History Lessons: ABI/INFORM.(ABI/INFORM has about 2 mn online documents)

EDITOR'S NOTE: This History Lesson is the first of a series on the background of some of the longest-lived and most prominent online products that shaped the information professionals' world. Many readers of ONLINE doubtless feel themselves perfectly conversant with online history, but newer practitioners may not be aware of the rich history behind their present searching activities. We're starting with ABI/INFORM, which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2001, making it even older than ONLINE magazine.

It was the early 1970s when three graduate students--Dennis Auld, Greg Payne, and Jerry Dick--were working on an MBA project at Portland State University in Oregon. It sounded simple: find an innovative way to keep the management team at a local bank up to speed on their professional reading. Today we'd head straight to the Internet and one of the free current awareness sites, but that wasn't an option in 1971. Paper clipping services were the then state of the art.

Portland State's business librarian, Ann McMahon, steered the students to a group of Russian engineers at the Bonneville Power Administration who were running an information service for other engineers. In a 1988 interview by Nancy Garman ("An Inside Look at …