From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media Indexing & Seaching Information Outline

The Earliest Surviving Monolingual Dictionary
(Circa 250 BCE)

The Origins of Bibliography
(Circa 200 BCE)

One of the Earliest, Most Widely-Used Cross-Indexing Systems
(Circa 280 CE – 340 CE)

The Book of Kells
(Circa 800)

Massive Byzantine Encyclopedic Dictionary
(Circa 950)

The Earliest Universal Bibliography
(988 – 990)

The Emergence of Concordances and Subject Indexes
(Circa 1190 – 1290)

Biblical Concordances, Tools for Preachers
(1239)

The First Alphabetical Subject Indexes
(Circa 1250)

The Arrangement and Cataloguing of Books
(Circa 1270)

Organization of the Sorbonne Library, and the Way it Was Physically Arranged
(1290)

Logical Machines for the Production of Knowledge
(1305)

Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts
(Circa 1320)

Medieval Union Catalogue of Manuscripts Names 694 Authors
(Circa 1350)

The First Bible Concordance in Hebrew
(1448)

The First Printed Book Issued with Pagination
(Circa 1473 – 1474)

Unprecedented Blending of Scientific Exposition, Art and Typography
(June 1543)

The First Universal Bibliography Since the Invention of Printing
(1545 – 1555)

The First General Subject Index
(1548 – 1549)

Index Librorum Prohibitorum
(1559)

Renaissance Information Retrieval Device
(1588)

The First "Books in Print"
(1595)

Depiction of Record Keeping by Pieter Breughel the Younger
(1620 – 1640)

A Universal Bibliography but Only for "A and B"
(1699)

The Central Enterprise of the French Enlightenment
(1751 – 1780)

Diderot on Information Overload
(1755)

166.5 Volumes of Text but No Comprehensive Index!
(1782 – 1832)

The First Thematic Index of a Composer's Work, Based on Mozart's Own Index
(1805)

Panizzi's 91 Rules for Standardizing the Cataloguing of Books
(1841)

Early Proposal for a National Union Catalogue
(1852)

Roget's Thesaurus
(April 29, 1852)

The Basis for a Catalogue Code
(1856)

The Kochel-Verzeichnis
(1862)

The Last Library Cataloguing Code Written by One Person
(1876)

The First Extensively Used Scientific Method of Criminal Identification
(1879)

Index Medicus Begins
(1879)

A Landmark in Efforts to Organize Information and Make it Searchable
(1880)

Fingerprints as a System of Identification
(October 8, 1880)

Finger Prints as a Means of Identification
(1892)

An Analog Search Engine
(1895)

The Cumulative Book Index
(February 1898)

The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature
(1901)

LC Cards
(1901)

"Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House
(1911)

An Electronic Machine for Searching Through Information
(December 29, 1931)

Bradford's Law
(January 26, 1934)

H. G. Wells and the "World Brain"
(1938)

Vannevar Bush's "Rapid Selector"
(1938)

"As We May Think"
(July 1945)

The Illustrated Version of "As We May Think"
(September 1945)

Developing Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector
(1949)

The Origins of Humanities Computing
(1949)

One of the Earliest Projects in Library Automation
(April 1949)

The First Textbook on How to Build an Electronic Computer
(1950)

Coining the Expression, Information Retrieval
(1950)

Schmieder's Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
(1950)

Applying New Technology to the Searching and Storage of Information
(1951)

Applying Computer Methods to Library Cataloguing and Research
(June 24 – June 27, 1952)

The Uniterm Indexing System
(1953)

Early Library Information Retrieval System
(1954)

Probably the First Widely-Accepted Controlled Vocabulary
(1954)

Machine Methods for Information Searching
(1955)

The Foundation of Citation Analysis
(July 15, 1955)

Mechanized Encoding of Library Information
(1957)

Automatic Document Indexing Program
(1958)

Keyword in Context (KWIC) Indexing
(November 1958)

The Most Voluminous Printed Catalogue of a Single Library
(1959 – 1972)

Auto-Encoding of Documents for Information Retrieval
(1959)

Pioneering Computer-Assisted Legal Research
(1960)

One of the First Data Publishing and Retrieval Systems
(1962)

First Computerized Encyclopedia
(1964)

Science Citation Index
(1964)

The First Large Scale Computer-Based Retrospective Search Service Available to the General Public
(January 1964)

"Libraries of the Future"
(1965)

The MARC Cataloguing Standard
(1965 – 1968)

A Computer-Assisted Full-Text Inventory System
(1966)

Lockheed's DIALOG
(1966)

Full-Text Interactive Search Service
(1967)

OCLC is Founded
(1967)

The Museum Computer Network
(1967)

Mead Purchases Data Corporation
(1968)

Probably the Largest Printed Bibliography, Complete in 754 Folio Volumes
(1968 – 1981)

