The bibliography is arranged topically under eight subheadings, with some titles being listed more than once. It was called the "Blue Bibliography" because of its blue spiral binding. The entries date from 1972 through 1990, and include books, papers, reports, talks, published and unpublished materials. There are entries for papers by Warfield and by his colleagues Christakis, Keever, Ohuchi, Broome, Wood, Hill, Kawamura, Prabhu, Geschka, Hamilton, El Mokadem, Bishop, and Pollick - serving either as primary or secondary authors. The eight topical subheadings are:
1) Planning
2) Systems Science and Conceptual Science
3) Structural Modeling
4) Group Processes
5) Display Representations
6) Design Theory and Methodology
7) Design Applications
8) Social Roles
A lengthy preface written by Warfield describes the course of his work in the field of systems science directed toward enhancing the ability of humans to manage complexity. John Warfield wrote all of the annotations, then had the manuscript typed and printed by Colleen Kearney, the Institute's secretary, as an ongoing and continually updated computer printout, with its first edition December 1986, under the title "Annotated Bibliography of Publications of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences." Under this title, the manuscript was updated and reprinted in May 1987, May 1988 and May 1989. During this period, the papers described in this bibliography were stored in the IASIS filing cabinet in Fenwick Library at George Mason University, where for a number of years they were available to the public through Interlibrary Loan.
In 1990, after Colleen left, Rose Warfield (who couldn’t use a computer at that time) retyped the manuscript on an electric typewriter, giving it the new title "Generic Systems Design." She got it printed with a nice-looking blue & white cover. With this new title, printed spiral-bound copies were distributed for ten years from the IASIS office. A hardcover copy of the 1990 version was donated to George Mason University's Fenwick Library, and another to the Library of Congress, where it now enjoys "book" status, because it was given LCCN 90-71125 and classification Z7671.W37 1990.
The manuscript was againn retyped by Bonnie Seitz as a computer file in 1996, at which time all reference to the Interlibrary Loan availability of the papers was deleted from the text, since the Fenwick IASIS File had been discontinued. We now have Bonnie's typed version, in Microsoft Word 6, in two files: BIBLIO.DOC AND BIBLIOA.DOC.
John Warfield tackled the document again and converted Bonnie's Word document into a nicely formatted WordPerfect document, so we now have a digitized version WordPerfect version, proofread and edited by Warfield himself, in filename biw043.wpd
R.W. Circa 2001, updated September 2012, and again updated on 12 August 2014.
