The development of Uniterm, and other new indexing systems, ultimately traces its history to the late World War II period.
Aware of the advanced aircraft and rocket technologies developed in Germany, the US formed Operation Lusty and UK the similar Fedden Mission in order to gather as much of these materials as possible.
The desire to ease access into these enormous collections led to a great expansion in the field of information retrieval.
The collection grew so large and varied that a new operational group, the Armed Services Technical Information Agency (ASTIA), was formed in 1951 to manage it.
[2] Taube introduced the Uniterm concept in a 1951 paper, "Coordinate Indexing of Scientific Fields", part of the Symposium on Mechanical Aids to Chemical Documentation.
Among their largest efforts was a 1958 contract with the newly formed NASA to index their entire technical library, and later, make microfilm copies of it.
[4] Uniterm is based on the concept of making a separate card catalog that refers to the documents in the collection by their accession numbers.
If they are not found, they are created by writing the keyword at the top of the card and then dividing the lower portion into ten vertical sections, labeled 0 to 9.
[7] To retrieve a document, the user selects potentially useful key terms and extracts those cards from the uniterm index.
[9] Uniterm was popular in the United States for large technical collections, which led to considerable study on the system.
[10] They found one major advantage of the Uniterm system was that the librarians did not have to have an understanding of the material in order to correctly catalog it.
This contrasted with traditional hierarchical approaches, where selecting the proper spot within the hierarchy often required some, or considerable, knowledge of the underlying field.
[12] However, this was found not to be a serious problem in practice, and those few examples that did crop up were solved by adding "delta cards", see-also entries that incorporated a direction.