Information Science

I have talked about my first job in Information Work. I should say more precisely what Information Science is. I need to emphasise that name may be confused with Information Technology which is the omnibus name for computing and its applications. There is a wider problem of much confusion about names for branches of technology which is too large to discuss here although one needs only to think of the multiple meanings of “engineer”. The objective of Information Science was to assist development project work.

So Information Science as practiced by Unilever Research was a substantial part of the whole establishment. There were 7 graduate scientists and about the same number of other staff. This was perhaps 4% of the whole establishment.  An Information Scientist split their time approximately 40% on current awareness, 40% information recovery and 20% checking information needs. All of these need some further explanation. Current awareness involved essentially staying abreast of current publication of work. Information recovery split nicely into two types, Internal information generated within the organisation and external which was discovering relevant information outside the organisation. The 20% on establishing needs meant finding out what were relevant needs for information by discussion.

Current awareness in practice meant all information such as journals etc were subdivided among the staff who marked up work of interest. This was done by noting on a search sheet what items were of interest and then marking the keywords in the title of the item. This latter was used to computer generate a keywords-in-context index always called a KWIC index. For example suppose an interesting title was “the use of polyphosphates in fabric cleaning”. The index would show

Polyphosphates in fabric cleaning. The use of…

Also

Fabric cleaning. The use of polyphosphates in…

And

Cleaning. The use of polyphosphates in fabric…

The rotation of titles was I think 140 characters which was the maximum line length of the printer available.

My allocated journals were mainly on waste water treatment, chemical analysis, instrumentation, materials and corrosion science. I also reviewed some more general journals giving detergents industry news.

 Selected titles were sent out weekly in a current awareness bulletin containing items judged of wide interest. More specialist items were sent to groups or individuals expected to be interested.

Information recovery was done in one of two ways. If it was internal then all reports were held on a sortable punched card database. It needs to said that in those days machine readable information was held as much on punched cards or tape as on magnetic memory. Magnetic memory was expensive and required specialist handling while cards were relatively robust. In the Unilever case the cards were not only machine sortable but they had a precis of the report printed on them.

If the information needed was external then there was no single method. One common way was to search by hand through a massive publication called “Chemical Abstracts” This had abstracts of every paper in the general area of chemistry and was classified and indexed. However searches often required some imagination and craft by the searcher. It was always as well to find out why the information was sought. If it was a researcher new to the field then a good encyclopaedia such as “Kirk-Othmers Encyclopaedia of Chemical Technology” would be a good starting point.

Establishing needs necessitated going out into the laboratory to talk to the scientific staff finding out their projects and interests. Interests could be relatively specific as in an analyst specialising in chromatography who was interested in the mathematics which was closely related to telephony.

It is debateable whether such a specialist organisation is better than each individual scientist finding out for themselves. I took the view that in general with my background in information science I could find what I needed only using information specialists for particular needs.

In Unilever practice the Information Science group was separate from the Library although working closely with Library staff. It is more common in smaller organisations for the Library staff to fill part of the role of the Information Scientist. The Unilever Port Sunlight Research Lab had over 200 scientific staff so the cost was more easily justified.

Todays smile

A group of dinner party guests were discussing whether men or women were more trustworthy.
One man stated bluntly “No woman can keep a secret”
“That’s so not true” said the pretty blonde sitting opposite him ”I’ve kept my age a secret since I was twenty”
“You’ll let it slip one day” said the man
“No way” said the blonde ”When a woman has kept a secret for eighteen years she can keep