Roger K. Summit

Roger Kent Summit (October 14, 1930 – June 7, 2026) was American businessman who founded Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search. He worked for Lockheed in the 1960s, was put in charge of its information retrieval lab, and from his work created a system that became known as Dialog and spun off by Lockheed in the 1970s. Dialog is one of the leading professional online services, used by companies, law firms, governments etc. as a key online research tool.

Early life Roger Kent Summit was born on October 14, 1930 in Detroit, Michigan. Summit himself was musically gifted. He played trombone in high school and made money in college using his talent to play in dance bands. He also learned to play the horn. Summit vacationed in the West Coast in the summer of 1941 when he was 11 years old. It was the first time he had seen the mountains and the ocean, and the experience never left him. Later in life he decided to attend college at Stanford because of this early experience. He continued to reside there.

Middle years Summit held a doctorate in management science, a master's in business administration, and a bachelor's in psychology, all from Stanford University. When the Lockheed Corporation formed the Information Sciences Laboratory (1964) their mission for the lab was to examine how third-generation hardware would affect computing in the information sciences. Third-generation hardware, typified by the IBM 360 computer, introduced mass random-access storage, remotely controlled processing via telecommunications, and a time-sharing operation that allowed many people to utilize the computer at the same time. Roger Summit and a colleague submitted a proposal to the Lockheed Corporation to further explore and develop this technology. He was then given responsibility for information retrieval. Organizations were already conducting searches by inputting queries on punched cards. However, searches couldn't be revised after they were entered and during the process, therefore the outcomes of the search were at times unpredictable. The equipment that they were using was considered second-generation equipment. Summit's goal was to design an interactive retrieval language with third generation equipment that would bypass some of the problems they had with the second-generation equipment.

In 1968 Summit and his colleagues at Lockheed won a major contract from NASA to develop an online retrieval system for its database of aerospace research documents. Later, they won contracts to apply this technology to the databases of the Atomic Energy Commission, the European Space and Research Organization, the U.S. Office of Education, and the National Technical Information Service. In early 1972 Summit and his team offered the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) and the National Technical Information Service databases to any subscriber with a computer terminal. This is when Dialog was established as a commercial information retrieval business within Lockheed Palo Alto Research Laboratory, and became the world's first commercial online service.

In 1982, Dialog spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary with Roger Summit as president. In 1988, he participated in the sale of Dialog to Knight- Ridder Inc., and in February 1990 he was named president of its electronic publishing group. One year later, he assumed the office of chairman and chief executive officer until his retirement in late 1991.

Family Summit married Virginia Buckthorn in 1964. They had two children.

The user should be able to understand why results were retrieved based on the search statement provided. Summit hoped that this would allow the user to modify the search expression to improve the results for future searches. Recursion: the results of one search could be used in subsequent queries. Index terms should display alphabetically near a candidate term, together with posting frequencies to assist the user in formulating a search expression. Provision for nested Boolean expressions.

Summit and his team were striving to create a system that was adaptable. The system would allow users to gain the desired search outcome they sought in an easy and efficient manner. In 1965, they had developed a working prototype of Dialog and sought to have the prototype tested in a real situation using NASA's STAR database. When Summit's proposal was rejected over the Bunker Ramo System, he did not give up and instead created a smaller scale proposal, with minimized economic investment, for an experiment with Dialog to run parallel to Bunker Ramo. The minimalist proposal at the Ames Research Center proved to be more successful than the Bunker Ramo System leading to Dialog earning a contract with NASA in 1966.

Current challenges

1) In 2008, Proquest announced the need to update Dialog's platform. This new platform would integrate Dialog and DataStar offerings. Legacy systems such as Dialog's need complete reworking to meet the challenges of the future—or even the present. ProQuest embarked on a major platform design project to integrate ProQuest and CSA content into a "best of breed", Web 2.0-level service. Unified access remained incomplete until 2010, necessitating continued decision-making on the part of researchers.

2) One of the barriers to transforming Dialog has always been restrictive clauses in Dialog's contracts with database producers, some of which date back 30 years or more. Contract problems affect both pricing rigidity and how the service can handle data. There was a need for extensive discussions with groups of information professionals about what they want and need from a newly designed system. By working on the integration process, content gaps were plugged by developing new databases.

The new ProQuest platform is just beginning to be exposed and won't be finished for years—an ambitious undertaking. Recently announced is a partnership with libraries for a multi-year European book digitization project—a multimillion-dollar investment. These initiatives, plus the e-brary purchase, are all in fulfillment of the company's mission "to connect people and information".

Summit was a frequent lecturer on the field of information sciences, was widely published, and was part of many national committees

Awards and recognition From the Professional Biography IEEE Dialog Milestone Award (2019)