Dateline April-May-June 1967

Elvis and Priscilla get married. Thousands march in protest of the Vietnam War. The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s the beginning of the “Summer of Love.”

In New York City, representatives from fifteen museums gather for a meeting at the Whitney to discuss whether they should create a “museum data bank” using the latest in computer technology. The cost of such a project would be beyond what any individual museum could bear. The meeting’s organizers suggest that a group of museums would be able to share the costs by working together – by creating a “Museum Computer Network.”

Of course MCN just didn’t spring out of thin air. In the years after World War II, researchers faced a number of problems that they thought computers could solve. The war had generated an increasing body of scientific and technical papers that were overwhelming the traditional way scientists used to find information. The emerging fields of computer and information science harnessed computers to organize textual data into bibliographies and indices. Humanities scholars soon contributed their efforts by developing methods to statistically analyze texts and build large concordances. But the early computers still had a long way to go before they met up with the vision of early pioneers.

A major watershed came in 1964 when IBM introduced its third generation of computers. Earlier computers had required programming with “assembly languages,” but the IBM 360 included an operating system that allowed for more human-readable programming.  Computers could now be programmed by a broader range of people. Universities began to create computer centers for exploring new research areas and methods. New York University joined their ranks in 1965 when it established the Institute for Computer Research in the Humanities (ICRH), a highly interdisciplinary center lead by Dr. Jack Heller. Within the first year, Heller had launched ICRH on several projects that would prove important to the foundation of MCN. ICRH created the first electronic version of the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), an important musicology bibliography, along with an index of the Revista Filología Española. ICRH also began to develop a computerized index of United Nations reports for the Dag Hammarskjöld Library. For this project, Heller created a set of programs that he called the General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies (GRIPHOS).

In late 1966, the work of ICRH came to the attention of staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Carl C. Dauterman was conducting research on the Met’s Sèvres porcelain collection, trying to weed out the genuine pieces from later fakes. He thought that a computer might help him organize and compare the several distinguishing characteristics of the objects and contacted Edmund A. Bowles, who was then working for IBM as a representative for library and humanities projects. Bowles, a graduate of Princeton and student of Erwin Panofsky, enthusiastically directed Dauterman to Heller’s work at ICRH (which was all running on an IBM 360). By the spring of 1967, ICRH was working with Dauterman on his project and exploring the potential for other collaborations with the Met. James Humphrey III, the Met’s librarian, announced plans to use ICRH software to create an improved index of the Bulletin. Both Humphrey and Dauterman attended the ICRH spring colloquium along with Dr. Kenneth C. Lindsay, who articulated the need for an international visual arts center that would create a unified index of all the world’s artworks.

Shortly after this colloquium, the ideas swirling around coalesced into the bold vision of MCN. With the help of several registrars and curators, Heller started working on a data dictionary that could accommodate the diverse information museums recorded about their collections. GRIPHOS would be the platform that stored, indexed, and retrieved records submitted by partners.   By the end of the year, funding for the project was secured from the Old Dominion Foundation (now part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and the New York State Council on the Arts. With cash in hand, the administrative committee selected Everett Ellin, an assistant to the director of Guggenheim Museum, to serve as the director of the MCN project.

And the rest, as they say, is history…

As we lead up to the MCN Annual Conference in November, I’ll be sharing other important events in MCN’s early history and reflect on what lessons they hold for us today. This is part of some ongoing research I’m doing that is still very preliminary and piecemeal. I welcome questions an comments from readers. I am already indebted to the work of Kathy Jones, Howard Besser and the staff of the NYU Archives.

We are also interested in hearing from members about how we can best mark this anniversary. Send us your ideas and stay tuned for more!