chronology

This page offers highlights in the history of information identification and retrieval.

     before the web

1583 Andrea Cesalpino's first systematic taxonomy of plants

1737 Carolus Linnaeus' systematic taxonomy

1775 Abbé Rozier's card catalogue for publications of Paris Académie des sciences

1791 French government introduces numbering scheme for books

1839 Panizzi's British Museum Cataloguing Rules

1847 William Poole's Index to Periodical Literature

1852 Charles Jewett's On the Construction of Catalogues Of Libraries

1852 Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus

1854 Boole's An Investigation into Laws of Thought

1876 Charles Cutter's Rules for A Printed Dictionary Catalogue

1876 first edition of Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification System

1897 Library of Congress Classification

1893 La Fontaine & Otlet establish Institut international de bibliographie

1899 Instruktionen fur die alphabetischen Kataloge in der preussischen Bibliotheken

1905 first edition of the Universal Decimal Classification

1908 American Library Association Cataloging Rules

1951 Suzanne Briet's Qu'est-ce que la documentation?

1960 Lubetzky's Cataloging Rules & Principles

1961 International Conference on Cataloguing Principles (ICCP) articulates 'Paris Principles'

1967 first edition of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules

1967 OCLC established

1968 release of MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) as US standard

1974 International Standard Bibliographic Description

1977 Nippon Cataloguing Rules (NCR)

1984 MARC Archival & Manuscript Control (AMC) format published by US Library of Congress

1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposes global hypertext space

     and the browser

1990 Alan Emtage at McGill University creates 'Archie' ftp search tool

1991 Mark McCahill at University of Minnesota introduces 'Gopher' as alternative to Archie

1992 'Veronica' launched at University of Nevada

1993 Matthew Gray creates World Wide Web Wanderer at MIT

1993 Martijn Koster creates Archie-Like Indexing of the Web (ALIWEB)

1993 JumpStation

1993 World Wide Web Worm spider

1993 Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider

1994 General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) published by International Council on Archives

1994 launch of Galaxy searchable Web directory

1994 David Filo & Jerry Yang at Stanford University start Yahoo!

1994 Brian Pinkerton introduces WebCrawler

1994 Carnegie Mellon launches Lycos search engine with directory of 54,000 documents

1995 Infoseek becomes default search engine for Netscape

1995 Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS)

1995 first Dublin Core (DC) Workshop held in Dublin, Ohio

1995 Erik Selberg launches MetaCrawler

1995 Digital Equipment Corporation launches AltaVista

1995 launch of Excite

1996 launch of Inktomi

1996 launch of HotBot

1996 ANZLIC geospatial Metadata Guidelines

1996 US Government Information Locator Service (GILS)

1996 launch of LookSmart

1997 Excite buys WebCrawler

1997 DOI launched

1997 Crossref launched

1997 Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) developed

1997 launch of Ask Jeeves

1997 launch of GoTo (pay-per-click search)

1997 launch of Northern Light

1998 launch of MSN Search

1998 Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD) launched

1998 establishment of Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

1998 Larry Page & Sergey Brin of Stanford launch Google

1998 US Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata

1999 Disney launches GO Network with InfoSeek search

1999 NBC launches NBCi with Snap

1999 CMGI buys 82% of AltaVista

1999 Norwegian FAST is first engine to index 200 million web pages?

1999 Encoded Archival Description (EAD) adopted by the Society of American Archivists (SAA)

1999 DC Version 1.1. Elements recommended

2000 set of DC Qualifiers recommended

2000 US Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC)

2001 Ask Jeeves buys Teoma

2001 GoTo renamed Overture

2002 DC becomes ANSI/NISO standard

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