The Technical Information Project (TIP) was an early database project focused on the scholarly physics literature. Its "most unique feature" was its use
bibliographic coupling
Bibliographic coupling, like co-citation, is a similarity measure that uses citation analysis to establish a similarity relationship between documents. Bibliographic coupling occurs when two works reference a common third work in their bibliographi ...
, a novel way to search for related documents.
The TIP included over 25,000 records.
Meyer Mike Kessler began developing the TIP at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
in April 1962, with the support of a grant by the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...
. The project's objective was to create a system that could "perform automatic search operations on bibliographic data" using bibliographic coupling.
Some of the innovations in TIP included the use of wild cards, and boolean searching.
Transfer to the American Institute of Physics
Around 1968, responsibility for the TIP was transferred to the
American Institute of Physics
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) promotes science and the profession of physics, publishes physics journals, and produces publications for scientific and engineering societies. The AIP is made up of various member societies. Its corpora ...
, under the direction of Dr. H. William Koch. In connection with the transfer, the Institute received a $149,000 NSF grant meant to address problems "produced by the rapid growth of the published
hysicsliterature, which threatens a breakdown in communications among scientists". The Institute aimed to create a nationwide "physics information network" by adding indexing information to the TIP, and using it to automatically produce classification indexes for its 38 physics journals, as part of a planned "National Physics Information System".
References
Not cited inline
Chronology of Information Science*''Bourne, C.P. and Hahn, T. B. A History of Online Information Services'', 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
The article PDF*
*
*
*
*
*
Bibliographic databases and indexes
{{Database-software-stub