International Business Machines

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is a major US-based computer company.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) was founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 and renamed International Business Machine Corporation in 1924. It specialized in punch card equipment until World Work II, but had built up a patent position in electronics. IBM, nick-named "Big Blue," then became dominant in computer hardware and software in the second half of the 20th century.

IBM equipment was very widely used in information technology infrastructure, including for information storage and retrieval systems.

For more on IBM see "IBM" Wikipedia [1].

This article is limited to IBM's direct involvement in documentation and information retrieval services.

Contributions to documentation

Microfilm rapid selectors

IBM promptly acquired rights to the US Patent for Emanuel Goldberg's "Statistical machine" (USP 1,838,389. 29 December 1931) after Goldberg assigned his rights to Zeiss Ikon. James W. Bryce, IBM's Chief Scientist, was developing IBM's patent position in this area including his own statistical machine patent (USP 2,124,906. July 26, 1938). (Buckland 2006, 161).

Keyword in Context (KWIC)

A concordance is a index to all of the words in a book, excepting insignificant words enumerated on a "stop-list. Concordances to the Bible pointing to chapter and verse are well-known form.[2] In 1864 British librarian, Andrea Crestadoro proposed indexing using words in text as a rapid and economical method for indexing.

At IBM Hans Peter Luhn recognized punch card systems were suitable for this routine method for generating indexes and, importantly, that valuable explanation could be provided showing adjacent text immediately before and after each term , thereby adding context. This became known a Keyword in Context (KWIC), with variant display formats "out of context" (KWOC) and "alongside context" (KWAC). KWIC and its variants were widely used until computing became a lot less expensive. [3]

Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI)

"Selective Dissemination of Information" (SDI) refers to current awareness services that automatically notifying readers of documents that match their stated interests. This was also developed and popularized by Hans Peter Luhn[4]

Other individuals involved with IBM include: Howard H. Aiken, Steve Furth, Manfred Kochen, Herbert M. Ohlman, Israel A. Warheit and Herbert S. White.

Further reading

• Bourne, Charles P. & Trudi B.Hahn. A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.