue. 15, no 3 /4 (June/August 1991): 125-128.

• "Document retrieval systems and techniques. With O.Firschein. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 9 (1974): 285-331. [1]
• "Lockheed Experience in Processing Large-Data Bases for Its Commercial Information Retrieval Service." Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences 15, no. 1 (1975): 40-42. [2]
• "On-Line Reference Retrieval in a Public Library." with O. Firshein. Special Libraries 67, no. 2 (1976): 91-6.

Awards

• NFAIS. Miles Conrad Memorial Lecturer and Award, 1996.
• American Society for Information Science. Award of Merit, 1991.
• Special Libraries Association. Honorary Member, 1989.
• American Library Association. Isadore Gilbert Mudge R.R. Bowker Award, 1982.
• Information Industry Association, Hall of Fame (1982)
• Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. Special Invention Award for the Aerospace Business Environment Simulator Computer Program, 1968.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellow.

Further reading

• Online review Roger Summit Festschrift issue. 15, no 3 /4 (June/August 1991): 117-243. Includes brief biography and lists publications about him and by him on pp 123-128.
• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B. Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• Burke, Colin B. America's information wars: The untold story of information systems in America's conflicts and politics from World War II to the internet age. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp 321-323.
• Lilley, Dorothy B. & R. W. Trice. A history of information science, 1945-1985. San Diego, CA” Academic Press, 1989.

Papers

• Stanford University Libraries. Department of Special Collections and University Archives. M2022: Roger K. Summit papers. Finding list [3]