Librarians Go High-Tech, Perhaps: The Ford Foundation, the CLR and INTREX

In the late 1950s the Ford Foundation handed the Council on Library Resources the responsibility of establishing a library research laboratory. The Council found it difficult to define what such a laboratory should be, and it was more than a half-decade before the Council decided to become the major sponsor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Project INTREX. Unfortunately, INTREX did not live up to the expectations of the Council. In the early 1970s, after the expenditure of several million dollars, INTREX ended with the Council less than pleased. INTREX had become a project for developing applied technology rather than one focused upon research into information methods that would help all types of libraries.