Atherton Seidell

Atherton Seidell (1878 – July 25, 1961), a founder of the American Documentation Institute (predecessor of the American Society for Information Science), was a chemist and who became a strong proponent of the use of microfilm for the management of scientific information. As Peter Hirtle writes, "Through a series of seminal articles in Science in the 1930s and 1940s, Seidell established a theoretical justification for the use of microfilms as a means of facilitating scientific information exchange."

With M. de Saint Rat, Seidell developed a simple, inexpensive ($2.00 in 1950), monocular microfilm viewing device, known as the "Seidell viewer," that was sold during the 1940s and 1950s.

Seidell's studies of vitamins lead to numerous publications, including the book, Solubilities of Inorganic and Organic Compounds. This text was first announced in a 1907 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, with the title, Solubilities of Inorganic and Organic Substances: A Handbook of the Most Reliable Quantitative Solubility Determinations. The text appeared in numerous editions over the course of fifty years, the last with which Seidell was involved being entitled, Solubilities, Inorganic and Metal Organic Compounds: A Compilation of Solubility Data from the Periodical Literature. This edition was co-written in 1958 with William F. Linke, who produced another edition in 1965.

Role in the National Library of Medicine
Seidell played an important role in the introduction of microfilm to the National Library of Medicine (called the Army Medical Library at the time) in the 1940s. In particular, he developed the first Current List of Medical Literature, which later became the Index Medicus and then Medline. A collection of his papers are held in the NLM archives.