I was a bit overexcited when I opened the September 1944 issue of the ALA Bulletin and found an article on Montclair (N.J.) Public Library's use of International Business Machines to analyze library usage statistics. In my head, IBM equals computers, and computers equal cool. (This is despite knowing the former statement to be untrue. I'll stand by the latter.)

In any event, the inspiringly-titled "Business Machine—Tool of Library Progress" (Sep. 1944, p. 291-294) wasn't about a computer by the modern (electronic and programmable) definition; IBM didn't introduce its first model until that year, although a few other machines had been built by then. While there's no explicit model or even machine type listed, it looks like Montclair was using a punchcard-based tabulating machine. (Author Felix E. Hirsch referred to the "Ten minutes of sorting time, which is sufficient for a considerable run of cards" needed to find the answer to a demographic question.)

Despite starring only a computer precursor, the article seems to have the energy and excitement of the herald of a new, computerized, era. No doubt they'll arrive on the scene shortly, right?

Well... not quite. There were, perhaps, a few nods in that direction in the coming years: an address at the 1946 Annual Conference reprinted in the September issue of that year (p. 261) by Tennessee Valley Authority Director David Lilienthal asked the now-age-old question "Is the machine good, or is it evil?", while a September 1956 article by Frank Anderson of East Chicago Public Library mused on what libraries would be like in 2006. (Among his predictions: Carnegie libraries would be razed to make space for heliports; physical books will all be filmed and then shredded and sold for waste paper, which would be used in boxes to pack nuclear device components; and an automated "electronic book plucker" that could search circulation records kept on IBM punchcards.)

I'd say the computer age didn't really reach the Bulletin until the March 1959 issue, in which ALA Associate Executive Director Richard B. Harwell announced the Library Technology Project, a grant-funded program at ALA with a full-time staff of five. Even that's not quite accurate: While the Project soon turned its attention to the use of computers in libraries, its initial charge was to develop standards for library supplies, to contribute to the development of new or redesigned library equipment (including an inexpensive microfilm reader, scuff-free paperclips, and a permanent ink), and to maintain a clearinghouse of information on library technology.

Even if the Library Technology Project wasn't instantly focused on computer technology, others were. In October 1961, Jesse H. Shera (former bigwig in the Junior Members Round Table and then dean of the School of Library Science at Western Reserve University) published "Automation Without Fear." (p. 787-794) This article identifies three sources of fear of computers: psychological, technological, and economic; it describes potential uses of computers in reference work—the examples, while specific, appear to be hypothetical rather than based on actual uses at the time; and it ruminated on the question of whether or not computers can "think." (It also represents what I believe to be the first time the Bulletin used the word "computer" to refer to the machines so familiar to us today.)

The Library Technology Project joined the computer game by 1963. The project's director, Frazer Poole, reported on the four-day Conference on Libraries and Automation in the July-August issue of that year (p. 658-659).

About 100 people attended the conference, a meeting of two worlds: librarians and computer experts. Despite high-level support—Librarian of Congress L. Quincy Mumford opened the first session—the conference was rough going. "It was obvious to even the casual observer that the computer experts and the librarians were not always talking the same language," Poole wrote. He noted the skepticism held by many of the attending librarians that computers could improve processes at all, and observed a basic failure to communicate. "In too many instances, librarians were saying, in effect: Tell us what your machines can do and we will tell you whether we can use them. The machine men, on the other hand, stated again and again their basic tenet: Tell us your requirements and we will tell you what machines can do to help libraries."

But the Library Technology Project did, finally, lead to concrete computer applications, reported in 1964 and 1965 in a series of seven articles by engineer-librarian Joseph Becker. He covered: MEDLARS, the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System at the National Library of Medicine; the University of California at San Diego's experiments with using computers to maintain serial holdings records for 1,500 titles (with 3,500 more promised); Los Angeles County Public Library's use of computers to automatically generate a printed catalog of its 223,000 titles; a remote-retrieval system demonstrated at the New York World's Fair; the IBM Research Library's computer-based circulation record updating and maintenance; Pennsylvania State University Library's systems analysis project; and a case study of Florida Atlantic University, which was established in 1964 and whose library was the first in the United States to use computer-based data processing from its founding.

