CentenniAL

American Libraries' First Hundred Years

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.

Each issue of American Libraries, like any magazine, is a product of its time. Even if you took out easy identification clues like dates and page design, with a bit of examination you could still group issues together by their time period.

Some years are easier than others, however. 1994's issues, for example, are striking for their use of the term "Information Superhighway" or close variants. ("N.Y. librarians fight to direct traffic on the info highway"; "Pac Bell's $100K gift paves the info highway on-ramp in Calif."; "At Senate hearing, librarians seek their place on the information highway"; "First bumper sticker on the Infobahn?"; etc.)

Ah, the nostalgia of it: the Mosaic web browser had just been released, popularizing the the World Wide Web amongst a still-technophobic public. To ease the transition, someone comes up with a catchy metaphor: "It's like a superhighway. For information." Before long, someone comes up with the quip, "I feel like roadkill on the information superhighway," and the term joins '80s hair on the list of embarrassing things that seemed to make sense at the time.

More dramatic (and dire) are the issues from the first half of 1947. That was the year that the Bulletin heralded, with great trepidation, the Atomic Age.

The tone was dark from the beginning, with the January issue's announcement of the theme of the Annual Conference, as determined at Midwinter: "A Moratorium on Trivia." (p. 19) Also at Midwinter, Council passed a resolution urging all libraries "to advance a true understanding on the part of all the people of atomic energy and its meaning for civilization", and that the ALA urge international control over atomic energy.

In several news stories, the Bulletin reported on an atomic energy education program developed by the ALA and Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore (or, perhaps, developed by EPFL with some aid from ALA; reports aren't consistent on that point) and presented at libraries around the country (Jan., p. 38, 53). It featured films and lectures with titles such as "While Time Remains", "One World or None", and "Don't Resign from the Human Race."

Major speeches at both Midwinter and Annual addressed the topic. In "Atomic Energy and Your Future," (p. 71-74) J.J. Nickson of Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago and Harrison S. Brown of the University of Chicago laid out three grim facts about the Bomb: there's no secret in how to make it, there's no defense, and there's no monopoly in the ability to make one. Their proposed solutions to the problem of nuclear war: Disperse cities into areas of not more than 100,000 people each (at an estimated cost of more than $200 billion and the suspension of the Bill of Rights), the maintenance of the military at wartime levels at all times (making nuclear war almost a foregone conclusion) or the elimination of sovereign nations and the establishment of a functioning world government (the only solution the speakers suggested was viable.)

At Annual, Joel H. Hildebrand, dean of the Graduate School of the University of California, gave an even less pleasant speech (Sep. 1, p. 273), basically reviewing a number of strategies for controlling atomic weapons—and then explaining why each wouldn't work.

But there was some hope expressed amidst the doom. In his April "Notes from the Corner Office," (p. 99) ALA Executive Secretary Carl H. Milam reported on Enoch Pratt's atomic energy education program with admiration: "It was based on four facts, or, if you like, assumptions: 1) Intelligent management of atomic energy is vital to the preservation of peace and the promotion of the public welfare. 2) The people of the U.S. and the world have it in their power—as never before—to decide how much management and control, and what kind, are desirable and necessary. 3) People should have informed opinions before they speak their minds. 4) The library, as a public institution for public enlightenment, can and should do something about it." His column was accompanied by a letter from journalist Leland Stowe, who spoke at the Baltimore program, that was even more complimentary of librarians and their role: "One of its aspects which cheers me mightily is this: Baltimore's answer to a crying nationwide need was born in a public library. ... The librarians and libraries of America can be, and should be, the Paul Reveres of 1947."

The tech desert in the ALA Bulletin continued, in reality, to 1933. The magazine's entrance into a more technological age was heralded relatively innocuously in the November issue of that year, with the printing of an abridged version of ALA President Harry Miller Lydenberg's speech at the Annual Conference in Chicago. Near the end of his speech (p. 492), Lydenberg observed that "With the camera, the offset process, the rubber blanket, the film slide, the phonograph record—to say nothing about radio broadcasting, television, sound pictures—so emphatically at our elbow, what can we as librarians do but ask earnestly where we may find the man with vision extensive enough and accurate enough to picture exactly whither we go and what we are to encounter? ... We are living in a new world, with a new emphasis on the machine."

The growing awareness of technology was echoed in the September 1934 Montreal Annual Conference proceedings. Helen Gordon Stewart, director of Fraser Valley Demonstration in British Columbia, spoke on "Social Trends," noting her generation's acceptance of change: "In our own experience we have run the gamut of a whole scale of new things from incubators and carpet sweepers to vitamines and television.... And if the future decrees that we shall travel from place to place as projectiles, I have no doubt we shall face our first human pea-shooter with the equanimity of a Jules Verne hero." (p. 485)

There were, certainly, specifics as well. A May 1934 article by Edward M. Peterson, chairman of the ALA Committee on Work with the Blind, reported on the development of the talking book (p. 243-244), noting that there were then two types of readers, one electric and one spring-driven, and that manufacturers were debating which materials to use in making the records and how to best maximize the disc capacity. An Oct. 1, 1937 article listed the mechanical equipment used in modern libraries, based on a survey of eight facilities. Among them: Label pasting machines, floor scrubbing and polishing machines, calculator machines, adding machines, typewriters, projectors, mimeographs, and stereopticons. The Bulletin was also covering radio, in terms of its potential for publicity, and movies, in terms of their value in collections, by this time.

