Library and Information Science

Since the beginning of 1950's, every country has had her own policy for scientific communication problem, which is inseparably related with her social, economic and/or industrial situation. In this paper, the events concerning the scientific communication in this period are reviewed and their social backgrounds are discussed. The reviews and discussions are focussed on U.S. activities which were based upon following national needs; (1) to strengthen information activities and services in order to make R&D activity more efficient, which is performed by the tremendous amount of financial support from governmental organizations, e.g., DOD, NASA, AEC, DHEW and NSF, (2) to promote the technology transfer in order to make easier for tax-payers to use the results of governmental-sponsored R&D, (3) for the purpose of national defense, to build up or develop nation-wide communication networks, interactive computing systems, interactive retrieval systems for, various data files, and data base management technology.

Influence of ‘Americanis’ is the other factor affecting the U.S. policy for scientific communication, such as; (1) the bargaining between public sector and private sector, (2) the pluralism in public sector and open competition in private sector, (3) frontier spirit as shown in the development of information processing technology and computer communication network, (4) the tradition of mutual aid fostered during the exploitation of the West, and (5) deligence of American people. Standing on these view points, typical events in scientific communication since 1950 are reviewed, and the problems which would be suggestive to the activity in our country are discussed.