A Little History

1
A Little History A Few Lessons From The Last
Millennium
The Impact of Information Technology on Academic
Libraries February 2, 2001
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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-Generals 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. Holleriths company later
  becomes the International Business Machines
  Corporation, aka IBM

3
First Steps

• More refined versions of Holleriths 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

4
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 its too technical to explain to
  the lay mind
• Desk Set (1957)

5
From Procedure to Personal Choice How Best to
Close a Window?
1. Yell at Window to Close 2. Turn Off
Computer 3. Press Alt-F4 4. Click on the X in
the top right-hand corner
5. 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-click
7. Right-click and choose
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A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium
The impact of technology is hard to predict
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A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium (cont.)
Successful technologies are usually more
dependent on outside factors that is ever
acknowledged
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A Few Lessons from the Last Millenium (cont.)
Never underestimate ease of use as a factor for
success
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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

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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 aint on
  the Web, it doesnt 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

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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 electronics 2. Syntactic - attacks against
vulnerabilities in software and protocols 3.
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
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A Brief Look at the Present (Cont.)
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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
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Final Thought from Holleriths 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.
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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/19
  99-42-11/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.oursel
  ves.to.death.html