John Rothman, who in an era before Google conceived and helped develop The New York Times Information Bank, a revolutionary system that let computer users easily find journalism by The Times and dozens of other publications, died on Thursday in Manhattan. His son, Andrew, said the cause was a stroke. Mr. Rothman was a fitting leader for the Information Bank. He had, since 1946, worked for The New York Times Index , the invaluable monthly, quarterly and annual publications that offered summaries of articles from as far back as 1913, guiding students and researchers to find the full ones on microfilm. “Indexing is a giant guessing game,” Mr. Rothman wrote in Saturday Review magazine in 1965, when he was the index’s editor.

Source: New York Times October 01, 2019 21:17 UTC