Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information Two Volumes (1959) / Chapter Skim
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Opening Session Address
Opening Session Address
Pages 1-8
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From page 3... ...
The simplest explanation is that I am at the moment the Senior Secretary of the Royal Society of London, and the Royal Society held almost exactly 10 years ago the first Conference of international status devoted solely to the subject of Scientific Information. The Conference was not in the strict sense international since it arose directly from the deliberations two years previously of a meeting of Scientists of the British Commonwealth, what we then hac]
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From page 4... ...
One group of five working parties dealt with the problem of the raw material of Scientific Information Scientific publication format, editc~rial policy, subject grouping, general organization and delays in publication. Then there was a group dealing with Abstracting and another with Reviews and Annual Reports.
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From page 5... ...
This indeed is a failure of communication by those whose primary function is to communicate. ~ work at the begetting end of the life cycle of scientific information, you work at a distant point in that cycle where you preserve the encysted spores of knowledge and revitalize them on demand.
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From page 6... ...
Now what do I mean by restraint? I mean a little simple self denial by scientists; let them publish the resets ot their work once and once only, let us see a well written account in one Journal insteac3 of exempli gratia a cyclostyled laboratory preview, a letter to Nature, a paper, a lecture given to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Little Puddlebury and printed in its "Proceedings", the verbatim account of a Sympos~um at Sulphur Creek, Colorado, and perhaps also a review article ostensibly of the subject but in fact of the author's own work.
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From page 7... ...
Is it the fruit of the tree of knowledge or is it the fallen leaves? For my part I should be happy if the fruit only were preserved; as ~ cannot conceive of any collecting and storage system adequate to cope with the world's output of scientific information as it grows at present, and I view with only a little compunction the prospect of the loss of minor contributions to knowledge provided that the ripe fruit can be preserved.
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From page 8... ...
First and foremost to Dr. Atwood and the Conference Committee who seized on a bold idea and developed it swiftly and logically, secondly to the Programme Committee whose labours have produced the remarkable volume that ~ have already referred to.
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