Sure, the programs aren't sophisticated by today's standards; it would be absurd to expect them to be. (If we accept Moore's law as an estimate, computing power has doubled 28 times since then, so we've got about 268 million times more juice to work with.) MEDLARS, for example, required a typist to prepare catalog entries on a special typewriter, which converted letters to punched holes on a paper tape, which could be spliced together, and run through a machine to transfer that information to magnetic tape. That tape was read by a computer, which could: Compare subject headings with a master list to detect errors; generate full citations and create cross-references; sort citations alphabetically; and "look for logical errors in the citations themselves and print out exactly where they occur," although the article doesn't specify how.

Still, it's a start. Welcome, computer era.

As I prepare to leave for Annual, I'd like to share a conference-related curiosity from the middle years of the ALA Bulletin: Fashion advice.

From 1935 through 1961 (though not in every year), the Bulletin offered suggestions on what to wear at conference. These articles covered the type of weather to expect, but in most cases they also provided style guidance—in detail simultaneously delightful and grotesque to my T-shirt-and-jeans fashion sensibility.

In Boston in 1941 (Apr., p. 232–236), for example, Hugh McLennon of Wm. Filene's Sons Co. advised women (he called them "feminine visitors") to bring an assortment of "light cotton washables of the tailored variety," a lightweight wool coat, a tailored lightweight wool suit, and a lightweight pastel wool. He also encouraged visitors to take advantage of the beaches, noting that "Suits of the more daring variety are not unknown nor are they unappreciated here. Men, however, must wear tops at most of the local beaches."

McLennon's advice to men (yes, he did call them "masculine visitors") included: a summer "weightsuit," a medium-weight gabardine or flannel with a topcoat or sport jacket, a white Palm Beach tuxedo jacket over black or midnight-blue dress trousers for formal evening wear, and a white suit or white flannels with a dark blue or camel's-hair jacket for informal evenings.

The next year (May 1942, p. 332–333), an unnamed representative of Emma Lange, Inc., advised conference attendees that women in the host city of Milwaukee acclaim their city a "suit town" and wear suits of all types, "plus their accompanying colorful display of sweaters and blouses, frills, dickys, ruches, and jabots." Men seemed to have it a bit easier, although the author warned that "white and very light suits are seldom seen" and that "slacks are worn everywhere with separate sport coats."

A brief unsigned note in the April 1946 issue (p. 136) suggested that due to lingering effects of wartime restrictions on the clothing markets, attendees dress formally or informally at Annual as they saw fit. (Feel free to try to wrap your head around what precisely was intended with the line "Obviously, no male President would dare to set himself up as a moderator of convention fashions.") Fashion concerns returned with a vengeance in the May 1947 issue (p. 142), in which one Anne M. Farrell declared that "While the hatless craze is practiced to a small extent in San Francisco, it is usually the school or college girl who is the devotee." (So if you're not wearing a hat, congratulations—you're part of a craze!)

The next "What to Wear" articles, in 1948 and 1959, came in verse.

Yes, poetry.

Highlights from "ALA couture" the far more extensive May 1959 edition (p. 419) by Helen-Anne Hilker that covered Washington, D.C., fashion trends:

"Since the strong sex still comes crated
'Mid cravat and shirt outdated,
Males may find our June like Hades.
(Summer's not so rough on ladies.)
Men of Butte, Seattle, Akron—
Come in cotton loomed with dacron.
Wool and man-made textile mated
Rank with suits of silk light-weighted."

"Pert chapeaux do add allure so,
Hats are smart—not de rigueur, 'tho.
Gauntlets are another matter,
Even when you snub your hatter.
Gloves are worn—not clutched—for highlight.
Hands are clad from dawn past twilight!"

The series, such as it was, concluded at the Cleveland conference in the April 1961 issue (p. 365–366) with a tour de force combo of his-and-hers articles by husband-and-wife "fashion authorities" Rita and Oscar Bergman. Rita recommended "that seven-day wonder, the shirtwaist dress" for women, calling it a "lifesaver for today's busy woman with places to go and not much time to change into outfit after outfit," along with simple and minimal accessories. Oscar's suggestions, on the other hand, were precise: "6 short-sleeve dress shirts, 2 long-sleeve white shirts for the evening parties, 3 sport shirts, 8 pairs of hose, 3 neckties, 6 linen changes, pajamas, and handkerchiefs."

