What were pre-Web library resources?
I worked in a pre-WWW library at the University of Washington in Seattle. We had a lot of access to databases via a few models – DIALOG and the like, fee-based databases that the university had a subscription to and users who understood the really complicated query languages could access sometimes [I think most of the time end users weren’t allowed to search these, I can’t remember if this was true for Lexis Nexis and the like]. Each company had its own query languages [sort of like how different search engines did this a little bit] and when you were in library school you’d learn different query languages and how to be efficient because you paid by the query in some cases. – Networked CD based databases. So people could search stuff like AGRICOLA, I think, by searching a networked computer that had a CD changer with a shitton of data on it. So I was at the reference desk and I would help students access t
I remember the University of Iowa library had a Telnet portal that let you search books by any thing that would be in the card catalog (title, author, subject, etc). It would tell you if it was checked in or, if out, when it was due back, and which library (if not the main) it was in. It was probably the same system that the librarians used behind the counter but I’m pretty sure anyone with Telnet could access it. This would be 1991 or so. However there was no access to the content within the books, nor did the library provide access to any “digital only” media as far as I know. (There was a good, ‘net connected computer lab, and it was there I saw my first web browser in 1994, but I don’t think they had, say, a digital encyclopedia you could use.) The computers available were generally more powerful than what a person would have at home (For example, they had probably 8 or 10 NeXT’s., and
With jessamyn’s note as a reminder I would add that in my early 1990s college, functions were separated in way they probably are not today. We did have access to Usenet and could use Gopher terminals — but these were located in the Computing Center, which was not part of the library, but was hosted and maintained in the mathematics and science building as sort of an offshoot of the engineering department. The library had the terminal with our library’s online catalogy (actually a 5 college consortium catalog linked together) and access to the psychology database, whatever that was called. But to get into the online internet archives of other college systems (1990-93 is what I’m speaking of) we had to submit an application to the Computing Services department to get a login which would allow us to use the Unix terminals to access whatever was out there on the internet. I wish I could say I used it for scholarly purposes but I learned Unix only to email my friends at other schools (“hey
