A product of his merchant father’s second marriage, Herbert had two step-brothers and a step-sister, as well as a brother, the famed artist Hamilton Easter Field, and a sister who died when she was just seven, devastating her parents, Aaron and Lydia.
He showed his intellectual gifts at Brooklyn Friends School, the city’s advanced Polytechnic Institute and, then, at Harvard University where he majored in zoology, one of the new fields of study that were defining modern science methods.
Herbert decided not to continue his zoological research but to focus on the information problem, which was the difficulty at the time of locating relevant articles on a topic published in the growing number of scientific journals.
[1] His mother and, later, a legacy from his father allowed him to form and initially self-finance the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich, Switzerland in 1895 to provide a service that would survey all the literature in zoology and related fields and send his subscribers indexed and abstracted notices every two weeks.
[5] After the war, Herbert tried to revive the Concilium Bibliographicum but found himself in a battle against scientists, represented by the National Research Council (United States), who wanted quick and inexpensive information systems based on abstracts done by volunteers rather than classifications by professionals.