If you're looking for last-minute fashion advice for D.C., I'm afraid I can't be of much help, but I do have one suggestion: Wear clothes. Historically, very few ALA sessions have welcomed those who are nude.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

I am always filled with regret at the passing of someone I adored but never spent enough time with, only called when I needed something, and never told how much she was loved and admired. Such a person was Barbara Gittings, whom I met for the first time in 1999, long after she had blazed a trail for gay rights in the American Library Association, being one of the key activists who formed the Association’s Gay Task Force. She died February 18 at the age of 75 after a courageous battle with cancer.

Gittings

In the December 1999 issue, American Libraries published a three-page interview with Gittings. She sat for the interview at ALA’s Annual Conference in New Orleans, where she had come to see the task force become a full-fledged round table, now called the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. It seemed a fitting piece to publish in the last issue of the 20th century.

I approached Barbara Gittings cautiously, fearing the worst—that she would be humorless, strident, or priggish. As I reread the interview eight years later, I realize that it does not do justice to how untrue those characterizations turned out to be.

Barbara Gittings holds the Civil Liberties Achievement Award she received at PrideFest America at the Free Library of Philadelphia April 27, 1999, in recognition of her role as an organizer of ALA's Task Force on Gay Liberation and her efforts to open American libraries to gay and lesbian literature.

Gittings was an activist of the first order, but she was a professional activist. She understood what worked and what didn’t in the context of the American civil rights movement. The thing that impressed me most about her was the way she was able to combine a ferocious dedication to the cause with a cock-eyed optimism, kindness, and gentle sense of humor. The insults and resistance she endured while marching in public protests during the 1960s seemed only to have increased her resolve that people are basically good, that ignorance is the worst enemy of humanity, and that working with librarians was “my best experience of all.”

I remember very clearly that her enthusiasm was infectious and irrepressible. She was a person filled with a joy and vitality that no defeat could squelch. If she spoke of defeat, it was only of what she had learned from it and how she was then propelled to try even harder next time. The other thing that does not come through loudly enough in the interview is that Barbara Gittings was a person filled with and motivated by love and curiosity. She had that rare ability when she talked to you to make you feel that you were the most interesting and remarkable person in the world.

One piece of the interview that I left out of the published piece was the discussion we had over the new name of the ALA round table. I asked her if she didn’t think it was a little unwieldy. At first, I could not get her to disparage the title. It was just folks trying to be inclusive, she said. I countered by asking what was wrong with “gay”? Hadn’t Ellen DeGeneres just the year before shouted the famous words “I'm gay” into an airport microphone on her television show?

After a lot of laughing and coaxing, I finally did get Barbara Gittings to say that she thought “gay” was a perfectly wonderful word, a happy word to describe a whole sphere of sexual identity possibilities without resorting to the rather clinical choices of the ‘90s movers and shakers in the gay community.

There was a lot of discussion going on in those days about the word “gay,” with some purists arguing that they didn’t like to see the word appropriated by a political movement to mean something other than happy. In Gittings’s case, it was a specious argument, for it meant both. She had reached a conclusion early in her life—the kind of conclusion that made by enough people at the same time can lead to a sexual revolution—that there was nothing sick or evil about falling in love with a person of the same sex.

The last time I saw Barbara Gittings was in 2003, when she was awarded ALA’s highest honor, Honorary Membership, at the Annual Conference in Toronto. I had lunch with her and her beloved partner Kay Tobin Lahusen. They both pooh-poohed the SARS scare that had kept so many from attending. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Barbara said. Although she was already weakened and struggling with breast cancer, there was not a shred of self-pity or despair in her voice.

I wonder now, how to honor such a remarkable woman. Perhaps the best way is to remember the way she lived—fully, joyously, and on her own terms. In her own words:

Barbara Gittings and author Isabel Miller at the Task Force on Gay Liberation's "Hug a Homosexual" kissing booth at the 1971 ALA Annual Conference.

“For years I would haunt libraries and secondhand book shops trying to find stories to read about my people, and then I became active in other arenas of the gay rights movement, but I always kept an eye on the emerging literature. It was just coming up, very slowly, in the 1960s, just a tiny handful of books. It began to talk about homosexuals who were healthy and happy and wholesome and who had good lives. Then…I heard that a group of gay librarians had formed a caucus within the American Library Association and they were going to do something about the literature and the problems in the profession. That rang the bells for me—libraries, gay books!” She remembered the “Hug a Homosexual” booth the group set up at an ALA conference. “I had a great deal of fun,” she recalled, but a lot of the response was negative. “One librarian said, ‘I fail to see how the subject of homosexuality is relevant to libraries,” Gittings laughed. “And I like to say, well, I hope she got new glasses.”

