Herbert Marvin Ohlman was born on 6 March 1927 in New York City. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1944. After spending two years in the U.S. Army, he enrolled at Syracuse University, earning a B.S. in physics in 1950. After a year of graduate work at the University of Minnesota in physics, Ohlman held various positions at the National Bureau of Standards, Engineering and Research Corporation, American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Carrier Corporation and Battelle Memorial Institute.
In 1957 Ohlman began working at Rand Corporation in the System Development Division. During his tenure at Rand, he developed a system of mechanical indexing, giving a public presentation of his Permuterm Indexing at the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information (ICSI). At this same conference, H.P. Luhn and colleagues from IBM presented on their indexing system which focused on "titles indexed by Key Words-in-Context system," better known as KWIC. The methods Ohlman and Luhn used to create their indexes were slightly different but the output of the systems were almost identical.
After Ohlman left Rand in 1958, he worked at System Development Corporation (1959-1960), Lockheed (1960-1961), IBM (1961-1962), McGraw-Hill (1962) Itek Corporation (1963-1964), and Xerox (1964-1967) with graduate work at UCLA in Mathematics (1959) and Rutgers in Library Science (1961).
Ohlman earned his M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University (St. Louis, MO) in 1971. He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland to work as an consultant in communications and microcomputing for the World Health Organization, returning to the United States in the mid-late 1990s. Herbert Ohlman died on 27 May 2002 in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina following complications from open-heart surgery.
From the guide to the Herbert Ohlman papers, 1955-2002, (University of Minnesota Libraries. Charles Babbage Institute. [cbi])
