Organization of Information / Taxonomy Timeline Outline

The Oldest-Known List of Titles and Occupations
(Circa 3,200 BCE)

The Earliest Surviving Literary or Library Catalogues
(Circa 2,000 BCE)

The Earliest Surviving Detailed Bibliographical Entries
(Circa 1,400 BCE)

The "Chicago Syllabary"
(Circa 900 BCE)

The Archives of the Athenian Cavalry
(Circa 350 BCE – 250 BCE)

The Earliest Bibliographical Classification System
(Circa 53 BCE – 23 CE)

"Attic Nights" : Lack of Arrangement Makes its Own Kind of Arrangement
(Circa 180 CE)

The First Auto-Bibliography
(Circa 190 CE)

The Porphyrian Tree: The Earliest Metaphorical Tree of Knowledge
(270 CE)

Excepting the Bible, Probably the Most Widely Circulated Educational Work During the Middle Ages
(Circa 633)

Some of the Earliest Library Catalogs
(Circa 800)

Inventories of Ninth Century Libraries
(833 – 835)

Massive Byzantine Encyclopedic Dictionary
(Circa 950)

The Earliest Universal Bibliography
(988 – 990)

The Emergence of Concordances and Subject Indexes
(Circa 1190 – 1290)

The First Alphabetical Subject Indexes
(Circa 1250)

Probably the Largest Medieval Library in Europe
(1289)

Organization of the Sorbonne Library, and the Way it Was Physically Arranged
(1290)

Llull's Tree of Knowledge
(September 29, 1295 – April 1, 1296)

The Second Catalogue of the Library of the Sorbonne
(1338)

The High Point of Medieval Library Cataloguing
(1389)

The First Map Included in a Printed Book
(November 19, 1472)

The First Catalogue of the Vatican Library
(1475)

The Earliest Subject Bibliography
(1494)

The First English Book Printed on Paper Made in England
(1495 – 1496)

The First Modern Dictionary: the Most Successful and Widely Reprinted Reference Work of the Early Modern Period
(1502)

One of the First General Reference Works Produced for the Printed Book Market
(1503)

Collecting Books and Prints in the Early Sixteenth Century
(Circa 1510 – 1539)

The First General Subject Index
(1548 – 1549)

The Earliest Effort to Systematize Botanical Description; Discovery of Sulfuric Ether
(1561)

The First Bio-Bibliography
(1562)

The First Catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair
(1564)

The First Treatise on Museums
(1565)

The First French National Bibliography
(1584)

The First Systematic Medical Bibliography
(1590)

The First Medical Subject Bibliography
(1591)

The First "Books in Print"
(1595)

Model for Subject Bibliographies
(1598)

Plant Classification Based upon General Morphology
(1623)

At Attempt to Record All Human Knowledge in Visual Form
(Circa 1625 – 1665)

The First Published Illustrated Catalogue of an Art Collection
(1660)

The Earliest Bibliography of Bibliographies
(1664)

The First Book on Print Collecting
(1666)

A Universal Language Based on a Classification Scheme or Ontology, and a Universal System of Measurement
(1668)

Locke's Method of Indexing Commonplace Books
(1685 – 1706)

The First Attempt to Collect and Organize the Literature of Early Printing
(1688)

The First Country-Wide Printed Union Catalogue of Manuscripts
(1697)

A Universal Bibliography but Only for "A and B"
(1699)

The First English Encyclopedia Arranged in Alphabetical Order
(1704 – 1710)

The First Book Auction Conducted in Paris for Which a Catalogue was Printed
(July – December 1706)

The First Natural History of North American Flora and Fauna
(1729 – 1747)

Systema Naturae
(1735)

The First Continent-Wide Union Catalogue of Manuscripts
(1739)

The Central Enterprise of the French Enlightenment
(1751 – 1780)

Binomial Nomenclature for Plants
(1753)

Diderot on Information Overload, and the Encyclopedia as a Means of Organizing and Enhancing Associations in Knowledge
(1755)

Binomial Nomenclature for Animals
(1758)

The Beginning of "Modern" Rare Book Cataloguing
(1763 – 1769)

Encyclopaedia Britannica Begins
(December 1768 – 1771)

Graphic Representation of the Organization of the Encyclopedie
(1769)

Probably the Most Ambitious Editorial Enterprise before the Wikipedia
(1773 – 1782)

Prospectus for a Monumental European Encyclopedia
(1782)

166.5 Volumes of Text but No Comprehensive Index!
(1782 – 1832)

First Catalogue of the British Museum Library
(1787)

Bibliographical Guide to Antiquarian Bookselling and Collecting, With Pioneering Exposition on Rarity
(1790 – 1802)

The First National Code of Descriptive Cataloging--Early Use of Cards in Cataloging Books
(Circa 1791)

Proposal for a National Bibliography of France
(1793 – 1794)

"The Best and Last of the General Rare Book Bibliographies"
(1810 – 1865)

The First Extensive Catalogue of the Library of Congress
(November 1815)

The First Attempt Since that of Montfaucon (1739) to Publish a Union Catalogue of Manuscripts in European Libraries
(1830 – 1853)

Early Proposal for a National Union Catalogue
(1852)

Roget's Thesaurus
(April 29, 1852)

Keyword in Context Indexing
(1856)

The Kochel-Verzeichnis
(1862)

The Largest Dictionary in Book Form
(1863)

Shepardizing
(1875)

