Information Retrieval Systems, 1896 – 1966

My colleague and Endeca co-founder Pete Bell just pointed me to a great post by Kevin Kelly about what may be the earliest implementation of a faceted navigation system. Like every good Endecan, I’m familiar with Ranganathan‘s struggle to sell the library world on colon classification. But it is still striking to see this struggle played out through technology artifacts from a pre-Internet world.