National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) is a United States non-profit institutional membership organization of content and technology providers, specifically those that support the authoritative information needs and activities of professionals across a spectrum of scholarly disciplines and fields of research. The organization provides analysis, news alerts and educational services to its more than sixty members. The NFAIS headquarters are in Philadelphia

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...

, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

.

Formation and growth

In 1957, the former Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 launched the world’s first spacecraft

Spacecraft

A spacecraft or spaceship is a craft or machine designed for spaceflight. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including communications, earth observation, meteorology, navigation, planetary exploration and transportation of humans and cargo....

, Sputnik. This event generated a wave of intense competition in science and technology in the industrialized nations, but one of the rationales offered publicly to Western politicians at the time was that the Soviets had leapt ahead in the space race

Space Race

The Space Race was a mid-to-late 20th century competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in space exploration. Between 1957 and 1975, Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on attaining firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national...

 because they had a more unified and orderly approach to the organization and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Even more importantly, it was believed that science and technology had won World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 and that science and technology would maintain the peace. Therefore, one specific area of attention was enhanced dissemination of the scientific literature

Scientific literature

Scientific literature comprises scientific publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences, and within a scientific field is often abbreviated as the literature. Academic publishing is the process of placing the results of one's research into the...

 to maximize awareness of research and investigation already undertaken. At this time, such activities were documented through the scientific journal

Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

 and through abstracting and indexing services. In 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...

 directed the National Science Foundation

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 to ensure the provision of indexing, abstracting, translation, and other information retrieval services as a way of ensuring a constant flow of consistently high-quality information to those working in scientific research facilities.

As the United States mobilized to create a new information infrastructure

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...

 for the promotion of scientific innovation, G. Miles Conrad, Director of Biological Abstracts

Biological Abstracts

Biological Abstracts is a database produced by Thomson Reuters through its subsidiary BIOSIS. It includes abstracts from peer-reviewed academic journal articles in the fields of biology, biochemistry, biotechnology, botany, pre-clinical and experimental medicine, pharmacology, zoology, agriculture,...

 (now BIOSIS, part of the Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...

 corporation), called an urgent meeting of fourteen leading not-for-profit and government scientific abstracting and indexing (A&I) services. Such services play a major role in managing the flow of scientific and scholarly communication and have done so since 1665 with the launch of Journal des Scavans

Journal des sçavans

The Journal des sçavans , founded by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe, that from the beginning also carried a proportion of material that would not now be considered scientific, such as obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports...

. The attending representatives agreed to a model for information dissemination that drew upon the strengths of both scholarly associations of scientists and researchers and government agencies. By working collaboratively, their efforts would support national scientific initiatives as well as promote the international advancement of science. In 1958, convinced of the value of mutual interaction and the interchange of ideas and expertise, a new organization–the National Federation of Science Abstracting and Indexing Services (NFSAIS)–was formed. The organization in its earliest years provided reliable statistical information on journal publication activities, on overlap of information services, cost data, and the status of scientific information dissemination in other countries.

The Federation expanded its scope in 1972 to encompass information producers outside of the scientific and technology sector and dropped science from its name, becoming the National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services. Eligibility for membership was widened in 1981 to include the private for-profit sector

Private sector

In economics, the private sector is that part of the economy, sometimes referred to as the citizen sector, which is run by private individuals or groups, usually as a means of enterprise for profit, and is not controlled by the state...

. The Federation expanded its scope further into the information community in 1982 and changed its name to National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services. Reflecting the advancement of technology and the emergence of the Internet

History of the Internet

The history of the Internet starts in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of computers. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, expanded to point-to-point connections between computers and then early research into packet switching...

, as well as the changing nature of how research information is collected and archived, the name of the organization became the National Federation of Advanced Information Services in 2007. The most current listing of the membership may be found at: http://www.nfais.org/members/list_of_members.cfm

Activities and awards

NFAIS, as an organization, continues its contribution to the information community by:

• Facilitating the exchange of information among NFAIS members
• Promoting NFAIS members and their essential role within the Information Community
• Encouraging discussion, understanding and cooperation across all Information Community sectors
• Sponsoring topical conferences, seminars and educational courses
• Publishing newsletters, current awareness alerts, books and reports
• Developing Codes of Practice, Guiding Principles and White Papers on Information Policy and New Technologies

Its most prestigious award is the Miles Conrad Lecture given annually to “…an outstanding person on a suitable topic in the field of abstracting and indexing, but above the level of any individual service.” The first lecture was given in 1968 by Robert W. Cairns, Chairman of the Committee on Scientific and Technical Communication of the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

-National Academy of Engineering

National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

. The series has continued unbroken since that time to honor those who have made significant contributions to information science and who have been supporters of NFAIS. A full list of the Miles Conrad Lecture recipients is available.

In 1983, NFAIS created the title of Honorary Fellow to recognize those who have made significant contributions to NFAIS and no longer work for a member organization. This honorary designation has been awarded every year since then. A full list of those so honored by NFAIS may be found at:
http://63.151.46.161/about/Honorary_Fellows_Listing.htm.

Membership

A list of membership as of 2010

• Access Innovations, Inc.
• Accessible Archives, Inc.
• American Economic Association
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Physics
• American Mathematical Society
• American Psychological Association
• American Theological Library Association
• Annual Reviews
• Association Of Computing Machinery(ACM)
• Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Informatics Division
• British Library
• British Standards Institution
• Cabi Publishing
• CAS (A Division of the American Chemical Society)
• Content Data Solutions, Inc.
• Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
• Data Conversion Laboratory
• Defense Technical Information Center
• Dialog
• EBSCO Publishing
• Elsevier
• Fiz Karlsruhe
• Fiz-Chemie Berlin
• George A. Smathers Libraries, University Of Florida
• H.W. Wilson Company
• IDS America, Inc.
• Information Today, Inc.
• Innodata Isogen
• Institut De L'information Scientifique Et Technique
• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Institution Of Engineering And Technology/ Inspec
• Intellidimension, Inc.
• International Food Information Service
• Issel
• Ivins Econtent Solutions
• J. Paul Getty Trust
• LexisNexis
• Mark Logic Corporation
• Massachusetts Medical Society
• Modern Language Association
• Molecular Connections Private, Ltd.
• National Agricultural Library
• National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• National Institute of Standards and Technology
• National Library of Education
• National Library of Medicine
• National Technical Information Service
• OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
• Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI)
• Optical Society of America
• Ovid Technologies, Inc.
• Philosophers Information Center
• ProQuest
• Rilm Abstracts Of Music Literature
• Ripm: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1800-1950)
• Scope E-Knowledge Center
• Temis, Inc.
• Thomson Reuters Health Care & Science
• Thomson Reuters IP Solutions
• U.S. Government Printing Office
• U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
• Unlimited Priorities Corporation