[WEB4LIB] Re: Please help SLJ: Milestones in Library Technology

[Prentiss Riddle]

> Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 13:55:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: "Thomas Dowling" <tdowling at ohiolink.edu>
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Please help SLJ: Milestones in Library Technology
> 
> My hazy recollection is that a few library web sites were around in 1993.
> Prentiss Riddle: I seem to recall Rice being one of them.  Is that right?

My recollection is hazy, as well, but looking back at old e-mail I see
that was a bit early for Rice.  In January 1993 we were still heavily
invested in gopher -- that's when we deployed a bunch of tape-loaded
bibliographic databases accessible via gopher and WAIS.

In January 1994 we went public with a web front-end to our primarily
still gopher-based CWIS.  In February 1994 we fleshed out the web site
to correspond to two levels of our gopher site, so I'm guessing that's
when our library web site probably debuted.  We didn't start loading it
heavily with gopher-free content until later in the spring.

One person the SLJ folks may want to talk to is Billy Barron, whose
database of Internet-accessible OPACs was a hot ticket in the early
gopher world.  He might know when library web sites first appeared on
his radar.  A while back Billy and I and some other old farts of the
gopher era packaged some things up and sent them in to Brewster Kahle's
Internet Archive.  Assuming it's not a "Write Once, Read Never" device,
Brewster would be another good person to talk to.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle