In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

portal: Libraries and the Academy 1.2 (2001) v-viii



[Access article in PDF]

Forty Years, and We're Still Here

Susan K. Martin
Executive Editor


At the end of 2000, I made the announcement that after almost forty years in the library world, I would be leaving the structured environment of academia in order to work perhaps not less, but at least differently. Such an action provides an occasion for reflection back over the years, something that I have been asked to make public in these pages.

Think of the many predictions we all have read over the years: Libraries will become museums. Libraries won't contain books any more; everything will be in electronic form. Users of information won't come to libraries any longer, because they will be able to access all the information they need from their homes, dorm rooms, or offices. Libraries in universities will be under the control of the chief information officers or heads of computing centers. Libraries without walls will pervade. Publishers and other producers of information will bypass libraries to sell information directly to the end users. Owners of information will use the power of computers to charge "by the drink"--the honorable tradition of public libraries (or academic libraries, for that matter) providing reading matter to their entire communities, regardless of ability to pay, will be eroded.

Many of these prophecies have come to pass, either in whole or in part. The impact of information technologies on libraries has been obvious, but the accretion of this impact over the decades, and the resulting alteration in the relationship between libraries and their environments has been far from predictable, either in substance or in sequence.

In the 1950s and '60s, data-oriented libraries were ahead of most other kinds of institutions in their use of technology. My early years in the profession were focused initially on the use of punched card systems to convert bibliographic information into machine-readable form. I will never forget the delight of converting to punched cards, and then "storing" them in Harvard's Widener Library's U.S. history classification. We worked for more than twenty-four hours without stopping. We fed the cards into a reader so that the information could be put onto magnetic tape--disks were not a reality for us at that time, and it wasn't possible yet to append information to an existing file, and therefore to do it in shorter bursts. But I often laugh when I think of what we could [End Page v] do with a computer with eight kilobytes of memory, as compared with the twenty gigabytes that I absolutely have to have on my PC at home today!

At that time, the MARC format was being developed, under the guidance of Henriette Avram and the Library of Congress. Thoughtful members of our profession were able to look at the technology then in existence, and discern a future made better, streamlined by the use of these formidable inventions. OCLC was established in the late 1960s, and many of us still hear Fred Kilgour intoning the mantra of "reducing the rate of rise of costs of cataloging"--and then interlibrary loan, and reference, and acquisitions.

In 2001 it is difficult to recall that as recently as twenty-five years ago, the use of technology in libraries was still largely the bailiwick of the more sizable and wealthier libraries. They had the resources to create systems departments large and sophisticated enough to create "home grown" systems in support of circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, and serials. Only in the 1970s did the turnkey library system become widely available. Even then, many of us thought that it would always be unreasonable for small libraries to engage in the use of information technologies of any kind. Providentially, most of us didn't place bets on that kind of thinking!

The next milestone in the lives of librarians involved networks providing cooperative access to information systems--a phenomenon that has grown and changed with the times so that networks are now different in form and function, but...

pdf

Share