Reuben M Harding (1 results)

No Binding. Condition: Very Good. "Final Report of Bibliographic Section of Cooperative Research Project Between the U.S. Weather Bureau and North Carolina State College." (1949). 11 sheets, 9 of which are blueprints of text. "Final Report." pp 1-6, "Appendix 2 [sic], Meteorological Factor Codes", 3pp. Also included is a sample IBM card mock-up with hand-printed notation. No doubt this is rare, and shows no signs of having been published. There is also an extensive 2pp cover letter explaining the bibliography project in some detail. This letter was written by Reuben M. Harding ("assistant statistician") on the UNC at Raleigh Institute of Statistics letterhead. (The director and associate directors were all heavy hitter statisticians, including Gertrude Cox, William Cochran, and Harold Hotelling.) The college (which is today NC State University) has had a long and continuing partnership with NOAA on many projects.__+__ The letter is dated March 11, 1949, and written to Jack Haynes ("Basic Sciences Division, Biological Department, Chemical Corps, Camp Detrick". "Camp Detrick" was named so from "Detrick Field" in 1943, and became after great expansion in Biowar "Fort Detrick" in 1953.) I cannot find out anything about Harding save for his dates (1919-1997) and I found nothing on Mr. Haynes, though given the nature of Fort Detrick, this does not surprise me at all.__+__ Basically it seems that Haynes wrote to Harding for general information on creating a punch card database, though not necessarily for meteorological purposes. There is a mention for example of "battlefield conditions" which would not necessarily appear in a meteorological bibliography. So my guess is that Haynes was interested in structure and not content. Harding responds mostly outlining the weaknesses of his project, though the critique is very useful in itself. The blueprint is an outline of how to use a computer to store bibliographic information, which is, so far as I can tell, an early application of computers to this sort of research. …