In the early 1970s, an evaluation of this system resulted in the decision to implement a new system for use by faculty, staff and students at Stanford University. SPIRES was renamed the Stanford Public Information Retrieval System. The new development took place under a National Science Foundation grant headed by Edwin B. Parker, principal investigator. SPIRES joined forces with the BALLOTS project to create a bibliographic citation retrieval system and quickly evolved into a generalized information retrieval and data base management system that could meet the needs of a large and diverse computing community.