The Sesquidecennial of portal

Fifteen years. In some respects, that’s a long time; in other cases, not so much. In many cultures, the fifteenth year—the quinceañera—is synonymous with the coming of age. In terms of wedding anniversaries, the fifteenth is symbolized by crystal—rock solid. Fifteen years is long enough to pay off a mortgage but short enough to feel as if the time has flown by. As terminology goes, fifteen years lacks a well-known descriptor, unlike decade for ten years and score for twenty. Sometimes fifteen years is referred to as a sesquidecade—a quirky, though rarely used, convention to note a decade and a half.¹

Nonetheless, significant things often seem to occur at fifteen-year marks. In 1791, fifteen years after the United States declared its independence, the Bill of Rights was ratified, with the final state, Virginia, doing so on the 15th of December that year. Those first ten amendments to our Constitution were designed to place limits on government power and control. They ensured, among other things, freedom of speech, which underpins the rights inherent in the academic freedom that we cherish. While distinctly different, the essential connections between those rights² ensure that rich content on a wide range of topics, sometimes controversial, can find its way onto the pages of journals such as this one.

Less than a decade later, in 1800, a legislative act established the Library of Congress as a small reference library containing “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.”³ Initially housed in the Capitol, the library lasted fourteen years, until the British burned it during the War of 1812. It rose from the ashes, thanks to Thomas Jefferson, who offered up his personal accumulation of books to replace the original, fledgling library. As his comprehensive collection changed hands, Congress approved a dedicated building to house it, and ground was broken in 1815—fifteen years after the library was first established. That proved to be the critical year, the point from which the library took root and established its identity, following directly from Jefferson’s belief that “there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”⁴ Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, the Library of Congress grew to become the unparalleled collection of rich information resources that it is today—thanks, largely, to Jefferson being an early advocate of just-in-case collecting, which was visionary for a congressional library.

After the Civil War, America entered into an industrial age as revolutionary as the information age is now. The transition was difficult and dangerous, the progress undeniable. One of my favorite examples, the Brooklyn Bridge, took fifteen years from the start of construction to the day in May 1884 when P.T. Barnum sent a herd of elephants across it to demonstrate the strength of its suspension cables. Many of the great engineering feats of that era happened not in ivory towers but in the city around the bridge’s soaring stone towers. Those neo-Gothic pillars stood, inexplicably to many even today, upright in the middle of a great river. Such a feat of construction was not unlike the risky venture of starting a new journal on an uncertain landscape and seeing it stand strong after fifteen years.

As we know all too well, the twentieth century brought its own onslaught of things technological: mainframe and personal computing, programming languages, software development—and online discovery and communication, thanks to the launch of the World Wide Web (WWW). That event is generally placed at 1993, when the WWW software entered the public domain.⁵ Five years later, Google came on the scene. Established in 1998, the search engine was an immediate success—and became something of a threat to librarians and libraries. Times change, though. By the time Google turned 15, the perception of it—and libraries’ relationships with it—were changing as well. A rash of specialized Google search tools had sprung up, including Google Scholar, Google Earth, and the now-defunct Google Government—and of course Google’s e-mail and document sharing...