From Cave Paintings to the Internet
A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media
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Short Version:
Circa 250 BCE Earliest Surviving Monolingual Dictionary 1938 H. G. Wells and the “World Brain” July 15, 1955 Eugene Garfield Foundation of Citation Analysis 1973 Henry Small Discovery of Citation Mapping September 7, 1998 Google is Founded January 15, 2001 Wikipedia Begins May 16, 2009 Wolfram/Alpha
Circa 250 BCE Earliest Surviving Monolingual Dictionary Circa 200 BCE Origins of Bibliography Circa 280 CE – 340 CE One of the Earliest, Most Widely-Used Cross-Indexing Systems Circa 800 The Book of KellsCirca 1190 – 1290The Emergence of Concordances and Subject Indexes1239 Biblical Concordances, Tools for Preachers Circa 1250 The First Alphabetical Subject Indexes Circa 1270 The Arrangement and Cataloguing of Books 1290 Organization of the Sorbonne Library, and the Way it Was Physically Arranged 1305 Logical Machines for the Production of Knowledge Circa 1320 Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts Circa 1350 Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts Names 694 Authors 1448 The First Bible Concordance in Hebrew Circa 1473 – 1474 The First Printed Book Issued with Pagination June 1543 Unprecedented Blending of Scientific Exposition, Art and Typography 1548 – 1549 The First General Subject Index 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 1588 Renaissance Information Retrieval Device 1595 The First “Books in Print” 1620 – 1640 Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger 1699 A Universal Bibliography but Only for “A and B” 1782 – 1832 166.5 Volumes of Text but No Comprehensive Index! 1805 The First Thematic Index of a Composer's Work, Based on Mozart's Own Index 1841 Panizzi's 91 Rules for Standardizing the Cataloguing of Books 1852 Early Proposal for a National Union Catalogue April 29 1852 Roget's Thesaurus 1876 The Last Library Cataloguing Code Written by One Person 1879 The First Extensively Used Scientific Method of Criminal Identification 1879 Index Medicus Begins 1880 A Landmark in Efforts to Organize Information and Make it Searchable 1880 Fingerprints as a System of Identification October 1892 Finger Prints as a Means of Identification 1895 An Analog Search Engine 1898 The Cumulative Book Index February 1901 The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature 1901 Library of Congress Printed Cards 1911 “Die Brucke” and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House 1931 An Electronic Machine for Searching Through Information
December 29, January 26, 1934 Bradford's Law. In a paper entitled “Sources of Information on Specific Subjects,” (Engineering 137 [1934], 85-6), Samuel C. Bradford publishes Bradford's Law of the “exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search.”
1938 H. G. Wells and the “World Brain”
Vannevar Bush's “Rapid Selector” July 1945 Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” (Atlantic Monthly) September 1945 The Illustrated Version of “As We May Think” 1949 Developing Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector 1949 The Origins of Humanities Computing April 1949 One of the Earliest Projects in Library Automation 1950 The First Textbook on How to Build an Electronic Computer 1950 Coining the Expression, Information Retrieval 1951 Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information June 24 – June 27, 1952 Applying Computer Methods to Library Cataloguing and Research 1953 Mortimer Taube proposes the Uniterm Indexing system 1954 Early Library Information Retrieval System 1954 Probably the First Widely-Accepted Controlled Vocabulary 1955 Machine Methods for Information Searching
July 15, 1955 The Foundation of Citation Analysis. Eugene Garfield publishes “Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas,” Science, Vol. 122, No. 3159, 108-11. This paper may be the foundation of “bibliometrics” or citation analysis.