But the first technological development that truly got major coverage in the Bulletin, the "killer app" of this post's title, was microphotography.

Between mid-1936 and late 1938, the Bulletin published nearly monthly articles on the topic. (Several of these articles have been digitized and are available online at the New Deal Network.) It began in August 1936, with coverage of a microphotography symposium at the Annual Conference in Richmond (p. 719-723). That symposium developed into the Microphotography Round Table, which held a fiery meeting at the 1937 New York Annual Conference (p. 808-813), where "The crowd of five hundred who packed the Sert Room to overflowing then demanded a show-down on projectors, while the group that lunched together afterward were equally insistent on starting a new journal." It also never met again.

But in those two years, the Bulletin covered numerous aspects of the practice: Uses, including current ones like filming newspapers, and experimental ones like filming encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone directories; practical considerations like how to care for and catalog the films; comparisons of cameras; news; and a speculative article in the April 1938 issue (p. 241-243) suggesting that library card catalogs could be transferred to microfilm. (This last one brings back happy memories of using the microfiche at my childhood library—and a certain amusement, remembering my father's angry resistance to it.)

After 1938, technology coverage slipped into the background once again: I suspect due to a combination of the heavy coverage microphotography had received and the impending war. It won't be like that for long, though: Big Blue makes its first appearance in the Bulletin in 1944, and in Part 3.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

In the early years, the Bulletin of the American Library Association usually published six issues per year, but it was primarily devoted to publishing the Annual Conference proceedings. (In 1907, for example, the proceedings took up the 326-page July issue. The other five issues totaled only 109 pages, and 65 of those were the ALA Handbook.)

There wasn't a huge amount of tech talk at those conferences, and what there was tended to touch on the subject only obliquely. A 1907 paper (page 163) by C. H. Brown, a reference librarian at Chicago's John Crerar library, titled "Use of Scientific and Technical Books," advocates for the value of technical collections (while dropping lines such as "Public libraries are useful to the women and children but not so much to the men. ... Women use books as playthings; men as tools."). The 1910 conference in Mackinac Island, Michigan, had an exhibition of such books (page 598), although Elwood McClelland, head of the committee that organized it, felt the need to apologize for how hastily prepared the exhibit was, noting that "Many of those interested have already found their way to it, probably more by reason of its accessibility than its merit." A 1908 survey (page 208) of the Pratt Institute's library school curriculum noted that business skills had been dropped from the program entirely, with the exception of typewriting, which had been made optional.

The first real coverage of technology itself comes in 1911, and outside the conference coverage. A two-paragraph story on page 45 of the May issue covers an informal conference of library educators, where attendees concluded that stereopticon slides could have use in library education, "if some means of obtaining them for temporary use by different schools could be effected, as the purchase of a large collection by any one school would be too expensive."

The year 1914 saw a bit more serious coverage of technology, as the Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., featured an exhibit of labor-saving devices, including typewriters; manifolding machines; machines for billing, dictating, and adding; and vacuum cleaners. One of two articles previewing the exhibits promised that "there will also be a number of devices shown which are not so widely known. Perhaps the most important of these will be the photographic copying machines." (May, page 65). Photostat and Rectigraph, two of the three major manufacturers of copiers at the time, demonstrated their products at the Exhibits.

The copiers were prominent enough to have a technical paper on the use of the Photostat machine presented at the 1916 conference, by Walter T. and Maude Kellerman Swingle of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (page 194).

Coverage of the exhibit was omitted from the conference proceedings, but a review in the November issue (page 507) by C. Seymour Thompson, who had coordinated the exhibit, called for the creation of a "clearing house" of information about such labor-saving devices. Work began on it, but, in 1917, the committee reported to Council that the work had been "unavoidably delayed" (Jan., page 30). The United States' entry into World War I put the Association's focus on the war, and it appears the work was never completed.

—Greg Landgraf, American Libraries editorial assistant.

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CentenniAL

Categories: Technology, Internet

09/06/07

10:51:34 am Technology Coverage, Part 3: From Big Blue to the Computer, 1944-1965

07/10/07

10:05:30 am The Bulletin Goes Atomic

06/05/07

04:17:52 pm Technology Coverage, Part 2: The First Killer App, 1923-1943

02/20/07

03:06:41 pm Technology Coverage, Part 1: The Tech Desert, 1907-1922

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