Dewey Decimal Classification
(1876 – 1885)

The Last Library Cataloguing Code Written by One Person
(1876)

Standardization of Library Catalogue Cards
(1877)

The First Extensively Used Scientific Method of Criminal Identification
(1879)

Index Medicus Begins
(1879)

A Landmark in Efforts to Organize Information and Make it Searchable
(1880)

The First Complete Catalogue of the British Museum Following Panizzi's Rules
(1881 – 1905)

3,500,000 Quotations on Individual Slips of Paper
(1882 – 1884)

Imagining a Library One Hundred Years in the Future
(1883)

Finger Prints as a Means of Identification
(1892)

The First Systematic Classification of Calculating Machines
(1894)

An Analog Search Engine to Organize All the World's Knowledge
(1895)

The Library of Congress Classification
(1897)

The Cumulative Book Index
(February 1898)

The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature
(1901)

LC Cards
(1901)

"Die Brucke" and its Goals for a World Information Clearing House
(June 11, 1911 – 1913)

Dewey Classification Numbers on Catalogue Cards
(1930)

H. G. Wells and the "World Brain"
(November 20, 1936 – 1938)

The Bettmann Archive; the Beginning of the Visual Age
(1938)

The Library of Congress Catalogue
(1942 – 1953)

"As We May Think"
(July 1945)

The Illustrated Version of "As We May Think"
(September 1945)

Origins of NLM's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
(December 1947)

Transposing a System from Commercial and Statistical Uses to the Sorting of Words in a Literary Text: The Origins of Humanities Computing
(1949 – 1951)

Schmieder's Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
(1950)

Probably the First Widely-Accepted Controlled Vocabulary
(1954 – 1960)

Machine Methods for Information Searching
(1955)

The Foundation of Citation Analysis
(July 15, 1955)

Automatic Document Indexing Program
(1958)

The Most Voluminous Printed Catalogue of a Single Library
(1959 – 1972)

The First Computerized Encyclopedia
(1964)

Science Citation Index
(1964)

The MARC Cataloguing Standard
(1965 – 1968)

The First Hypertext Editing System
(1967)

The Museum Computer Network
(1967)

Probably the Largest Printed Bibliography, Complete in 754 Folio Volumes
(1968 – 1981)

Generalized Markup Language is Introduced
(Circa 1969)

The First Library to do Online Cataloguing
(August 26, 1971)

SGML is Invented
(1974)

The English Short Title Catalogue
(June 1976)

Keyboarding over 350,000,000 Characters
(1983)

The First "Killer App" for the PC
(January 1983)

WordNet Begins
(1985)

SGML Standard is Accepted
(October 1986)

The First Digital Image Database of Cultural Materials
(1987)

OCLC Acquires Publisher of the Dewey Classification System
(1988)

The Electronic Dewey
(1993)

Online Searchable Archive of Over 1000 Academic Journals
(1995)

Free Online Classified Advertisements
(March 1995)

The Last Printed Edition of Beilstein is Published
(1998)

Using Neural Networks for Word Sense Disambiguation
(1998)

PageRank is Published on Paper
(January 29, 1998)

The Bibliometrics of Science
(February 14, 1998)

Google is Founded
(September 7, 1998)

Berners-Lee's Conception of the Semantic Web
(1999)

Pandora Radio is Founded
(January 2000)

Predecessor of the Wikipedia
(March 9, 2000 – September 2003)

OED Online
(March 14, 2000)

The Wikipedia Begins
(January 15, 2001)

ECHO (European Cultural Heritage Online) is Founded
(December 1, 2002)

Regulations.gov is Launched
(January 2003)

OCLC Serves More than 50,000 Libraries, Contains 56 Million Records
(2004)

Flickr
(February 2004)

The Index-Catalogue Goes Online
(May 1, 2004)

The Google Print Project
(October 2004)

Kosmix.com
(2005)

Proposal for a World Digital Library
(June 6, 2005)

LibraryThing is Founded
(August 29, 2005)

Nearly as Accurate as Brittanica
(December 14, 2005)

The Changing Nature of the Catalogue. . . .
(March 17, 2006)

Encyclopedia Brittanica Will Include Wiki-Style Collaboration
(June 2008)

Old Wine in New Bottles?
(October 24, 2008)

An Encyclopedia with More than Ten Million Articles
(October 27, 2008)

A Higher Resolution Map of Knowledge Than Can be Produced from Citation Analysis
(March 11, 2009)

Wolfram/Alpha is Launched
(May 16, 2009)

The First Historical Thesaurus
(October 2009)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism
(October 3, 2009)

" A Library to Last Forever" ??
(October 9, 2009)

Bing Will Encorporate Wolfram Alpha Search Information
(November 12, 2009)

The Sociology of Wikipedians
(March 2010)

Towards a New Digital Legal Information Environment
(November 9, 2010)

Seventy Online Databases that "Define Our Planet"
(December 3, 2010)

Google's Track of its Own Development
(2011)

"Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information"
(2011)

The Wikipedia Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary
(January 15, 2011)

Google Processes 1,000,000,000 Search Queries Per Day
(March 5, 2011)

What Would an Infinite Digital Bookcase Look Like?
(October 18, 2011)

The Encyclopedia Britannica Ends Print Publication
(March 14, 2012)

Google Introduces the Knowledge Graph
(May 16, 2012)

Historicizing Big Data
(November 2012)

A Natural History of Data
(November 2012)