Computers and Libraries: A Convergence During My Career

Like many librarians (actually, I retired from my full-time librarian career in 2009 and from the 21-year part-time librarian gig at Macomb Community College in 2015), I didn’t start out pursuing that career. That’s often the case with librarians — we tend to fall into that field rather than initially aiming for it.

In retrospect, though, my nearly 40 years working in libraries worked out well for me. I didn’t get wealthy, but neither did I ever go hungry. And between my Social Security pension and two other pensions (in what other world does a 21-year part-time job lead to a pension?) and the IRA, my income in the autumn of my years covers my expenses and the more-than-occasional luxuries that make life worth living.

Reflecting on my experiences, it’s hard for me to appreciate just how much libraries and librarianship changed during my full- and part-time career.

Computerization

Without PCs and the Cloud that interconnects them, libraries would still be the places they had been for the first three quarters of the Twentieth Century. The limited computer skills I had picked up while working at the Wayne State University library system in Detroit in order to get free tuition to the WSU School of Library and Information Studies are what landed me the nearly 24-year gig at the Detroit Public Library. When the head of the DPL Human Resources Department looked over my resume when she interviewed me as part of a massive hiring spree occasioned by the passage of a millage, she said “I see where you have extensive computer skills. Mr. Maas over in the TIP Clearinghouse is looking for someone like you.”

These were the early days of personal computing, when the hardware and software were expensive investments. TIP Service coordinator Norm Maas had managed to patch together funding for a primitive network of three workstations that shared a single 10 MB hard drive (whose contents staff dutifully backed up to 360 KB floppy disks each week) and a single incredibly noisy daisywheel printer that needed to be housed in foam-lined enclosure to keep the noise down. Norm had been told that up to 64 workstations could share that expensive data storage space. What he hadn’t been told was that, as additional workstations were brought online, processing speed would be compromised because all the workstations shared a single microprocessor. Should two of our three workstations happen to be in use at the same time, staff could notice the pronounced delay in processor output. God only knows what it would have been like with 64 workstations competing for processing time. Staff could probably have taken coffee breaks between the time they would hit a key and when the image of that character would have appeared on the green-on-black screen.

But it was what it was, and I was in charge of it. For a very brief window in time, I may have been the most computer-savvy person on the 500-person DPL staff. Luckily, Norm was sufficiently prescient not to put all of his eggs in the workstation basket. The Clearinghouse also had a single IBM PC-XT machine when I joined the staff. When IBM released their groundbreaking PC-AT model, we jumped onto that boat. And we kept on jumping.

The DPL administration came to their senses and established an increasingly sophisticated Information Services Department. These men and women had the training, background, and interest to stay on top of the rapidly changing technology.

Baby Steps in Learning to Use Computers at WSU

During my 1979–1985 tenure at the Wayne State University Science and Engineering Library, administrators began to appreciate the importance of preparing their workforce to operate in a digital age. Initially, a single Apple computer was purchased for the entire system. It was housed at the G. Flint Purdy Library and interested staff were permitted to sign up for lessons on how to use it. That concept quickly failed.

Next, the Library administration purchased a $1,795 Osborn I portable computer for each of the system’s seven units. These were indeed the first truly transportable personal computers on the market. About the size of a portable sewing machine and equipped with dual 360KB floppy drives and shipping with state-of-the-art WordStar word processing software, SuperCalc spreadsheet software, and the impenetrable dBase database software, these 25 pound units claimed to be small enough to fit under an airliner seat,

An internal 5" green-on-black display was initially capable of displaying three (maybe it was five) 65-character lines. Like many purchasers, the WSU Libraries shipped our units back to Osborne to be upgraded when an option was announced to upgrade the display to 80-character lines. And like many purchasers, we wound up shipping our units back to Osborne to have the upgrade undone when we realized that all the upgrade accomplished was to make the already-tiny characters even tinier.

The WSU Library administration permitted staff to sign out the units to take home so that interested parties could learn to use them on their own time rather than worktime.

I drank the Koolaid. My boss, Science and Engineering Library Director Emerson Hilker, and I took turns lugging the behemoths to our cars in the parking structure blocks away.

