
Mooers's Law - hhs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooers%27s_law
======
dalke
I'm probably the Mooers' expert here on HN. Mooers worked at the Naval
Ordnance Lab headed by John Atanasoff, of Atanasoff-Berry computer fame. He
was one of the very first people working on digital computers. (Eg, see
[https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241712-von-neumann-
tho...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2020/1/241712-von-neumann-thought-
turings-universal-machine-was-simple-and-neat/fulltext) ).

Unlike most people who worked with computers for numerical abilities and
business accounting, he was interested in information search and management.
He coined the terms "information retrieval" and "descriptor" and is one of the
pioneers of IR.

While his ideas were reasonably widely known at the time, he self-published
nearly all his papers as company white-papers. This makes it very hard to
track down the original sources. I have a copy somewhere in my personal
archives.

This one was reprinted in the Bulletin of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology, and is available from
[https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bul...](https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bult.37)
.

Eugene Garfield's tribute to Mooers is at [https://www.the-
scientist.com/commentary/a-tribute-to-calvin...](https://www.the-
scientist.com/commentary/a-tribute-to-calvin-n-mooers-a-pioneer-of-
information-retrieval-57586) .

