A Tribute To Calvin N. Mooers, A Pioneer Of Information Retrieval
Author: Eugene Garfield
The Scientist, Vol: 11(4)March 17, 1997
Last October at its annual meeting in Baltimore, the American Society for Information Science presented a session entitled "History of Information Science: Reminiscences and Assessments." Part of the session memorialized Calvin N. Mooers, a pioneer of information science who passed away in December 1994.
Mooers was responsible for many innovations in computer and information science. He is perhaps best known for coining the term "information retrieval" while writing his master's thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, Online cites the original source for this term as the Zator Technical Bulletin No. 48 (1950), a publication of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Zator Co.-which Mooers founded in 1947-with the following definition: "The requirements of information retrieval, of finding information whose location or very existence is ...
