Today in 1961, Information Selection Systems: Retrieving Replica Copies by Thomas C. Bagg and Mary Elizabeth Stevens was published as the National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 157.
The Note reported on a “state-of-the art survey on information selection systems that retrieve replica copies of selected items as the product of search… 15 specific systems employing search-type selection principles are described.”
Though we typically view information searching through a digital lens, as late as 1961… systems remained in place, and under development, for the searching and retrieval of images stored on the photographic media of microfilm and microfiche. The was very much in the tradition of Vannevar Bush's Rapid Selector Project, and remains still another example of the overlap of media for information storage and distribution, with the persistence of the use of analog photographic methodology that originated in the 1930s paralleling the early development of digital storage and retrieval modalities thirty years later… At least one microfilm rapid selector as originally conceived and developed by Vannevar Bush was in operation for the U.S. Navy in 1961.