1957 Mechanized Encoding of Library Information 1958 Automatic Document Indexing Program 1958 Keyword in Context (KWIC) Indexing November 1959 – 1972 The Most Voluminous Printed Catalogue of a Single Library 1959 Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval 1960 Pioneering Computer-Assisted Legal Research 1962 One of the First Data Publishing and Retrieval Systems 1964 First Computerized Encyclopedia 1964 Science Citation Index 1964 The First Large Scale Computer-Based Retrospective Search Service Available to the General Public January 1965 “Libraries of the Future”1965 – 1968 The MARC Cataloguing Standard 1966 Lockheed's DIALOG 1967 Full-Text Interactive Search Service 1967 Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) is Founded 1967 The Museum Computer Network 1968 – 1981 Probably the Largest Printed Bibliography, Complete in 754 Folio Volumes June 1970 The Definitive Model for Relational Database Management Systems 1971 Medline is Operational October 1973 Mead Data Central introduces Lexis and NAARS services
1973 Discovery of Citation Mapping, American information scientist Henry G. Small of the Institute for Scientific Information publishes “Co-Citation in the Scientific Literature; A New Measure of the Relationship between Two Documents,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 24 (1973) 265-9.
1974 Structured Querry Language (SQL) 1974 New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities found RLG (Research Libraries Group) 1977 Lawrence Ellison founds what will become ORACLE 1978 dBase 1980 Nexis 1982 IBM DB2 1983 Work begins on computerizing the text of the Oxford English Dictionary 1985 Tufts Perseus Digital Library Project 1987 The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials 1988 International Standard for Computer-to-Computer Information Retrieval 1990 The First “Search Engine” but Not a “Web Search Engine” 1991 Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines invents the Wide Area Information Server or WAIS system September 1991 Mark P. McCahill and team at the University of Minnesota develop the Gopher protocol 1993 OCLC publishes Electronic Dewey 1993 IBM First Library of Digital Images on the Internet 1993 Richard Weatherford establishes Interloc, “the first successful online bookseller service” 1993 Development of Neural Networks by Psychologist, neural scientist and cognitive scientist James A. Anderson June 1993 The First Web Search Engine? Matthew Gray at MIT develops the web crawler, World Wide Web Wanderer 1994 World Wide Web Worm April 1994 Yahoo! Founded Jerry Yang and David Filo April 20, 1994 The First Full Text Web Search Engine The first “full text” crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington December 15, 1995 Altavista 1996 IBM DB2 Universal Database 1996 LexisNexis online services exceed one billion documents January 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, begin collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub April 1996 Seachenginewatch.com goes online as “A Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines” January 29, 1998 Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd of the Stanford Database Group publish on paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web ” September – December 1998 MSN Search Circa
September 7, 1998 Google is Founded
December 23, 1998 Where's George? Database consultant Hank Estrin creates and makes operational Where's George?, a website that tracks the natural geographic circulation of American paper money. March 9, 2000 – September 2003 Predecessor of the Wikipedia Using money from the dot.com Bomis, American entrepeneur Jimmy Wales founds the web-encyclopedia, Nupedia, hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief March 14, 2000 Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Online October 23, 2000 Google Launches AdWords
January 15, 2001 Wikipedia Begins
October 2004 The Google Print Project 2005 Kosmix.com “With the vision of connecting people to information that makes a difference in their lives,” Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman found Kosmix.com October 3, 2005 Universally Accessible Digital Archive The Open Content Alliance in association with Yahoo and the Internet Archive announce plans to build a universally accessible digital archive of published information October 8, 2005 Google CEO Eric Schmidt speculates that it may take three hundred years to index all the world's information and make it searchable February 8, 2006 Zillow.com Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, former Microsoft executives and founders of Expedia launch the online real estate service company, Zillow.com February 9, 2006 Making Handwritten Manuscripts Searchable July 2008 Over One Trillion Unique URLs
Analysis of Web Search Queries Track the Spread of Flu Faster than Traditional Surveillance Methods November 11, 2008 Google.org unveils Google Flu Trends, using aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems March 11, 2009 Higher Resolution Map of Knowledge Than Can be Produced from Citation Analysis Johan Bollen of Los Alamos National Laboratory and six co-authors publish “Clickstream Data Yields High Resolution Maps of Science” in the open access online journal Plos ONE.
May 16, 2009 Wolfram/Alpha
June 1, 2009 Microsoft Launches Bing September 2, 2009 Algorithm to Decipher Ancient Texts October 19, 2009 Google Represents 6% of All Internet Traffic November 12, 2009 Bing Will Encorporate Wolfram Alpha Search Information Microsoft announces a deal that will bring the Wolfram Alpha search tool to its Bing search engine December 17, 2009 French Alternative to Google Books Formed