—Leonard Kniffel, American Libraries editor in chief.

Memories from AL Editor Leonard Kniffel.

A hundred years no longer seems like a very long time to me. For that matter, written human history doesn’t seem like much time either—a couple hundred generations or so. No doubt this view of time is precipitated by my age. A mere 40 years ago, I had just graduated from high school and American Libraries was only 60 years old, the age I will be this year. Not much time at all.

My high school librarian, Ruth Lyons, was born in 1922, when AL, then called the Bulletin of the American Library Association, was just 15 years old. I was not aware of it in the 1960s, of course, but she was part of a progressive movement to build powerful and empowering libraries in schools across America. By the time she had built one in Armada High School and I was a student library assistant fresh off the farm, I figured that was the way it was everywhere. Man, was I wrong.

Ruth Lyons making the library work, Armada Area (Mich.) High School, circa 1966.

The legendary Mary Virginia Gaver, writing in the January 1966 ALA Bulletin, made a beautiful case for the value of school libraries. By that time, my Mrs. Lyons was already a believer. Our library, in probably the most pleasant and nicely windowed room at AHS, was a haven for individualized study, a paradise of free inquiry, and, with discipline, compassion, and a subtle sense of humor, Mrs. Lyons kept it that way.

In her 1966 article, however, Gaver noted the challenges school librarians and all who believed in them faced. “School libraries are on the fringes of education,” she said. “Many teachers do not understand the role of the school library in the modern school or are apathetic in accepting any part in it.” She went on to say that most teacher-education programs “lack the basic resources needed to orient future teachers and school administrators to the role school library/instructional materials centers can play in their future success.”

“Most college librarians do not concern themselves with the establishment or maintenance of an organized collection of instructional materials at the elementary or secondary levels as a proper responsibility of their institution’s library,” Gaver, then president-elect of the American Library Association, concluded.

Three years earlier, ALA had launched the Knapp School Libraries Project, under the direction of Peggy Sullivan, who would become ALA president in 1980 and executive director in 1992. As Sullivan put it in a March 2003 AL article on the history of the project, it was a time when “the concept of library was evolving into the center for media in schools” and “forward-looking leaders” wanted to “show people what a good library program could contribute to a school.”

That period, 1963–1966, coincided precisely with my four years in high school, and Mrs. Lyons was so “forward-looking” that she convinced the powers that be that our town needed a strong school library. She urged me to sign up for library class and then pushed me to meetings of regional student library groups with acronyms like SLAM, SLAW, and SLOCOM, and eventually to a bizarre and wonderful phenomenon known as library summer camp on the campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where the jam-packed daily agenda made room for both swimming and book discussions.

What strikes me as most strange about all of these memories is this: Were Ruth Lyons running a school library media center today just as she ran it in 1966, it would be viewed as a marvel of progressive design. Furthermore, large sections of Mary Gaver’s “Teacher Education and School Libraries” that address the need for educators to understand the role of the library and the librarian depict the same crying needs as those of many American school systems today.

Ruth Lyons died last September at the age of 84. I had kept in touch with her through the years with letters and cards, and before I learned of her death, I had decided that this was the year—in honor of the AL centennial—when we simply had to reunite. I wanted to go back to Armada with her and take a walk through the new high school and ask her to reflect on the colossal effort I am now sure it must have taken to establish the library that opened the world up to me and to so many other students. I waited too long, and now it will never happen.

It’s a proven fact that time accelerates as we get older—40 years, 84 years, 100 years, a drop in the bucket. The more years that have passed since library camp, the shorter and more glorious that period seems. Our professional reading should play a role in developing the same kind of compassion and determination in librarians today that enabled Mrs. Lyons to influence me—and so many others—in ways that last a lifetime.

I invite you to share your “Comments” on this CentenniAL blog—memories of influential articles, debates, or advice that reached you through our pages. Help us send American Libraries into its second century by looking back at what went right—or wrong—in the first.

—Leonard Kniffel, AL editor, 1995–present.