2026-07-22 07:31 UTC
@lkngrrr@hachyderm.io For some history, back in the 1950s people looked to computers as a way to not need single term classification.
"The Technical Report and Its Impact on Post–World War II Information Systems", Jana Varlejs, https://web.archive.org/web/20130702201706/https://www.asis.org/History/07-varlejs.pdf quotes Taube (1950)
“there cannot be one subject key to bibliographic organization which would serve the librarian, the general reader, and all specialists”, and proposed using computers to handle multiple coordinates. (Nor was he the first to propose it.)
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@dalke@toots.nu 2026-07-22 07:35
@lkngrrr@hachyderm.io I also seem to recall a Eugene Garfield essay, perhaps in the 1970s, about the bright future which would allow full-text search to skip some of the issues with machine-based coordinate search. I don't have a link for that one handy.