Article,
Looking Back on Library Technology
American Libraries, 34 (6): 100 (June 2003)
Abstract
TXT: TITLE: Looking Back on Library Technology SOURCE: American Libraries 34 no6 100 Je/Jl 2003 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.ala.org/ Walt Crawford In preparing to speak at the 30th anniversary of the University of Tennessee's School of Information Science last fall, I looked at some elements of library life in 1972 and 1973. How many people remember what library services and technology were like three decades ago? I worked at the University of California at Berkeley's Doe Library in 1973, having designed and implemented the punch-card circulation system that was Doe's first library automation. We had a visit from the FBI very early in the 1970s and learned to destroy circulation records as soon as items were returned. How's your 2003 privacy audit going? Can you assure readers that their circulation histories are private? You haven't done a privacy audit? You should. YOUR LIBRARY IN 1972-73 You almost certainly had a card catalog. MARC II existed, but shared online cataloging was in its infancy--OCLC went online in 1971, but primarily served a few dozen Ohio institutions by 1973. BALLOTS, the underlying software for RLG's RLIN, went online in November 1972--but RLG didn't exist until 1975. WLN began offering services in late 1972, but didn't go online until 1975 or later. You might have had a circulation system using a "minicomputer" that you'd consider huge by today's standards, but with a fraction of the power of today's cheapest PCs. It's possible that you searched remote databases on SDC or BRS with a state-of-the-art 300-bps modem, or, in a university library, searched locally mounted databases through batch processing. Library automation began considerably earlier. The Information Science and Automation Division, the earlier name of ALA's Library and Information Technology Association, began in 1966. Microprocessors already existed (Intel's 8088 came out in late 1972, the 8080 in 1973), but personal computers didn't appear until 1975; the first widely used models (Commodore PET, Apple II, Radio Shack TRS-80) showed up in 1977. The first IBM PC was still eight years away--and that PC didn't have any hard disk. The books on your shelves didn't have ISBNs, although a few of them might have had SBNs, the predecessor standard adopted in 1973. If you circulated movies at all, they were films, probably 16mm reels. You might have had some U-Matic videocassettes (introduced in 1971), but Betamax and VHS came along in 1975 and 1976. 1973 was a banner year for hard disks, but they were too big, slow, and expensive for most library use. The first modern hard disk, IBM's 3340 "Winchester," appeared that year--a 14-inch, 80-pound beast costing thousands of dollars and holding 35 to 70 megabytes. It was attached to room-filling mainframe computers. The first PC hard disk appeared seven years later, cost about $1,000 once you added case and power supply, and only held five or 10 megabytes--but it was a modest 5.25 inches in diameter. Today's PC disk measures 3.5 inches in diameter and holds 200 gigabytes--40,000 times as much as the original PC disk. It costs about $300. You might have used fax--slow, expensive, and ugly, but the technology was established more than a century ago. There were fax (frequently called "telefax" or "telefacsimile" back then) experiments within library groups as early as the late 1960s, but they were rarely very successful. The pricing problem with scientific, technical, and medical journals was alive and well 30 years ago. Berkeley, for example, carried out a budget-related 10% serials cut in the early 1970s. THE REVOLUTIONARY EVOLUTION Back then we were talking about library networks, but few of us could envision the Internet. We were learning about MARC II, a painful process that took another decade. Libraries learned earlier than most that the computer wasn't magic. No revolution occurred between 1973 and 2003--but for most libraries and librarians, the overall changes could be considered revolutionary. Even then, the crisis-mongers and hypesters were active. If libraries didn't transform themselves using computer-based tools and replacements for the book--microfilm being the replacement of choice--they would disappear. But somehow, despite using boring old books and failing to make every librarian a programmer (another necessary transformation touted a few years later), libraries have survived. The tools have improved, and the core missions remain. ADDED MATERIAL WALT CRAWFORD is a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group in Mountain View, California. You can reach him at wcc@notes.rlg.org.
