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This article follows on an investigation conducted by the Unit for Library and Information Research of the Human Sciences Research Council in 1981 for the Department of National Education. The article is limited to a consideration of the aim and functions of national library services. Matters such as the organisation and management of these services, the pros and cons of centralisation and decentralisation in particular circumstances, bringing services into line with modern demands, problem areas in existing services, the raison d'être of national library and information advisory councils alongside the management councils of national library services, legislation of these services, etc. have been excluded from the discussion.

The last CRG Bulletin, no. 7, dealt only with the practical application of four faceted special classifications.

The purpose of this paper is to present the initial relationship between the Classification Research Group (CRG) and the Center for Documentation and Communication Research (CDCR) and how this relationship changed between 1952 and 1970. The theory of normative behavior and its concepts of worldviews, social norms, social types, and information behavior are used to characterize the relationship between the small worlds of the two groups with the intent of understanding the gap between early classification research and information retrieval (IR) research.

This is a mixed method analysis of two groups as evidenced in published artifacts by and about their work. A thorough review of historical literature about the groups as well as their own published works was employed and an author co-citation analysis was used to characterize the conceptual similarities and differences of the two groups of researchers.

The CRG focused on fundamental principles to aid classification and retrieval of information. The CDCR were more inclined to develop practical methods of retrieval without benefit of good theoretical foundations. The CRG began it work under the contention that the general classification schemes at the time were inadequate for the developing IR mechanisms. The CDCR rejected the classification schemes of the times and focused on developing punch card mechanisms and processes that were generously funded by both government and corporate funding.

This paper provides a unique historical analysis of two groups of influential researchers in the field of library and information science.

There have been many signs of a growing interest in the idea of a national lending library for the humanities. The manifestations of this interest include two articles, by D. J. Urquhart and D. J. Foskett, directly on the subject; an article by S. P. L. Filon on the new book‐buying policy of the National Central Library; and the review by I. P. Gibb of the report on the operation of the United States Farmington Plan.

The group has continued to meet regularly since the publication of the last bulletin and has welcomed a number of new members and visitors from both home and overseas. Many members who joined at the beginning or very early on in the Group's history still attend regularly, but several long‐standing members have also left, or ceased active participation, in the period under review. Towards the end of 1972 Mr Wells relinquished the chairmanship of the Group, due to pressure of work, and his place was taken by Mr Mills. Another departure, and one that robbed the Group of one of its most active and forceful members, was that of Jason Farradane. He left the country in 1974, and the Group presented him with a book as a memento of many enjoyable and provocative discussions stimulated by his presence at the meetings which he unfailingly attended. It was with great pleasure that he was welcomed back to a meeting while he was visiting this country in January 1976.

It would indeed be pleasant to be able to begin this paper with the relation of many striking and significant advances made since I last spoke on the topic to Aslib, at the 1965 Annual Conference at the University of Keele. Such, alas, is not possible; it would not be too much to say, of the social sciences as a whole, what R. B. Joynson has recently said of Psychology: ‘The present sub‐divisions of Psychology are not, for the most part, the fruit of any agreed and deliberate analysis. They are historical flotsam—a haphazard collection of topics … brashly inflated by a hand‐to‐mouth empiricism into one great blooming buzzing confusion.’ Although there are a few bright patches of orderliness, I fear that much of our subject presents something of the same confusion; while I am certain that the same hand‐to‐mouth empiricism is earnestly providing classification and indexing with more than its fair share of historical flotsam.

The term ‘informatics’ was first advanced formally by the Director of VINITI, A. I. Mikhailov, and his colleagues A. I. Chernyi and R. S. Gilyarevskii, in their paper Informatics—new name for the theory of Scientific Information published at the end of 1966. An English translation was circularized in the beginning of 1967. As the authors state in this paper, they are not the first to use this term, and they quote a review by Professor J. G. Dorfmann of their own book Fundamentals of Scientific Information in which Dorfmann criticizes the use of other terminology, such as ‘documentation’, ‘documentalistics’, ‘information science’, and so on. Although the authors do not object to the use of the word ‘Documentation’ in the name of the International Federation for Documentation, nevertheless they claim that this term has not found application in the USSR and indeed they apologize for spending some time in discussing its suitability as a name for ‘the new scientific discipline which studies the structure and properties of scientific information as well as the regularities of scientific information activity, its theory, history, methods, and organization’. It is clear that the authors have made a thorough survey of the literature, as might be expected, and they argue fairly about the meaning of most of the terms that have at one time or another been advanced to name this ‘new discipline’. Their definition is as stated above but they are careful to add the rider that Informatics docs not investigate the specific content of scientific information, only the structure and properties. In their paper they also advance definitions for ‘information’, ‘scientific information’, ‘scientific information activity’, ‘information officer’, and ‘information scientist’. They have backed up their proposal by changing the title of their own book for its second edition, and the title of the information science fascicule of the Referativnyi Zhurnal, which is now called Informatiki.

IThe activity of the group has continued to progress with great energy and enthusiasm for practical applications of the theoretical ideas and schemes of the members, many of whom have acted as consultants to private, government and international institutions. Some of the longer‐serving members retired, but continued to attend meetings. The Group heard with great regret of the death of Mr B. I. Palmer, its Founder Chairman. An important element in the discussions from its beginning was the theoretical scheme of S. R. Ranganathan, and this was largely due to Palmer, who had returned from war service in India fired with enthusiasm for Ranganathan's ideas, and determined to interest others in developing and applying them. His collaboration with Mr A. J. Wells, another founder member, had as an early result their little monograph, The fundamentals of library classification, which has greatly influenced both teaching and practice of classification, and not only in Britain.

Classification is so fundamental and pervasive an activity that care is needed to define its scope when discussing a particular application, such as information retrieval.

Undiscovered public knowledge is a relatively unstudied phenomenon, and the few extended examples that have been published are intradisciplinary. This paper presents the concept of ‘facet’ as an example of interdisciplinary undiscovered public knowledge. ‘Facets’ were central to the bibliographic classification theory of S.R. Ranganathan in India and to the behavioural research of L. Guttman in Israel. The term had the same meaning in both fields, and the concept was developed and exploited at about the same time in both, but two separate, unconnected literatures grew up around the term and its associated concepts. This paper examines the origins and parallel uses of the concept and the term in both fields as a case study of interdisciplinary knowledge that could have been, but was apparently not, discovered any time between the early 1950s and the present using simple, readily available information retrieval techniques.