Allen Kent

Allen Kent
Credit: University of Pittsburgh Library System Digital Collections

Allen Kent (1921- 2014) was an American pioneer of information science.

Life

Allen Kent was born October 24, 1921 in New York city. He received a degree in chemistry from City College of New York and served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After the war, he worked on a project at MIT in mechanized document encoding and search.

In 1955, Kent helped found the Center for Documentation Communication Research at Western Reserve University in Cleveland with James Perry. He joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, where in 1970 he began the Department of Information Science. He retired from the university in 1992. He died May 1, 2014.

Contributions

Concerned with free-field searching; Realized need for vocabulary control especially when dealing with automated functions; Began developing a semantic code dictionary in 1951; 1953-55 worked on the telegraph abstract; Helped establish the Mark I Information Retrieval Service (based on the WRU System) 1960; Involved in pilot program to study the feasibility of a mechanized information service for educational research materials - led to development of ERIC; Established the Knowledge Availability Systems Center; 1971-1974 Chairman of Board of Trustees of EDUCOM; Co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science.

(With Perry) associated with the discovery and pioneering of information science. Worked on an elaborate coding system which involved "telegraphic abstracts;" This system included rules to aid in retrieval.

Publications

• Punched cards: Their applications to science and industry. 2nd ed. Ed. by R. S. Casey, J. W. Perry, M. Berry & A. Kent. New York: Reinhold.
• Perry, James W.; Kent, Allen; Berry, Madeline M. (1955). "Machine literature searching X. Machine language; factors underlying its design and development." American Documentation 6, no 4 (1955): 242–254. [doi:10.1002/asi.5090060411]
• "A Machine That Does Research," (April 1959), Harper's Magazine
• Information Analysis and Retrieval. New York, Becker and Hayes 1971. Based on his Textbook on mechanized information retrieval, New York, Interscience Publishers, 1962; 2nd ed., 1966.
• ""The Structure and governance of library networks : proceedings of the 1978 conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [Edited by] Allen Kent, Thomas J. Galvin. New York: M. Dekker, 1979.
• The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Edited by Allen Kent, Harold Lancour and Jay E. Daily. New York: Marcel Dekker, 1968-2003.
• An extensive oral history interview with Kent was conducted in 1993 by the National Council of Jewish Women, Pittsburgh Section and the tapes have been digitized and are available for listening. [1] Concentrates on his experiences as a Jew but includes his career in information science and work at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Awards

• ASIS. Award of Merit, 1977.
• ASIS. Best Information Science Book, 1980.

Further reading

• A brief obituary and biographical statement is available at: [2]
• 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.
• "Allen Kent," Wikipedia [3]
• Who’s who in library and information services. Joel M. Lee, ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p 250.

Papers

• University of Michigan, Rare books. Margaret (Smith) Warden papers. 1944-1987; bulk 1966-1985. 1.9 feet (ca.685 items).