Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016. William Aspray

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СКАЧАТЬ “the National Science Foundation [to] take leadership in bringing about effective coordination of various scientific information activities within the Federal Government.”²⁰

The post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act (NDEA) became law on September 2, 1958. It contained major provisions²¹ for loans to higher education students; fellowships for advanced study of mathematics and science; guidance counseling and testing to identify able students; improvement of K–12 science, mathematics, and foreign language programs; vocational programs; and research on effective uses of television and other media for educational purposes. In addition, the NDEA authorized the National Science Foundation to establish a Science Information Service: first to address indexing, abstracting, translating, and to provide other services leading to a more effective dissemination of scientific information; and next to undertake programs to develop new or improved methods for making scientific information available.²²

On December 11, 1958, NSF established the Office of Science Information Service (OSIS) with Adkinson as head. By the end of the decade, OSIS had made 146 grants totaling about $3.8 million under four major programs: Documentation Research (through which most of the research and development was funded), Foreign Science Information, Publications and Information Services, and Unpublished Research Information. Among these grants²³ were projects on linguistic transformation for information retrieval at the University of Pennsylvania and mechanical translation projects at Harvard Computation Laboratory, Georgetown University, the University of California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Cambridge Language Research Unit in England. OSIS also funded the National Bureau of Standards to establish a Research Information Center and Advisory Service on Information Processing in 1959.²⁴

In the late 1950s, it was unclear how to classify the various fields that encompass the basic sciences behind computing, computers, information, communications, and the fields that depend on them. Louis Fein, a Stanford Research Institute (SRI) consultant, was asked by Frederick Terman and Albert Bowker of Stanford University to design a computing curriculum. Fein began studying university programs “in the fields of computers, data processing, operations research, and other relatively new and apparently closely related fields.”²⁵ His goals were to identify not only computing-related organizations, curricula, research programs, and facilities, but also computing-related fields of study, and the role of the universities in these fields. As Fein noted in 1959,²⁶ “universities, as institutions, are having a hard time . . . learning how to effectively incorporate these new fields into the academic structure.” In recommending the creation of a Graduate School of Computer Sciences at Stanford, Fein defined two research-oriented departments.²⁷ “Information and Communication” encompassed instruction and research activities in information theory, switching theory, coding theory, automata theory, artificial intelligence, learning, language translation, and theory of simulation. “Systems” comprised instruction and research activities in management science, econometrics, systems theory, information classification, indexing and retrieval, model theory, self-organizing systems, and adaptive mechanisms. Today, the former might fall under a computer science (or engineering) department, while the latter might be divided among departments of information systems, information technology, and management information science. Fein saw a divide between the science of computing, communications, and information and the application and use of computing, communications, and information.

As we describe in Chapter 2, efforts to formally establish computer science as a discipline accelerated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the early 1960s, the fields and practitioners of information technology and information science were becoming better defined. Information technology—the more applied side— was staffed by information specialists, while information science—the research side—was staffed by information scientists. As we relate later, Altman and Brown²⁸ described the creation in the 1980s of the CISE Directorate as a move away from the library scientists and specialists supported under OSIS, to support for computer and information scientists.

Dorothy Crosland organized a series of conferences²⁹ at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for the first time making a distinction between information specialist and scientist. A specialist was someone who applied technology to the storage, indexing, and archiving of information, while a scientist was concerned with the nature of information and its representation. These conferences had a significant impact on the establishment of new information research programs at Georgia Tech, Lehigh University, and Drexel University.³⁰

The OSIS programs continued to expand. In 1967, OSIS made grants to Georgia Tech (Vladimir Slamecka) and Ohio State University (Marshall Yovits) to expand programs in information science. It also made grants to professional scientific societies to improve their literature services. The Georgia Tech center had two principal activities: mathematical models for information in the scientific disciplines and control of information for problem solving and decision making in an academic environment.³¹ By 1968, NSF awards to various professional societies to develop computerized information retrieval systems had grown to $17.7 million,³² up from $9 million in 1958. While the percentage of OSIS funds going to research projects was approximately 5.5% in 1958, eventually 50% of OSIS funding was spent on disciplinary information research centers.

In 1969, OSIS was moved organizationally from reporting directly to the NSF Director to reporting to the Assistant Director for National and International Programs, where OSIS staff were less able to make a case for funding directly to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). With declining interest in supporting OSIS within its new directorate, science information activities declined as its appropriations waned. OSIS also had to assume responsibility for the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information (COSATI), which was transferred from the President’s Office of Science and Technology. This greatly increased the burden on OSIS staff³³ and its resources. These changes also resulted in a termination of operating grants for information services and unrestricted grants to university research centers for information science by 1972.³⁴ OMB further reduced the OSIS appropriations to $5 million in 1974 and asked NSF to phase out support to the university-centered information systems programs at Pittsburgh and Ohio State and to the New England Board of Higher Education science information network. These and similar organizations at the University of Georgia, UCLA, and Lehigh University continued at their own expense.³⁵

During the period from 1971 to 1973, OSIS also experienced a rapid change in staffing.³⁶ Adkinson retired and moved to the American Geographical Society in 1971. Melvin Day, who replaced him as head of OSIS, left NSF in 1973 to accept a position as Director of the National Library of Medicine. Lee C. Burchinal was named as Day’s replacement.³⁷ NSF meanwhile established priorities among the five OSIS programs: Research Support, National Information, User Support, СКАЧАТЬ