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

[Walt Crawford]

Tony Barry notes:
>The Commonwealth Parliamentary Library (Australia) had an automated
circulation system based on 80 col punched cards and tabulating equipment
in 1969.

>Weapons Research Establishment Library (Australia) had a number of
automated systems some years earlier than that.

I hadn't even mentioned UC Berkeley's circulation system (which I designed
and implemented in 1968: Hollerith cards, IBM collator, sorter,
keypunches), because my feeling is that 1968 was pretty late in the game
for first-generation circulation systems.

A good source on very early library use of technology is Klaus Musmann's
Technological Innovations in Libraries, 1860-1960: An Anecdotal History
(Greenwood Press, 1993). Unlike my writing, this one is exhaustively
researched and footnoted, and will lead to many good sources on early
library automation. Musmann cites a Hollerith-card circulation system at
Montclair Public Library in New Jersey--in 1941!

So, if you're into the sixties, you should be looking for computer-based
systems and early online catalogs/book catalogs; that's way too late to be
looking for origins of punched-card/tab equipment systems. (My own claim to
infamy, expressed in a Brian Aveney editorial in the Journal of Library
Automation, is that Berkeley's circ system--which I designed as a five-year
interim solution--was, at that point [early 1980s], possibly the
longest-surviving "library automation" system still running, unchanged, on
its original platform. It survived some years beyond that, until IBM, um,
encouraged Berkeley to shut it down by asserting the impossibility of
maintaining the IBM 188 Collator any longer...or at least that's the way I
heard it, second hand.)

Someone out there with access to a good library school library should be
able to pin down most of these beginnings. The University of Illinois began
its Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in 1963 (I presume,
since the second one was in 1964); ALA's Committee on Library Automation
(composed entirely of people who were involved in developing or operating
library systems) began in 1964; the Airlie Conference on library automation
was held in 1963; I believe Florida Atlantic's remarkable (if failed)
experiment was in full swing by 1965.