Abstract
I was intrigued when David Penniman requested that IOS Press consider publication in its book series of an unfinished manuscript by Andrew “Andy” Aines, Colonel, U.S. Army, retired.
I knew Andy only by reputation in the early 1970s. At the American Psychological Association, I participated in the development of a National Information System for Psychology (NISP). This was in the days of NSF-funded (National Science Foundation) discipline-specific scientific and technical information (STI) systems of the kind called for by Andy in a prescient 1968 essay [1]. In it, Andy also foresaw the development of what would ultimately become the Internet and World Wide Web among other predicted technological advances in computing, communications, and networking.
I got to know Andy personally in the 1980s when I represented the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) as a member of CENDI, an informal group of federal information managers whose agencies supported 95% of U.S. government-funded scientific and engineering R&D. Andy was a frequent guest at those meetings where he correctly perceived and actively encouraged us to function as the de facto network of STI managers (and by extension policy makers) that he envisioned, but was never formally established in statute by the U.S. Congress, in the absence of a top-down federal information policy.
The irony was my realization that the unfinished book manuscript my friend Dave Penniman was pitching in 2021 was indeed the same book Andy was writing in the 1990s when he was a Scholar in Residence at NLM. Andy and I frequently lunched together in the NLM cafeteria, and he delighted in re-telling stories of the early days of STI, the achievements realized and the opportunities missed. Unknown to me at the time, I was hearing the audio version of a book that a quarter of a century later would come my way in a different role. Might I be able to do something about it?
So it was with great anticipation and not a small measure of disappointment to discover that the unfinished manuscript was already far too long and would require very extensive editing to be considered a candidate for formal publication. As an alternative, Andy’s manuscript has been deposited in the Internet Archive [2]. It can be accessed by present day and future scholars who will appreciate this primary source document written by an insider who literally helped shape the early contours of STI policy and technology.
As this year is the 25th anniversary of Andy’s passing in 1996, Dave Penniman and I agreed that a tribute to Col. Andrew Aines in the pages of Information Services and Use, along with excerpted selections from the manuscript, would be a fitting acknowledgment and remembrance of Andy’s outstanding contributions to our field in his several capacities as an effective leader of federal agency and White House STI programs, a knowledgeable technical advisor, and an always provocative thought leader and friend.
Elliot R. Siegel
Editor-in-Chief