Bruce Seely (Emeritus Professor and Dean Michigan Technological University)
One of the longest running activities supported by the Society for the History of Technology is a bibliography initiative. I suspect that many members are not aware of this work, so what follows is a summary history and an update on the most recent bibliographic work. I will conclude with a request to members to use the bibliography database, while also supporting the Society itself.
SHOT’s bibliography project was initiated by Eugene S. Ferguson with six essays entitled “Contributions to Bibliography in the History of Technology.” These appeared in Technology and Culture, volumes 3-5 (1962-1965). Gene had undertaken the project after complaining that no bibliography existed for our emerging field. He repeatedly stated that his efforts would not fill that gap, but nonetheless, his essays were expanded into his Bibliography of the History of Technology published by MIT Press in 1968. Generations of graduate students, myself included, found this volume a starting point for research projects and papers.
Even before all of Gene’s essays had appeared, SHOT created a committee chaired by Gene to launch an ongoing bibliography project for the Society. That the History of Science Society had produced an annual bibliography since 1913 certainly was a factor in SHOT’s thinking. Adopting an organizational structure similar to that employed in the original six essays, in 1963 the committee launched the “Current Bibliography of the History of Technology,” edited by Jack Goodwin at the Smithsonian Institution Library. Their initial edition covered publications from 1962 and appeared in Volume 5 (Winter 1965); it consisted of 11 pages with 171 citations. Subsequent versions followed Goodwin’s structural system for several decades, always appearing in T&C with a two-year lag between the publication of the citations and printing of each bibliography. Goodwin prepared 20 annual editions of the “Current Bibliography” which grew to more than 500 citations.
When Goodwin retired in 1983, a team of people replaced him. Initially the roster included Stephen Cutcliffe, Christine Roysdon and Judith Mistichelli; Jane Morley, Louis Rodriquez, Ian Winship, and Victoria Dow joined later. This group compiled and prepared SHOT’s “Current Bibliography” for six years, as the number of citations swelled to 2,000, taking up 150 pages in T&C. This expansion forced the adoption of a computer-aided filing and storage system, replacing 3×5 cards(!)
In 1987, Henry Lowood at Stanford Library assumed direction of the project, retaining the assistance of several members of Cutcliffe’s team. Lowood’s first volume, covering 1988 publications, appeared in 1990. The most important change engineered by Lowood was connecting to the Research Libraries Group (RLG)’ on-line project, the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM) database. HSTM included access not only to SHOT’s “Current Bibliography,” but also to the HSS Bibliography of the History of Science, the Bibliografia Italiana di Storia della Scienza and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. From 1990 onward, SHOT members now had cumulative access to all new content in the “Current Bibliography, which soon totaled 3,000 citations annually. That scale required printing the annual bibliography in its own number of T&C; Johns Hopkins Press generously supported that extra number. But the extra printing cost and the advantages of cumulative online access prompted SHOT to end printing a paper edition of the “Current Bibliography” in 1999.
Henry Lowood continued to direct the project, but after 20 years stepped down in 2009 having prepared approximately 50,000 citations to literature in the history of technology. Unfortunately, at this time SHOT, like many scholarly societies, was facing declining membership (and thus declining revenue) due to the shift to on-line journal access. Furthermore, the stock market decline of 2009-09 hit SHOT’s endowment hard, even as the Executive Council worried that new on-line search tools were rendering the bibliography redundant. Therefore the Executive Council chose not to replace Lowood and let the bibliography lapse in 2009.
Three years later, however, T&C editor Suzane Moon worried that members who lacked access to on-line search tools missed the “Current Bibliography.” Further, the HSTM database was weakened by the lack of new content related to the history of technology. These concerns prompted her in 2012 to ask SHOT members to send her citations to their own publications as a stop-gap mechanism for gathering materials about publications in our field. And SHOT’s Executive Council began to reexamine the place of a bibliography in 2012 and 2013. That conversation culminated in negotiation of a contract between SHOT and EBSCO in 2014, which by then had acquired the HSTM database. Importantly, EBSCO agreed to compensate SHOT for adding new content, at a level intended to help offset SHOT’s costs. On that basis, I re-launched bibliography work in late 2016, with one of the first steps being to upload the citations that Suzanne Moon had collected from members.
I started this work with no real background in bibliography preparation, but Stephen Weldon, the bibliographer at HSS, offered enormous assistance. He offered access to the HSS classification system for organizing content, technical tools for compiling citations, and essential assistance in transmitting content to EBSCO. Indeed, since 2016 SHOT’s content is also accessible to users via the HSS on-line bibliography, ISIS CB Explore (https://data.isiscb.org/p/isis/). The result is a seamless partnership, ironically mirroring how SHOT’s committee that brought the “Current Bibliography” into existence in 1963 learned from the HSS bibliography group. Collaboration has worked again: since SHOT revived the bibliography work in 2016, I have added 14,721 citations to HSTM and the ISIS CB.
The contract with EBSCO proved equally beneficial to the Society’s finances. SHOT is contractually obligated to provide 500 unique citations to EBSCO annually. In fact, I have regularly exceeded that total, adding more than 3400 citations during calendar year 2025 alone. In return, EBSCO guarantees a minimum royalty to SHOT of $10,000, with additional payments dependent upon the level of usage of SHOT-generated content within the HSTM database. In 2025, that usage translated into a total royalty payment to the SHOT treasury of $14,550. This is a good contribution to the Society’s bottom line, especially since my retirement has allowed me to work as a volunteer.
Now almost ten years in, I have a request to make of SHOT’s members. With your help we could increase the EBSCO royalty to SHOT, which is determined by the number of “hits” on SHOT-generated content in the HSTM database. Ideally, I’d ask members to explore the HSTM database for this purpose. Unfortunately, only a handful of universities with SHOT members provide institutional access. Perhaps SHOT members could lobby their libraries and/or on-line access systems to join EBSCO. But I know that’s not likely in this era of tightened university budgets, but please consider exploring this possibility.
But there is another way forward here — actuating a clause in SHOT’s contract with EBSCO, allowing SHOT members to access the HSTM database through a password-protected connection. HSS does this, and the SHOT secretariat is working to establish a portal to EBSCO on the SHOT website. Since a similar system enables SHOT members to read T&C through Hopkin’s Project Muse, the result should be straight-forward. Making it easy for members to access the data base should be an increased financial return to the Society.
Going forward, I want to explore bringing earlier SHOT bibliography content into the HSTM (and ISIS-CB) system. HSS already digitized its entire run of annual bibliography volumes, back to 1920. I’d like to do the same for SHOT’s Current Bibliographies printed from 1965 to 1990. This will be a major task, but I hope to learn from HSS’s experiences. A second project, smaller in scale, is to digitize Eugene Ferguson’s 1968 Bibliography, which SHOT co-published with MIT Press. We will see what might be possible here. But one step I will start right away is to adding citations from T&C volumes published before 1990. It will take a little while to catch up, but this task is doable.
Clearly, I have work for the next few years. For now, let’s start by SHOT members utilizing the resources of the HSTM database, and benefit SHOT at the same time. Thanks very much!