This paper briefly reviews the information explosion of the last thirty years and the various attempts made to organize that information in new ways. Section B offers a brief historic review of modern classification and subject heading theory. Section C reviews the literature of automatic indexing, automatic abstracting, and automatic classification. The problems of large file organization, word meanings, and the limitation of such "automatic" methods are discussed. Section D sums up the state of the art in automatic indexing by concluding that human intellectual effort is still required in indexing. The computer is viewed as a valuable assistant in that intellectual effort and the wide variety of computer applications to indexing work is summarized. (Author)