Calvin Northrup Mooers

Calvin Mooers (1919-1994) was an American information retrieval specialist.

Life

Calvin Northrup Mooers was born on October 24, 1919. He graduated BA summa cum laude at the University of Minnesota in 1941 and joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory as a physicist. At the end of the war he became part of the Lab's newly created Computer Division under John Vincent Atanasoff. Mooers left in 1946 for MIT where he met James Perry. In 1947 Mooers founded a company, “Zator,” and began marketing a custom designed version of edge-notched cards He completed a Master's thesis on Application of random codes to gathering of statistical information in 1948.

Raymond J. Solomonoff joined Zator Company in 1957. Mooers founded the Rockford Research Institute, a nonprofit corporation. in the early 1960s to facilitate his and Solornonoff’s grant-funded research. He died December 1, 1994.

Contributions

• Zator coding: Zator coding used specially notched cards for selection based on fuzzy sets. Each notch was a descriptor representing information in the document to which that card referred.
• TRAC programming language. In 1959, Mooers began to develop the Text Reckoning and Compiling (TRAC) language.
• Mooers coined the terms "information retrieval" (1950) and "descriptors."
• He promulgated "Mooers' Law" on the use of information.
• He advocated assigning random superimposed codes to reduce the possibility of false drops and assure greater accuracy.

June, 2001 issues of IEEE Annals of History.

Mooers developed his own coding and indexing ideas. He was a pioneer of IR systems, establishing a new approach to intellectual organization of knowledge. By 1947, Mooers was an "influential figure in the early information science community" (Burke). His Zatocoding system used superimposed random codes to improve information retrieval from a file of edge-notched cards. He began his own information management company.  He also developed a programming language, TRAC, which is still in use today

"In the 1940's Taube, Mooers, and Perry were the leaders among Americans...investigating subject analysis, the coding of subject terms, and their relationship to information retrieval. Their approach combined a pragmatic view and abstract thinking" (Farkas-Conn). He was editor ADI? (Bellardo). 

Publications

• "Atanasoff at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory." Annals of the History of Computing 15:2 (1993), 54-55.
• "TRAC, a Procedure-Describing Language for the Reactive Typewriter." CACM, 9:3 (March 1966), 215-219.
• Putting Probability to Work in Coding Punched Cards: Zatocoding. (Zator Technical Bulletin No. 10), 1947. Reprinted as Zator Technical Bulletin No. 30 (1950).
• The Zator - A Proposal: A Machine for Complete Documentation, 1947. Reprinted with preface as Zator Technical Bulletin No. 65 (1951).
• "Zatocoding applied to mechanical organization of knowledge." American documentation 2, issue 1 (Jan 1951): 20-32.
• "'Mooers' Law or Why some retrieval systems are used and others are not." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 22, no 1 (Nov 1996): 22-23.[1]
• Calvin N. and Charlotte D. Mooers oral history interview, 22 June 1993, OH 254,

Awards

• American Society for Information Science. Award of Merit, 1978.

Further reading

• Babbage Institute Finding list [2]
• Weiss, E. "Obituary for Calvin Mooers." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 46, issue 3 (Fall-1995): 79-81.
• Ceruzzi, Paul E. & Haigh, Thomas. "Calvin Mooers, Zatocoding, and Early Research on Information Retrieval." In: Exploring the Early Digital, ed. T. Haigh. Cham : Springer International Publishing, 2019, pp.69-86.

For additional biographical information see the Babbage Institute Web site noted below and the Web site developed by Mooers' daughters, Helen and Edith: http://www.tracfoundation.org/mooers/mooers.htm.

Papers

• University of Minnesota, Babbage Institute, Minneapolis, MN. Calvin N. Mooers papers CBI 81 55455. ca. 1930-1994. Finding aid [3]