The increasing economic importance of corrosion has resulted in more attention being devoted to its causes and to means whereby it may be mitigated. Several technical societies at home and abroad have corrosion as a specific field of interest, and the National Association of Corrosion Engineers devotes its attention to it exclusively.
Corrosion literature is being published in magazines ranging from the smallest trade magazine to the most learned technical journal. A survey of 3300 abstracts of corrosion technical literature published in 1946–47 showed 542 source publications. The American Coordinating Committee on Corrosion concluded the literature on corrosion could not be sectionized because it cut across many fields.
NACE, not wishing to duplicate work already done, secured permission of established abstracting agencies to collect, classify and publish abstracts. The need for a filing system index to coordinate corrosion literature in a manner covering any field of interest and with provisions for expansion became evident with the start of the abstract program.
The NACE Abstract Committee developed a system and keyed it to a punch card to make semi-mechanical sorting possible. Random number codes are used in the system, among others, and the card finally developed includes provision for coding topics, authors, publications, and year of publication, besides leaving a substantial number of unassigned holes for use in supplementary indexing.
