Dialog is an online information service owned by
ProQuest, who acquired it from
Thomson Reuters in mid-2008.
Dialog was one of the predecessors of the
World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form. The earliest form of the Dialog system was completed in 1966 in
Lockheed Martin
The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology corporation with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It ...
under the direction of
Roger K. Summit
Roger K. Summit (born 1930 - Detroit, Michigan) is the founder of Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search. He worked for Lockheed in the 1960s, was put in charge of its information retrieval lab, and fr ...
. According to its literature, it was "the world's first online information retrieval system to be used globally with materially significant databases". In the 1980s, a low-priced
dial-up
Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
version of a subset of Dialog was marketed to individual users as ''Knowledge Index''.
[Phyllis E. Worden]
Knowledge Index
''Journal of Extension'', Volume 26 Number 2, 1988. ISSN 1077-5315 This subset included
INSPEC,
MathSciNet, over 200 other bibliographic and reference databases, as well as third-party retrieval vendors who would go to physical libraries to copy materials for a fee and send it to the service subscriber.
While being owned by the Thomson Corporation, Dialog consisted of the Dialog, DataStar, Profound, and NewsEdge businesses. Dialog and DataStar were consolidated into Dialog. The news content from Profound and NewsEdge were consolidated, and the market research business from Profound was sold to MarketResearch.com. The NewsEdge business was eventually sold to Acquire Media, now Naviga. Prior to being owned by Thomson, MAID purchased Knight-Ridder Information which included the Dialog and DataStar businesses. MAID renamed itself to be the Dialog Corporation.
See also
*
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries
References
External links
Dialog Solutions Dialog
Former assets of Thomson Reuters
Online databases
Online companies of the United States
Bibliographic databases and indexes
Patent search services
Pre–World Wide Web online services
Full-text scholarly online databases
Scholarly search services
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