A Little History & A Few Lessons From The Last Millennium

The Impact of Information Technology on Academic LibrariesFebruary 2, 2001

It All Started with a Librarian…

“there ought to be a machine for doing the purely mechanical work of tabulation and similar statistics...” comment by Dr. John Shaw Billings, Director of the Surgeon-General’s Library to Census Bureau employee Herman Hollerith.

Hollerith invents equipment to read punched cards and in 1896 forms the Tabulating Machine Company

Hollerith offers Billings a share in company but Billings declines. Hollerith’s company later becomes the International Business Machines Corporation, aka IBM

First Steps

More refined versions of Hollerith’s invention appear and begin to be utilized in academic libraries in the 1940s and 1950s

In 1945, Vannevar Bush envisions an imaginary information retrieval machine called the “memex”

In the early 1960s, computers began replacing punched card systems. Computer Output Microform (COM) Catalogues start to appear

The Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) becomes common in the 1980s

A web interface is grafted on to an OPAC at the University of Waterloo in 1993. It is called “WebCat”

Katharine Hepburn Knew What It Was Like to Deal with IT Staff

IT Worker: “We try never to use that key” Bunny Watson: “Why not?”IT Worker: “Well it’s too technical to explain to the lay mind” Desk Set (1957)

From Procedure to Personal Choice: How Best to Close a Window?

1. Yell at Window to Close2. Turn Off Computer3. Press Alt-F44. Click on the “X” in the top right-hand corner5. Press Alt-F or click on “File” and select/click “Exit”6. Click on Icon in top-left or press Alt-Space and select/click “Close” or double-click7. Right-click and choose

A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium

The impact of technology is hard to predict

A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium (cont.)

Successful technologies are usually more dependent on outside factors that is ever acknowledged

A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium (cont.)

Never underestimate “ease of use” as a factor for success

So What Has Been the Impact of Information Technology on Academic Libraries?

Access to more computing resources than ever before Working with an increasingly technology-focused patron

community Greater expectations to deliver information in neatly

bundled, convenient electronic packages Blurring distinctions between computer labs and “study

space”, harder to separate information resources from infrastructure

Continued importance of the library on campus as a “place” though now virtually as well as physically

Organizational Strategies for IT - some ideas from the W3C

No one can mention a document in a meeting unless they can provide a URI for it - “if it ain’t on the Web, it doesn’t exist”

Live Early Adoption and Demonstration (LEAD) - “you are entitled to eat your own dog food”

Moving towards “organic styles of management” - groups form within an organization in a local, rather ad-hoc fashion, with the constraints that whoever joins is needed for the work and is covered by sufficient budget

A Brief Look at the Present

August 25, 2000 - Internet Wire publishes a forged email press seemingly from Emulex Corp. which states that CEO had resigned and earnings would be restated. Picked up by several news services and Web sites, the stock drops 61% before the hoax is exposed.

1. Physical - attacks against computers, wires, and electronics2. Syntactic - attacks against vulnerabilities in software and protocols3. Semantic - attacks that target the way we assign meaning to content

How do we both ensure and leverage our credibility in the online world is one of the key issues facing academic libraries

A Brief Look at the Present (Cont.)

“The Web has been a critical catalyst for many faculty, offering compelling content and technology that they could bring into their teaching and scholarly activities. But there are some real limits. The number of the faculty energized by the Web and willing to invest time and effort to infuse technology into their instructional activities, often absent adequate institutional support and recognition for their efforts, may begin to level off, a least for a little while.” - The 2000 National Survey of Information Technology in US Higher Education

A Brief Look at the Present (Cont.)

Final Thought from Hollerith’s Successor

“There is no business in the world which can hope to move forward if it does not keep abreast of the time, look into the future and study the probable demands of the future” - Thomas J. Watson, Sr.

Selected Resources

Berghel, Hal. “The Cost of Having Analog Executives in a Digital World”. Communications of the ACM. Nov. 1999 41(11), p. 11-15. http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/cacm/1999-42-11/p11-berghel/

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web : the original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Kenyon, John. Technology Budgeting Basics. http://www.tmcenter.org/programs/tech.html

Postman, Neil. Informing Ourselves to Death. http://internet-history.org/archives/inform.ourselves.to.death.html