The Card Catalog Gives Way to the OPAC

Cataloging the contents of a library’s collection is a tedious process and not something that librarians do by the seat of their pants. (Note to Self — Research the origin of that curious phrase.) When I took a couple of cataloging courses while going through the WSU MSLS program, we learned to abide by the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR2 to insiders) which prescribed EXACTLY how any given item (be it a book, periodical, manuscript, musical score, film, filmstrip, or whatever) was to be cataloged. Nor were catalogers permitted to make up the subject headings by which individual items could be identified by their subject content.

It was a meticulous system. It was also incredibly labor intensive.

Then OCLC came along. Originally a cooperative of academic and large public libraries in Ohio, OCLC (originally the Ohio College Library Center before becoming the Online Computer Library Center before eventually landing on OCLC, Inc.) provided the digital infrastructure for libraries to share cataloging records. Librarians at OCLC member institutions could see how other libraries had already cataloged any given item. They could then either accept the cataloging record as it had been created by another OCLC member institution or tweak it, either correcting mistakes (Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific authors in history, and I used to amuse myself by seeing how many OCLC records I could find for books by Issac Asimov) or potentially increase subject access to the cataloged item by assigning additional subject headings to the record.

Either way, a cataloger would eventually press a key to order a set of card catalog cards for each item being added to their library’s catalog.

The card catalog was always the soft underbelly of the libraries of yore. Even though OCLC gave libraries the ability to share catalog records, the damned cards still had to be filed manually. Talk about a hotbed of critical human error. Should a card be misfiled so that the patron couldn’t find it under the chosen author, title, or subject heading entries, the sought item was functionally unavailable. The item may have been on the shelf, but there are a lot of shelves in any given library.

And when officially approved subject headings were changed by the Library of Congress, the potential for human error was doubled. Not only did the cards of the old cardset have to be pulled and discarded, the cards from the new cardset had to be properly filed.

During the time when part of my job duties at the WSU Science and Engineering Library included provisional filing of new cardsets (we paraprofessional Library Assistants would file new cards above the retaining rods in card catalog drawers, while the trained and accredited Librarian would verify the placement of each card before dropping it fully into the drawer where it would be secured by the retaining rods), I remember when the subject heading Negro was superseded by the term Afro American. Can you imagine how many subject entry cards had to be replaced in a large research library in an urban environment? Within a year or two, the Library of Congress changed their mind. Oh, we didn’t mean Afro American. We meant to say African American. The LC got crossed off lots of Christmas card lists that year.

Those rods (visible beneath the pull-out tabs on the drawers in the picture) firmly held the cards in the drawers. I remember a student political protest when I was working at the University of Detroit Main Library in the 1970’s when several protesters swarmed into the library’s card catalog alcove and pulled out drawers and turned them upside down, fully expecting thousands of cards to fall to the floor in an unholy mess. They were dumbfounded when the cards stayed in place. Thank God for those retaining rods.

Card catalogs are now relics of the past. The only one I can remember even seeing on TV anymore graced the living room of Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter on The Big Bank Theory. Its presence there was never explained

Untangling the Maze of Periodical Literature

Access to periodical literature (which ordinary people call magazines and journals) was always a sticking point for library research on all levels because it was a multi-step process.

1. First, the user had to identify articles that seemed relevant to the topic being researched. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and its more specialized companions Social Science Index, Applied Science and Technology Index, and Arts and Humanities Index were the standby tools for this purpose.
2. Then the researcher had to obtain physical access to the desired articles. Just because an article was cited in the Reader’s Guide didn’t necessarily mean that the journal in which it was published was part of a particular library’s collection.
3. Finally, the user had to absorb the contents of the article. At $0.10 or $0.15 per black-and-white image, early photocopiers were expensive. They were also error-prone, and it wasn’t uncommon for library users to smell the scent of a sheet of copier papery burning under the fuser unit when the rubber transport belt would break. Users would often resort to simply writing down relevant points on notecards, though there were always unscrupulous researchers who wouldn’t hesitate to simply cut the article out of the bound or unbound issue. We hated those guys.

Particularly in the areas of technology and science, periodical literature represented a significant portion of a library’s budget. When I worked at the WSU Science and Engineering Library in the early 1980’s, three of the building’s seven stories were dedicated to periodical storage. One of my colleague’s workload was entirely devoted to preparing unbound journals to be bound with the proper titles and volume and date ranges printed in the proper color and font with the proper colored binding. Given the fact that some periodical titles included up to 10 physical volumes per calendar year, it was a massive undertaking.

