Calvin Mooers

"The requirements of information retrieval, of finding information whose location or very existence is a priori unknown."

"In the 1940s , Calvin Mooers, and James Perry were the leaders among Americans who began to investigate subject analysis, the coding of subject terms, and their relationship to information retrieval. At the frontiers in a paradigm-breaking era, their approach combined a pragmatic view and abstract thinking."

"Information retrieval is the name for the process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him. It is the finding or discovery process with respect to stored information. It is another, more general, name for the production of a demand bibliography. Information retrieval embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, technique, or machines that are employed to carry out the operation. Information retrieval is crucial to documentation and organization of knowledge."

"He was a participant in early developmental work on digital computers, a researcher, author, and implementer of applications in information retrieval; and a prophet in the 1950s describing the future importance of what is now called computer networks and distributive processing, and daring to predict that machines could simulate thought processes in retrieving computerized information. In 1947, he proposed the Zator, an electronic, film-scanning retrieval machine, and made the first proposal to use the Boolean operations or, and, and not to prescribe selections in retrieval machines. He developed his own Zatocoding System in 1948 using superimposed subject codes on edge-notched cards. He coined the term "Information Retrieval" in 1950, and went on from there to obtain several patents in information retrieval and signaling, produce a text-handling language (TRAC), author some 200 publications, and form one of the first companies whose only concern was information. His thinking has affected all who are in the field of Information and his early ideas are now incorporated into todays reality."

"People will resist information unless the price of not knowing it greatly exceeds the price of learning it."