Mailed to:

Office of the Special Assistant for Mental Ketardation
The White House
Wahsingotn, D. C.

Suly 7, 1964

Dr. Stafford L. Warren
UnfversLty of California, Los Angeles
School of Medicine
Los Angeles 24, California

Dear Dr. Warren:

Your recent praposals for a monolithic answer to the crushin.q problems of
scicntfflc coamnieation are of great interest, and *specially 112 that they
seem to have moved one notch farther than previous efforts.

. .

Whn I first started working, on Weinberg's panel, 1 found I was perhaps the
mast zealous firebrand on ft for a similar approach (see enclosure).  Since
then I have had some second thoughts, especially since Conqraaa started
taking such a critical view of science and TK)TC so in Light of %IH's reactions
to this.  Frankly, I am afraid to leave the essential cnmarunication claannela
where thay might be exposed to the pettier side of politlcr and ?mreaucrscy.
Th0 question who will COntl3L sCCess to and use of the information Syl#t@iTl
csanot be set aside as a triviality in the face or' currant experience.

Unfortunately the 6ciantific sacietles are not taking the necessary initiative,
and when they do they tend to delegate these responsihLlitiea to arl. equally
stuffy bureaucracy, like the AC5 publications and BLoXog%cnl Abstracts, but
this system at least has the vLrtue that Local nistglkea do not become the
fiaal CmES.

`)

Probably the cirtical probl@n is too fmportant to be left in this nntddle, and
w11 should have a central repository.  But this must be caupled with mtxim
encouragement of peripheral discretion, eepeciallv frotl the societies [contra
the private fournals), in the s0lcccfo,n of trta very mall part of the whole

torrent that should be broadcast rather than atored for easy retrieval on
request.

On the technLca1 side, I hope vsry moth t&sat you night look closely at
Citation Indexing, which has =ch subtle power beyond the c~bvlaus, and might
well ba the central theme of a comprehensive retrieval system.  To this end
I could do little better than Introduce Dr. Garfield to you; `I am sure you
would fFud his anafysls a very cogent one and I know he is most interested
to d&scurs infotmatfon retrieval with you.  I am suEgeot%ng he write you
in a few days to ask if it woutd be convenient for you to see h%m.

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Ledcrberg
Professor of Genetics

Enclosures:  SCXTEL propoeal
        atatfoa IR~CX hr0~hre

cc:  Dr. Eugene Garfield