Showing papers by "Eugene Garfield published in 2008"
TL;DR: The British influence on my career was felt strongly during my two years in Baltimore and the English connection picked up again in the spring of 1957 when much to my surprise I received an invitation to attend the Dorking Conference on Classification.
Abstract: As a child I grew up in awe of an English accent. That was not unusual for an American because so many movie stars spoke with an English accent. All during my high school and college days I instinctively believed that anyone who spoke with an Oxford or BBC accent was an authority. And even professors and intellectuals who adopted the Harvard version of an English accent held me in awe. Several of my professors at Columbia University deserved that sort of adulation since they were indeed experts in their respective fields. However, that all changed when I reached Johns Hopkins University in 1951, when I audited a course in statistics with Professor W.G. Cochran. The student who sat next to me was a Brit who spoke with great authority but after a few weeks I began to realize that most of what he said was nonsense. For the next few years I had little contact with Englishmen during my stay at Johns Hopkins but my boss at the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project reminded me regularly that he had studied Elizabethan medicine at Oxford. My next encounter with the English occurred after leaving the Welch Project. I was impressed by the performance of the editor of the Journal of Documentation, who stood up to the harassment from my then former boss. He was angry at me for submitting a paper to the Journal of Documentation without his permission. So much so that he asked the attorney for the university to write a ‘cease and desist’ letter but the editor did not buckle to his threats. So I can honestly say that my first published paper appeared in an English publication [1]. These stressful events occurred while I was enrolled at Columbia University School of Library Service. Of course, even during my two years in Baltimore the British influence on my career was felt strongly. My ‘bible’, so to speak, at that time was the one-volume, 700+ page Proceedings of the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference [2]. I mentioned the key role played by John Desmond Bernal in that meeting when I spoke about his impact on science policy studies and the field of information science at the recent symposium held at University College in Dublin in September 2007 [3]. Hopefully the Royal Society will soon post the full text of the Royal Society Proceedings to their website. A few years ago I was able to convince the National Academy of Sciences Press to post the full text of the two volumes of the 1958 Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information sponsored by the National Science Foundation [4]. The English connection picked up again in the spring of 1957 when much to my surprise I received an invitation to attend the Dorking Conference on Classification. My brief recollection of that conference follows, with thanks to Robert V. Williams (the co-coordinator of the Pioneers of Information Science Scrapbook [5], which includes my account titled Memories of the 1957 Dorking Conference,
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