In 1950, Heinlein wrote:
The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, no encroaching hunger, not the morals of young. It is a crisis in the *organization* and *accessibility* of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia"--which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.
Call it the Crisis of the Librarian.
We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.
But we are not likely to get either one in a hurry and we have a powerful lot of grief before us in the meantime.
--From Robert A. Heinlein's essay "Where to?" in the book Expanded Universe: The New Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein (published in 1980, but based on a 1966 book, The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, which itself was a collection of Heinlein's previously published essays).
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