View source for Don Swanson

'''Don Swanson''' (1924-2012) was an American information scientist.
== Life ==
'''Don Richard Swanson''' was born on October 10, 1924 in Los Angeles. He served in the US Navy Reserve from 1942 to 1946. He received his BS in Physics at Caltech, Pasadena, in 1945; MA at Rice University, Houston, TX; and a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952.

From 1952 to 1954 Swanson worked as a computer systems analyst at Hughes Aircraft Company Research and Development Laboratories in Culver City, California. In 1955 had joined Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, initially working as a research scientist. By 1959 he was manager of the Synthetic Intelligence Department, where he led a project funded by the Council on Library Resources, with Noam Chomsky and Paul L. Garvin as linguistic advisors, to investigate machine indexing of 'a small experimental library of scientific text (ca. 300,000 words)'. Swanson collaborated further with Garvin on Russian-English machine translation, considering problems of polysemy.

In 1963 Swanson joined the University of Chicago Graduate Library School where he served as dean from 1963 to 1972, from 1977 to 1979 and again from 1987 to 1989. From 1972 to 1976 he was a research fellow at the Chicago Institute for Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He became an active emeritus professor in 1996. He died on November 18, 2012.

== Contributions ==
Swanson completed early research and development work on library catalogs and was involved in early applications of operations research to library problems.

Undiscovered public knowledge: Swanson famously used bibliographical searching to discover a connection between dietary fish oil and Raynaud’s disease, a circulatory disorder which was later validated in a clinical trial. He later hypothesized a connection between migraine headaches and magnesium deficiency that was also subsequently supported by clinical research. He and Neil Smalheiser developed software named Arrowsmith for such work.

== Publications==
Numerous publications are listed in the ''Wikipedia'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_R._Swanson]

*''Requirements study for future catalogs: Final report to the National Science Foundation''. Chicago:
University of Chicago. Graduate Library School, 1972.
*"Probabilistic models for automatic indexing." With Abraham Bookstein. ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science'' 25, no. 5 (1974): 312-316.
*"Information retrieval as a trial-and-error process." ''Library Quarterly'' 47, no. 2 (1977): 128-148.
*"Undiscovered public knowledge." ''The Library Quarterly'' 56, no. 2 (1986): 103-118.
*"Two medical literatures that are logically but not bibliographically connected." ''Journal of the American society for information science'' 38, no. 4 (1987): 228-233.
*"Migraine and magnesium: eleven neglected connections." ''Perspectives in biology and medicine'' 31, no. 4 (1988): 526-557.
*"An interactive system for finding complementary literatures: a stimulus to scientific discovery." With Neil R. Smalheiser. ''Artificial intelligence'' 91, no. 2 (1997): 183-203.

== Awards ==
*[[ASIST|American Society for Information Science & Technology]]. Award of Merit, 2000.

== Further reading ==
*Allen, Susie. "Don R. Swanson, information science pioneer, 1924–2012." [Obituary]. ''UChicago News'' [https://news.uchicago.edu/story/don-r-swanson-information-science-pioneer-1924-2012]
*"Don R. Swanson." ''Wikipedia'' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_R._Swanson]