Al Gore, NLM and the Early Internet: Two Historians’ Account

Al Gore has been ridiculed since the late 1990s for supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet. Two historians of medical libraries, Michael Kronenfeld and Jennie J. Kronenfeld, argue in a National Library of Medicine (NLM) blog essay that in reality Gore played a key role in the Internet's early development, and they trace NLM's part in it. In 2005 he received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, which the authors call the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Michael Kronenfeld is University Librarian Emeritus at A.T. Still University of the Health Sciences and Jennie Kronenfeld is Professor Emerita at Arizona State University; they were awarded an NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine in 2019 for research on the history of medical libraries.

What the award said

The Webby announcement presented the prize as setting the record straight. It credited Gore as an early advocate of high-speed telecommunications as an engine of economic growth and one of the first members of Congress to see the Internet's importance. As a senator he led the legislation that created the National Research and Education Network, which spread the Internet beyond computer science. As Vice President for eight years he led efforts to bring Internet access to schools and libraries and gave political support to the Internet's quick privatization and to continued networking research. Vint Cerf, widely credited as a founder of the Internet, presented the award.

NLM's side of the story

NLM had been applying new technology to knowledge-based information since before the 1990s. In 1982 it began its Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) program, first about the library's role in academic information networks and, from the mid-1980s, about information management in institutions generally.

In late 1991 Congress passed the High-Performance Computing Act (Public Law 102-194), introduced by Senator Gore, to sustain and extend the country's leadership in computing, networking, software and information technologies. In 1992 this led to the National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications (NCO/HPCC), and NLM set up its own Office of High Performance Computing and Communications as the focal point for the federal effort. NLM Director Donald Lindberg became the NCO's founding director, and the office was first housed at NLM until it moved to the National Science Foundation in 1995. In an article that year, Lindberg called the federal part of the Internet one of the program's greatest successes, noting that almost three million computers were then reachable, and that more than 18,000 U.S. networks and more than 13,000 foreign ones in about 100 countries were part of it. As of June 1994, nearly 1,200 four-year colleges and universities, 100 community colleges and 1,000 U.S. high schools were connected, though many U.S. hospitals still were not.

A follow-up survey in 1999 found that all academic medical libraries, 91% of hospital libraries and 97% of other medical libraries had Internet connections.

Al Gore with Suzanne McInerney, David Lipman, Harold Varmus and Donald A.B. Lindberg at a ceremony on Capitol Hill, June 26, 1997. National Library of Medicine.

In 2017, on the 25th anniversary of the act, NLM's History of Medicine Division released the archives of the National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications.

Sources

• Michael Kronenfeld and Jennie J. Kronenfeld (A.T. Still University; Arizona State University), Al Gore, the Internet and the National Library of Medicine, Circulating Now, National Library of Medicine; rewritten in hubnx's own words.