Detail map of Maynard, Massachusetts, United States,Washington, District of Columbia, United States Overview map of Maynard, Massachusetts, United States,Washington, District of Columbia, United States

A: Maynard, Massachusetts, United States, B: Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Inforonics Develops One of the First Data Publishing and Retrieval Systems

1964

Inforonics, founded in 1962 by MIT graduate Lawrence F. Buckland in Littleton, Massachusetts, developed and maintained "one of the first data publishing and retrieval systems used by organizations such as the U.S. Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library."

In November 1964 and January 1965 Lawrence F. Buckland of Inforonics in Maynard, Massachusetts developed a plan for the Library of Congress to record its cataloguing data in machine-readable form so that the cards could be printed automatically. At the time printing and distributing L C cataloguing cards to libraries in the US and around the world was one of the major tasks of the Library of Congress.

The card automation process involved using a special typewriter that output the data onto punched paper tape with software to program data fields, foreign language characters, etc. This was the first step in the LC library automation process. Also in 1965 Henrietta Avram began developing the MARC digital cataloguing format.

Lawrence F. Buckland, The Recording of Library of Congress bibliographical Data in Machine Form. A Report Prepared for the Council of Library Resources, inc. Washington: Council on Library Sources, 1965.

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