I am researching the history of my field, cheminformatics. It grew out of documentation management, more specifically, chemical documentation. While that topic goes back to the 1800s, I limit my research to mechanical methods for chemical documentation search and management.
This started with punched cards in the 1940s. James Perry, then at MIT, was a nexus in the field. It's difficult to find people of the era that he wasn't connected to.
One of these is Calvin Mooers, who is a special focus of mine. Mooers developed some of the fundamental concepts that formed the basis for the computerization of chemical information. (To be more precise, he came up with ideas of how to solve problems. These ideas weren't solutions, but were in the ballpark, and ended up influencing the people who actually solved and implemented the problems.) Mooers was a Master's student at MIT, where he met Perry, and was influenced by the sorts of problems that Perry was interested in.
Mooers' Master's thesis was on a method for superimposed coding which he termed Zatocoding. A superimposed code is one where the keys are assigned to 1 or more bits, and where the bits for different keys may overlap. A Bloom filter is a type of superimpose code. In Zatocoding, there is one pass over the keys to get population statistics, then a bit of information theory to determine the number of bits to use for each key and its bit assignments. A common key ends up with 1 bit, while a rare key might have 7 bits.
Mooers is one of the contributors to "Punched Cards". I likely read the book while trying to track down his publications. I may have read it because Perry was the editor. Or I might have read it because I was trying to understand more about edge-notched punched cards.
As for 'seminal', I based that on the number of sources I've read which cite it. For something more outwardly visible, there are 100 citations at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=464718015108686727&... . And of course the book went through two editions.
Interesting. One of those references is to "Automated concordances and word indexes: The fifties". That article says 'Father Busa inaugurated the history of the automatic production of concordances and word indexes' and 'In 1951, using the punched-card equipment available to him, Father Busa produced and published the first automated word index and concordance to four hymns written by Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi, ...'
It's the same Busa who had the chapter in "Punched Cards" about working with the Dead Sea Scrolls; the one that got me to track down the Popular Science sciation. While that chapter doesn't establish the seminal nature, it does give an idea that the book was presenting cutting edge work with punched cards.