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  • In Praise of an Internet Pioneer
  • Sara Dreyfuss, Managing Editor

My husband and I wait eagerly for grandchildren. I envision gathering them around me and watching the amazement on their faces as I tell them about life in “the olden days.” The Dodgers played in Brooklyn. Nail polish came only in shades of pink and red. On television, you had a choice of three networks to watch. Nobody lost a telephone, because all the phones were attached to the wall with a wire. There were stores called dime stores where you really could find things that cost ten cents. And perhaps most amazing, there was a time when the Internet did not exist. A librarian pioneered in developing it.

The Internet pioneer was Louise Addis, a librarian at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California. At SLAC, she heard about the World Wide Web, with which users could read Web pages from any computer in the world. Addis saw the potential in this technology before most of the planet had even heard of the Internet. Addis helped created the first Web server in the United States—to help support a library project—and organized the world’s first virtual library.

Addis came to SLAC in 1962 to create a library for the center. At first, the library had little or no funding, and Addis recalls, “We started our library in a warehouse on the Stanford campus.”1 The physicists at SLAC generated vast amounts and many varieties of data that were particularly challenging for librarians to handle. Much of the material consisted of what librarians call gray (or grey) literature—that is, preprints or prepublication versions, technical reports, papers, and other material that was not published commercially or not generally accessible. In the late sixties, Addis recognized that the library needed a system to identify and classify the materials so that they could be organized, stored, and retrieved when needed. She set about to create an automated system of bibliographic control—today we would call it a database management system, but the term had scarcely been invented at that time. In an interview with First Monday, a publication of the University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Addis said, “There weren’t any library database management tools available at the time, and SLAC needed something to meet the unique needs of particle physics researchers.”2 Addis wrote about those early days: [End Page 211]

Librarians really didn’t have any idea of the importance of preprints in certain scientific fields. Preprints were indeed the greyest of “grey” literature . . . mimeographed or dittoed (oh the horror). The idea of keeping them at all, let alone filing a catalog card for each of the 100+ authors on an experimental paper, was radical.3

In about 1970, Addis began using SPIRES (Stanford Public Information REtrieval System) for the task, a database management system developed at SLAC the year before.

For decades, scientists had shared preprints and other results of their research through the mail. Then—about the same time that Addis started using SPIRES—the Department of Defense linked university and military computers in a network called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. In 1983, the network split into two branches, ARPANET for civilian use and another branch for the military. Twelve years later, the civilian branch was renamed the Internet.

In 1973, Addis and a colleague began to develop a Web search interface that would give everyone access to the more than 300,000 records in the SLAC Library bibliographic database. The interface was called SPIRES-HEP (Stanford Public Information REtrieval System—High-Energy Physics). Addis did this work despite her lack of a background in computer science. In the First Monday interview, she said, “I got into programming and database development by picking up information on my own. If I needed to know something, I asked someone to show me how to do a particular task. Then I went back to the library and tried it on my own.” Users began to remotely access the SPIRES-HEP database in 1974. For nearly four decades, SPIRES-HEP remained the most important resource tool in the field, until it was replaced...

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