Herbert Coblans died on 18 March 1977. Those of us who knew him personally have lost a highly esteemed colleague and friend: the world of librarianship has lost one of its most…
Abstract
Herbert Coblans died on 18 March 1977. Those of us who knew him personally have lost a highly esteemed colleague and friend: the world of librarianship has lost one of its most able proponents. But his memory and his influence will be more lasting and, for many of us, will serve to direct and inspire the practice of our profession for many years to come.
In 1964 Herbert Coblans wrote that the development of photo‐effect lithography, the invention and evolution of photographic techniques, had profoundly affected the ‘recording of…
Abstract
In 1964 Herbert Coblans wrote that the development of photo‐effect lithography, the invention and evolution of photographic techniques, had profoundly affected the ‘recording of knowledge, the making of libraries and all that that means’. He went on to ask if ‘two other lines of technical development, Hollerith's punched cards… and the electronic computer … [which] represent a third revolution, comparable to the other two’, had had the same significance for libraries and documentation. When originally asked, this question could not be answered with any clarity. Fourteen years later it should be possible to answer the question with some authority and to identify the other areas of technical development that form an integral part of the mechanized documentation services of today and those which are under development for tomorrow.
Those of us who look back on a lifetime of work in librarianship, documentation and education—what is nowadays called communication—are often tempted to try to define our terms…
Abstract
Those of us who look back on a lifetime of work in librarianship, documentation and education—what is nowadays called communication—are often tempted to try to define our terms. Subconsciously we are probably trying to separate the sheep from the goats. Precision in terminology is necessary, especially in the sciences. But what I am going to talk about is more akin to the arts. I would like to take a more general, broader view of our function, our stake in the continuity and the quality of civilization as a whole.
Herbert Coblans to whose memory this number of the Journal of Documentation is dedicated served for thirteen years as its editor and as a world‐wide spokesman of Aslib's cause. In…
Abstract
Herbert Coblans to whose memory this number of the Journal of Documentation is dedicated served for thirteen years as its editor and as a world‐wide spokesman of Aslib's cause. In character and intellectual make‐up he was an exemplar of Aslib itself: a highly professional exponent of the skills and techniques of recording and communication in, particularly, scientific fields. In this role he never allowed himself to be an extroverted propagandist but maintained his sometimes magisterial status as a highly attuned expert talking to experts. Thirty years ago he had been Head of the Chemistry Department in the University of Natal and it was certainly because of his scientific background that he was able to show to the scientific world a sense of the philosophies and techniques and sciences inherent in modern methods. What we are trying to show here, mainly in contributions from his professional colleagues, is more than just a record of his achievements at the summit of expertness in his profession but something of the social, cultural and moral character of a very remarkable man.
It is a measure of the man that, amongst the many friends who mourn his passing, there are some whose friendship grew on the basis of quite slight and infrequent contact. I am one…
Abstract
It is a measure of the man that, amongst the many friends who mourn his passing, there are some whose friendship grew on the basis of quite slight and infrequent contact. I am one of them, communicating more by letter than by word of mouth. At first our correspondence was rather formal, being often that between editor and tardy contributor. I am ashamed to say that this aspect persisted, though not with respect to the same contribution, up to his last letter which had a mild reminder as postscript. It is not difficult to feel shame, rather more difficult to cure its cause. I always wondered at the way in which he not only conducted the managing editorship of Journal of Documentation in his quiet, humane, scholarly, and efficient way, but also managed to read—in itself no mean task—and clarify collective and international publications in reviews for it.
PAUL KAEGBEIN and MICHAEL KNOCHE
At the end of World War II the destruction of German libraries and the political division of the former Reich led in the Federal Republic (BRD) to a planned development of…
Abstract
At the end of World War II the destruction of German libraries and the political division of the former Reich led in the Federal Republic (BRD) to a planned development of research collections and of collection‐based bibliographic tools highly relevant to the present‐day Anglo‐American debate on so‐called holdings and access policies. Unhappily, the authors argue, current financial constraints in the Bundesrepublik after weakening the thrust of acquisitions work now pose a threat to the access tools themselves.
My contact with Herbert Coblans was limited, alas, to our shared concerns in the field of subject indication. He first sought me out in the early 1960s, ostensibly to find out…
Abstract
My contact with Herbert Coblans was limited, alas, to our shared concerns in the field of subject indication. He first sought me out in the early 1960s, ostensibly to find out about the indexing methodology of British Technology Index, then with its birth agonies not too far behind it, but more probably to give moral support. From such a quarter this meant a great deal. I had, for some reason, expected to find him a mechanizing man, to whom I would be required to hand over copious rudimentary enlightenment on subject indication questions, but this was quite wrong. It was I who soon found myself on the receiving end of the enlightenment process.
Scott Adams, John Gray, Herbert Coblans and F.W. Matthews
The origins of the UNISIST programme proposals are to be found in the concerns of the scientific community itself for the survival of its traditional communication institutions…
Abstract
The origins of the UNISIST programme proposals are to be found in the concerns of the scientific community itself for the survival of its traditional communication institutions. From the outset, the concern transcended political and ideological boundaries. Scientists of East and West, meeting under Pugwash Conference auspices, in Karlovy Vary in 1964, viewed the tendency toward fractional and unco‐ordinated mechanization of information processing in different countries and in different fields of science with apprehension. Were the sciences in the process of creating in the electronic age a new Tower of Babel? Would the adventitious application of technology defeat the fundamental purpose of free and open scientific communication among all nations?
HERBERT COBLANS and M.F.C. Paige
Your Conference Committee asked me to talk about national documentation systems and to be provocative. Thus any dogmatism should not be taken too seriously. I would like to start…
Abstract
Your Conference Committee asked me to talk about national documentation systems and to be provocative. Thus any dogmatism should not be taken too seriously. I would like to start by taking stock of the problem in the second half of the twentieth century. Since the end of the last war we, as documentalists, have lived in a climate of crisis, of alarums and excursions. The cause has been commonly ascribed to the so‐called ‘flood of information’, the ‘literature explosion’. Perhaps the real revolution lies elsewhere, in the deep‐seated change in our publication potential.
Dr. Herbert Coblans recently remarked in a paper on the mechanisation of documentation that ‘today we can see that the achievements are not so much in the automation of…
Abstract
Dr. Herbert Coblans recently remarked in a paper on the mechanisation of documentation that ‘today we can see that the achievements are not so much in the automation of information retrieval as at the level of housekeeping operations …. in libraries’. A description of an operational method of handling The City University library accounts using the computer appeared in Program and since publication it has been developed to remove major limitations, notably the upper financial limit.