Technical Information Project

The Technical Information Project was an early database project focused on the scholarly physics literature. Its "most unique feature" was its use bibliographic coupling, a novel way to search for related documents. The TIP included over 25,000 records.
Meyer Mike Kessler began developing the TIP at MIT in April 1962, with the support of a grant by the National Science Foundation. The project's objective was to create a system that could "perform automatic search operations on bibliographic data" using bibliographic coupling. Some of the innovations in TIP included the use of wild cards, and boolean searching.

Transfer to the American Institute of Physics

Around 1968, responsibility for the TIP was transferred to the American [Institute of Physics], under the direction of Dr. H. William Koch. In connection with the transfer, the Institute received a $149,000 NSF grant meant to address problems "produced by the rapid growth of the published literature, which threatens a breakdown in communications among scientists". The Institute aimed to create a nationwide "physics information network" by adding indexing information to the TIP, and using it to automatically produce classification indexes for its 38 physics journals, as part of a planned "National Physics Information System".