What were pre-Web library resources?
At my high school library circa 1992 they had what I think was Encarta for an encyclopedia (though it was so crappy compared to the paper Britannica that the only advantage it had was that there were thirty computers to use if someone was already using the volume of Britannica you needed. There were also sets of laser discs (heh heh) that contained digitized high resolution art so you could pull up, say, Picasso’s Guernica and zoom in on the details. One nearby tech college’s library had a set of CDs containing a pretty extensive full-text searchable collection of magazine and newspaper articles. A local liberal arts college had Unix terminals with some sort of telnet application (so over the internet but pre-Web, like smackfu mentions) that allowed card-catalog type searching. It only very rarely returned full text, rather it usually gave just the bibliographic info, but it had an extremely thorough catalog and would return results for academic journals and even doctoral papers. Unfor
I worked in a childrens’s department of a Toronto public library in 1991, two different university libraries in 1991-1992, and 1993-1995 (Hamilton and Toronto area) and ran a Toronto high school library 1995-1996. Children’s department: we were just moving from a card catalogue to an online catalogue. No other electronic resources were on hand. Universities: We had two very different OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) and a variety of specialized CD-ROMs, including ERIC, PsychLit, and a huge selection from DIALOG and Silver Platter. (I wrote a hell of a lot of guides and did one on on and classroom training on those). Online searching of commercial databases was available, but very expensive. We had some Net access in 1993, but it was telnet, USENET, gopher, archie, lynx and veronica. I remember us trying to actually make Mosaic retrieve a page and finally giving up and going off for tea. And yes, we still used microfiche. LOTS of microfiche. High school: We had a few encyclopedia
This is about 10-15 years before the time period that you specified, but here goes. In undergrad, I loved the Library of American Civilization ultrafiche / reader / catalog combination. I spent almost as many hours in the college library exploring those reprinted 19th century texts as I now do on the web. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, circa 1980 (when I was in library school), ‘dumb terminals’ had been newly set up to access the new online catalog, which ran in parallel with the existing card catalog (into which I filed many a catalog card). Students would stand in line to get access to those terminals. And the U of I also had plasma-screen PLATO terminals in many campus locations. I learned Boolean logic and search strategies for DIALOG and BRS from some of the early pioneers of library automation. I remember how much time we had to take off-line to formulate our search strategies because the connect
Databases on CD-ROM were pretty hot in the early 90’s. The library school’s lab at UCLA had a couple of computers with the ERIC database and Library Literature CD-ROMs. There might have been a few other databases, too, I can’t remember. When I moved on to my first library jobs (Central California, 1993-97), Infotrac was available to the public on CD-ROM. It’s so odd to think about the databases on CD-ROM now. We had to go in and replace them every few months when the new discs arrived. Oh, and miko, some libraries (SF area, public library) still have walls filled with hundreds of phone books and we like it that way.
