James Whitney Perry

James Whitney Perry (1907-1971) was an American information retrieval specialist.

Life

James Whitney Perry (1907-1971). He studied chemical engineering at North Carolina State College (BS 1927; MS 1928), at MIT (SM 1931) and the Technical Universities of Stuttgart and Berlin-Charlottenberg (1932-1933). During the 1930s he helped develop the first low-cost synthetic detergent at the National Aniline Division of Allied Chemical. After wartime research on explosives at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, he initiated work on more efficient library and literature searching at MIT. He was later Director of the Center for Documentation and Communication Research at the School of Library Sciences at Western Reserve University. In 1960 he joined the College of Engineering at the University of Arizona. He died December 24, 1971.

Contributions

With Casey, Perry edited Punched Cards: Their Application to Science and Industry; Stressed information was polydimensional; Semantic factoring and use of role indicators for telegraphic abstracts provided linguistic foundation for his Searching Selector. His interests included: scientific Russian, documentation methods, synthetic detergents, military propellents. He worked at: Director, Center for Documentation and Communication, WRU; He also worked at: Chemist; Prof. Systems Engineering, Univ. of Arizona; Modern Language Dept., MIT.

He was a pioneer in IR systems, establishing a new approach to intellectual organization of knowledge. He helped to standardized language in documentation selection. He was a leader in investigating subject analysis, the coding of subject terms, and their relationship to information retrieval. Perry held several patents. He was concerned with problems of scientific bibliography and information retrieval. He advocated the mechanization of literature searching. He was a driving force behind the ACS's committees exploring the use of punch card machines for automatic indexing and information retrieval.

Publications

Perry is credited with 15 books, more than 100 papers and several patents.

Offices

• American Documentation Institute. President, 1957.
• American Chemical Society. Division of Chemical Literature. Co-organizer and President.

Awards

American Institute of Chemists. Honarary Fellow.

Further reading

• Obituary. Journal of Chemical Documentation 12, no 1 (Feb 1, 1972): 69. [1]
• Burke, Colin B. America's Information Wars: The untold story of information systems in America's

Papers

Some papers may still be at MIT and WRU.