Carlos Albert Cuadra
Carlos Cuadra (1925-2022) was an American information retrieval specialist.
Life
Carlos Albert Cuadra was born December 21, 1925 in San Francisco. Cuadra served in the Navy during World War II, stationed on Manus Island, south of Japan. He was a radio operator, decoding Morse code transmissions, and then was appointed Dean of the College of the Admiralties, managing the on-island school and teaching bookkeeping and photography. After the war he received a BA (1949) and a PhD (1953) at the University of California, Berkeley. Cuadra interned at the Veterans Administration neuropsychiatric hospital in Palo Alto, CA, and then worked as a Research Supervisor at the VA Hospital in Downey, Illinois, training clinical psychology interns and conducting research.
Cuadra joined the RAND Corporation in 1956, helping the U.S. Air Force to train radar operators to watch for incoming Soviet Union planes or missiles. In 1957 he moved into a RAND spin off, the System Development Corporation (SDC), where he prepared trainers for the U.S. Air Force’s Semi- Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) automated air defense system. He also studied automated fingerprint identification and information processing operations at the Central Intelligence Agency. At SDC he led the development of successive retrieval services.
In 1978 Cuadra left SDC and founded Cuadra Associates, Inc., as a consulting service and publisher of databases, and developed STAR knowledge management system. He retired in 2012, then founded Cuadra Enterprises.
Cuadra served numerous boards and organizations, taught at UCLA, lectured widely, and was an accomplished pianist. He died August 31, 2022.
Contributions
Cuadra made a significant contribution to the historical development of online retrieval services. He was a proponent of library networks, information networks, personal computers, and electronic publishing.
- At the System Development Corporation Cuadra was involved with the development of ORBIT, ORBIT II, and SDC Search Services (ORBIT III).
- He was founding editor of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) and served as editor through volume 10. Vols 1 (1966)-45(2011) are available open access [1] and continued in issues of the Journal of ASIST[2].
- Cuadra Associates published database directories.
Publications
- "Identifying key contributions to information science." American Documentation 15, no 4 (Oct. 1964): 289-295. [3]
- "Opening the black box of relevance." With Robert V. Katter. Journal of Documentation 23, no. 4 (1967): 291-303. [4]
- "On-line systems: Promise and pitfalls." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 22, Issue2 (March/April 1971): 107-114. [https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.4630220209}
- Oral history, 2001. Science History Institute. [5]
Awards
- American Society for Information Science. Award of Merit, 1968; Best Information Science Book award, 1969.
- The Information Industry Association conferred its 1975 Product of the Year award on the SDC Search Service.
- National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services: Miles Conrad Award and Honorary Fellow.
Further reading
Papers
- University of Michigan. Special Collections Research Center.