MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
"As We May Think" --
A Celebration of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Vision,
An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished,
and What Remains to Be Done
Thursday, October 12, 1995
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
The Seven Ages of Information Retrieval
Michael Lesk
Vannevar Bush's 1945 article set a goal of fast access to the
contents of the world's libraries which looks like it will
be achieved by 2010, sixty-five years later. Thus, its history
is comparable to that of a person. Information retrieval had
its schoolboy phase of research in the 1950s and early 1960s;
it then struggled for adoption in the 1970s but has, in the 1980s
and 1990s, reached acceptance as free-text search systems are
used routinely. My company, for example, no longer prints its
corporate phone book on paper. Now it is moving on, to projects
in sound and image retrieval, along with electronic provision of
much of what is now in libraries. We can look forward to
completion of Bush's dream, within a single lifespan.
To the symposium Agenda.
To MIT EECS home page.
Your comments are welcome.
Rev. PP Oct 2, 1995.