Roger Kent Summit (born 1930) is the founder of Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search.
Summit holds a doctorate in management science, a master's in business administration, and a bachelor's in psychology, all from Stanford University.
Roger Summit and a colleague submitted a proposal to the Lockheed Corporation to further explore and develop this technology.
Summit's goal was to design an interactive retrieval language with third generation equipment that would by pass some of the problems they had with the second generation equipment[4] In 1968 Summit and his colleagues at Lockheed won a major contract from NASA to develop an online retrieval system for its database of aerospace research documents.
Later, they won contracts to apply this technology to the databases of the Atomic Energy Commission, the European Space and Research Organization, the U.S. Office of Education, and the National Technical Information Service.
In 1988, he participated in the sale of Dialog to Knight- Ridder Inc., and in February 1990 he was named president of its electronic publishing group.
Their eldest child, Jennifer Summit, is the Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University.
The system would be interactive to allow searches and queries to be modified easily (also known as recursion), and that it would provide alphabetical displays of all the items one could choose from (also known as indexing) (Summit, 2002).
The system would allow users to gain the desired search outcome they sought in an easy and efficient manner.
The minimalist proposal at the Ames Research Center proved to be more successful than the Bunker Ramo System leading to Dialog earning a contract with NASA in 1966 (Summit, 2002).
[4] Information searches within the NASA STAR database went from taking 14 hours, plus shipping and handling, to a few minutes with Summit's Dialog system.
Dialog was associated with creating the first national network of terminals involving a large-scale database of 400,000 aerospace citations.
The ERIC database (only offering educational materials) was the first, extensive, nationwide application that was a non-defense related online information retrieval service.
[4] By 1972, Summit once again made a proposition and had convinced Lockheed that with the competition in the field, and the success of their work, they needed to go commercial.
Hailed as the 'Father of Online Systems,' Summit's work on DIALOG changed the information industry and provided a foundation for further research and development.
Databases such as ERIC, LexisNexis, ProQuest, EBSCOHost among others all owe much to Roger Summit and the creation of DIALOG.
These initiatives, plus the e-brary purchase, are all in fulfillment of the company's mission “to connect people and information.” (Keiser, 2011) [9] In 1998, Summit was appointed to the board of directors at Dialog.