The Definitive Model for Relational Database Management Systems
(June 1970)

Medline is Operational
(October 1971)

Lexis
(1973)

Discovery of Citation Mapping
(1973)

SQL
(1974)

"A Sweeping and Controversial Program"
(1974)

Ellison Founds Software Development Laboratories
(1977)

A Printed Book Entitled Toward Paperless Information Systems
(1978)

dBase
(1978)

Nexis
(1980)

756 Folio Volumes, Obsolete within 25 Years
(April 21 – June 6, 1981)

IBM DB2
(1982)

Oracle Corporation
(1983)

Keyboarding over 350,000,000 Characters
(1983)

The Perseus Digital Library Project
(1985)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

OCLC Acquires Publisher of the Dewey Classification System
(1988)

International Standard for Computer-to-Computer Information Retrieval
(1988)

The First "Search Engine" but Not a "Web Search Engine"
(1990)

The WAIS System for Searching Text is Introduced
(1991)

The Gopher Protocol
(September 1991)

The Electronic Dewey
(1993)

First Library of Digital Images on the Internet
(1993)

The First Successful Online Bookseller Service
(1993)

Development of Neural Networks
(1993)

The First Web Search Engine?
(June 1993)

World Wide Web Worm
(1994)

Yahoo! Founded
(April 1994)

The First Full Text Web Search Engine
(April 20, 1994)

Altavista
(December 15, 1995)

The IBM DB2 Universal Database
(1996)

Over One Billion Documents
(1996)

A Search Engine Initially Called "BackRub"
(January 1996)

Searchenginewatch.com Begins
(April 1996)

Digital Scriptorium
(November 1997)

Altavista Claims 20,000,000 Queries Per Day
(November 1997)

W3C Releases XML
(1998)

PageRank is Published on Paper
(January 29, 1998)

The Bibliometrics of Science
(February 14, 1998)

MSN Search
(Circa September – December 1998)

Google is Founded
(September 7, 1998)

Where's George?
(December 23, 1998)

Early English Books Online
(1999)

Predecessor of the Wikipedia
(March 9, 2000 – September 2003)

OED Online
(March 14, 2000)

Google Launches AdWords
(October 23, 2000)

The Wikipedia Begins
(January 15, 2001)

Google Acquires Deja.com
(February 21, 2001)

OCLC Serves More than 50,000 Libraries, Contains 56 Million Records
(2004)

18th Century Collections Online
(2004)

The National Digital Newspaper Program
(March 2004)

The Index-Catalogue Goes Online
(May 1, 2004)

The Google Print Project
(October 2004)

Kosmix.com
(2005)

Moratorium on Scanning Books
(August 11, 2005)

Universally Accessible Digital Archive
(October 3, 2005)

300 Years to Index All the World's Information
(October 8, 2005)

Google Books
(December 2005)

The Google Librarian Newsletter
(December 19, 2005)

Zillow.com
(February 8, 2006)

Making Handwritten Manuscripts Searchable
(February 9, 2006)

Access to Nearly One Million Archive Collection Descriptions
(March 2006)

The Changing Nature of the Catalogue. . . .
(March 17, 2006)

A Critical Review at the Library of Congress
(April 3, 2006)

Google's AdWords to Place Ads in Print Newspapers
(November 6, 2006)

DROID
(September 27, 2007)

21 Billion in Revenue from Google AdWords
(2008)

Over One Trillion Unique URLs
(July 2008)

Old Wine in New Bottles?
(October 24, 2008)

Analysis of Web Search Queries Track the Spread of Flu Faster than Traditional Surveillance Methods
(November 11, 2008)

Higher Resolution Map of Knowledge Than Can be Produced from Citation Analysis
(March 11, 2009)

Wolfram/Alpha
(May 16, 2009)

Microsoft Launches Bing
(June 1, 2009)

Bing Will Power Yahoo! Search
(July 29, 2009)

Algorithm to Decipher Ancient Texts
(September 2, 2009)

The First Historical Thesaurus
(October 2009)

Google Represents 6% of All Internet Traffic
(October 19, 2009)

Bing Will Encorporate Wolfram Alpha Search Information
(November 12, 2009)

Google Announces Real-Time Search
(December 2009)

Google Living Stories
(December 8, 2009)

Introduction of Google Goggles
(December 8, 2009)

French Alternative to Google Books Formed
(December 17, 2009)

Google's Computers in China Come Under Attack, Initiating a Review of the Company's Operations in China
(January 12, 2010)

Google Pulls its Search Engine Out of Mainland China
(March 22, 2010)

Google Announces "Replay" for Twitter
(April 14, 2010)

Using the Twitter Archive for Historical Research
(April 30, 2010)

Google Introduces Translation Feature for Google Goggles
(May 6, 2010)