On the Humanist Discussion List (22.043), the editor, Willard McCarty, finds a gem of a series of analyses of the information explosion - dating from the early 1960s.

Dr. McCarty says:

"In my trawlings for early views of computing one of the best finds has been a series of commissioned pieces published by the Times Literary Supplement in 1962 under the series title "Freeing the mind" and later that year as a booklet, Freeing the Mind: Articles and Letters from the Times Literary Supplement during March-June 1962 (London: Times Publishing Company, 1962), for the sum of 3/6. The main articles in this collection are: Research and the Library of the Future: D. J. Foskett; Mechanization in Lexicography: R. A. Wisbey; Electronic Storage and Searching: Ralph Shaw; The Kinds of Machine now in Use: Andrew D. Booth; The Future of Machine Translation: Yehoshua Bar-Hillel; The Intellect's New Eye: Margaret Masterman; Poetry, Prose and the Machine (anon). ... "

Here are some of the excerpts from the Introduction to that series:

Is THERE A DIRECT relationship between the growth of human knowledge and the decline in humanity's ability to handle what it knows? It often seems that there is. The development of (at least) two cultures, the breeding of more and more specialists, the mutual mystification of experts even within a single field of knowledge: we know the symptoms only too well. In every profession, in every branch of scholarship, it is becoming harder to keep pace with current developments. Nor is this just because so many actual discoveries are being made. The fragmentation of knowledge itself leads to overlapping and duplication, to the scattering of the relevant material through an ever-widening range of publications; as the horizons close in there is more and more pointless research. Keeping up with the real advances is only part of the problem. Trying to identify them at all in the vast wastes of words and effort: that is what takes the time.

-----

We have often heard how this presses on the scientist. To take the classic instance, the index to Chemical Abstracts for the decade 1947-1956 is three times the size of that for the decade preceding. But at the same time the sheer volume of paper published is also mounting on the non-scientific desk. Thus at a conference on Information Methods of Research Workers in the Social Sciences, whose report was published by the Library Association last year, Mr. Donald MacRae complained of "the difficulty of knowledge of and access to the mass of field studies and monographs" in sociology. Again an article by Mr. Brian Rowley in the October-January, 1961, number of German Life and Letters refers to a "jungle of secondary sources" in his subject which the bibliographers no longer have under control. Not only does research become increasingly fragmented as a result, in Mr. Rowley's view, but the young scholar, pressed to publish "original" work, may think he is doing so when the ground has already been covered; he may be thickening the word-jungle to no purpose. And there are many other indications that even if the flow of new discoveries in other fields is less than that in science the problem is still the same. For the scholar in the humanities cannot afford to treat his predecessors' work as superseded. He has to keep up with the present and the past.

I note in those paragraphs the same frustration that drove, notably, Anurag Acharya of Google to create Google Scholar. No better statement of that problem can be made. And here specifically the place for organizing the world's information:

In this country it seems probable that librarians are better aware of the new possibilities than are most scholars, writers, and publishers. At the Fedration Internationale de Documentation's conference, which was held in London last September, a number of revolutionary developments were discussed, among them the F.M.A. "Filesearch" and I.B.M. "Walnut" methods of mechanically searching a store of microfilm and projecting or enlarging the required page, and the efforts now being made to mechanize the Human Relations Area Files, the anthropological library at Yale. ...

-----

In the United States, where developments have been altogether more spectacular, the Council on Library Resources was established by the Ford Foundation in 1956 and was given a new grant of $8m. last year precisely "to set up a laboratory to study photographic and electronic techniques designed to cope with the deluge of publications resulting from the accelerated rate of research". This and much else has already been reported in the press. Yet each report so far has been treated rather in isolation; many of the projects evolved seem to have been planned without much idea of the scholars' needs. Nor is it always clear how far they have got beyond the theoretical stage.

Here, anyone associated with DLF is struck by the reference to CLR, which merged with another organization, the Commission on Preservation and Access, to form CLIR, and from whence, DLF itself was born. The thread of history is knotted with the problem of locating past-found knowledge. From the perspective of this great effort -- DLF, CLIR, Google, and Microsoft and many other organizations besides: we are a band of brothers and sisters.