Publishers quickly jumped onto the expense saving potential of digital publication. And as they began composing their content digitally, they began building a growing bank of content that consumers could directly access. Rather than relying on the content indexing that had previously been performed by highly trained human staff, this digital content would now be searchable by Boolean logic operators. Publishers invested significant sums to convert their archival content into digital format.

Library users can now choose among dozens of collections of content. No longer do they need to worry about accessing hard copy of desired articles. Better yet, they can save the entire text of relevant articles to flash drives or e-mail the text to themselves.

These electronic periodical databases are expensive investments for libraries to make. But the cost is offset by the fact that libraries no longer to invest in building and housing periodical collections.

As for the Wayne State University Science and Engineering Library that I worked in from January 1979-April 1985? The building was permanently closed in December 2013. Given the declining usage of the facility, it was no longer cost-effective to staff it. Most of the books in the building’s collection were selectively merged into the the collection of the recently opened Undergraduate Library (UGLI is a terrible name for any building), while items that haven’t been physically relocated can be paged from the closed building upon request. As for the thousands of bound periodical volumes that had resided on the 4th — 6th floors, I don’t know whether they’re still there or not. Given their limited value in a digital age and the high transport and storage expense, maybe they’ll go into a landfill when the University decides to tear down the building and replace it with something more urgently needed.

Interlibrary Loan

No library has ever been self-sufficent. Not the Library of Congress and not the British Lending Library. Researchers will always be seeking items that aren’t available locally.

There’s a long tradition of libraries sharing resources. An unused book is a sad, lonely thing. So long as there’s a user out there somewhere, it’s the librarian’s job to get the book to him or her.

My involvement with ILL (Interlibrary Loan) went back to the mid-1970’s at the University of Detroit Main Library. I was detailed to assist our ILL librarian, Aline Smith. Aline was a tiny woman who was increasingly crippled by arthritis.

The primary tool for searching the collections of major public and research libraries at that time was the National Union Catalog (NUC) one of the most massive research tools ever created. The Pre-1956 Imprints was a 754 volume set containing all older records in a consolidated alphabetical format, while the post-1955 volumes were published serially. Each of them listed the holdings of 1,100 major American and Canadian libraries. The 754 volumes collectively weighed over three tons, and poor Aline couldn’t manhandle those volumes any longer

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Each page consisted of reduced-size images of card catalog records of participating libraries. The NUC continued hard-copy publication into the early 1980’s when it mercifully switched over to a microfiche format.

But it was a highly cumbersome tool to use, and few librarians missed it when the ILL industry transitioned over from the postal service to OCLC in the late 1970’s. A staff member sitting at an OCLC terminal could specify up to five potential lenders for each ILL request. Should a potential lender be unable to fulfill the request or should three working days pass, the request would automatically be passed on to the next library in the lender queue. It felt magical. Fulfillment rates soared and turnaround time fell. It was a heady time to work in ILL.

Today, however, there are few remaining ILL librarians. That’s because technology now permits(at least in Michigan) individuals to ask remote libraries to send a particular title to the resident’s home public library. That’s the Melcat module of Mel.org (Michigan Electronic Library) system.

The Ever-Changing Role of Libraries

Throughout history, libraries have constantly struggled to redefine our roles. Think back to the times when hand-copied books were so valuable that they were chained to desks.

The 2020’s are no different. Yes, people still visit libraries to check out bestsellers, to consult shop manuals for broken-down cars, and to either verify old recipes or find new ones. And to introduce their children to story hours.

But libraries quickly stepped into the front lines when it came to educating users how to use emerging technologies. Especially in urban areas, a high speed internet connection is a luxury that many households can’t afford.

Visit almost any public library today and you’re likely to run across a volunteer tutor helping a sem-literate adult improve their reading skills. Librarians are actively involved in helping patrons to upgrade their employment toolkits and to explore career alternatives. And just as you’re likely to find a Starbucks at your local Barnes and Noble, you’ll find that coffee (but please don’t spill it on the books or the hardware) is no longer verboten.

For my professional career, however, it all started with one sentence. Mr. Maas over in the TIP Clearinghouse is looking for someone like you.

Thank you, Norm. For the support, the freedom to learn new things, and above all for your friendship. I miss you, buddy.