ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how natural scientists, and especially those committed to what Turner calls public science, came to play a crucial part in shaping this emergent early twentieth-century sphere of information. The British Science Guild (BSG), founded by Sir Norman Lockyer in 1905, provided an organizational focus for this movement, aiming as it did to 'promote and extend the application of scientific method in all matters affecting die national welfare'. Until the 1970s, the institutional history of twentieth-century British science as a whole was characterized by the various attempts made by the state to develop a national system of scientific innovation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the handling and processing of information, in Britain and other industrial economies, was still, in the main, an empirical, rule-of-thumb and localized activity. However, from around 1850, to varying degrees, the assorted branches of information work began to adopt systematic and 'scientific' practices.
