What were pre-Web library resources?

May 27, 2009 7:20 PM

What were the typical resources available to U.S. library users in the early 90's (that is, pre-WWW)?

I am assuming that most library (academic, public, or other) users would have had access to the online catalog, reference librarians, and the materials in the stacks. What other resources, especially in digital form, would they have had access to?

It would be helpful if the locale and type of library were specified in the answer.

posted by needled to grab bag (24 comments total)

Our small town library had 100 years of the local newspaper on microfilm and a viewer that would print out photostats.
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:32 PM on May 27

Microfiche!

And actual card catalogues.

I remember that my history professors would reserve articles for us to read in the reading room. There was a duotang at the desk you would use to look up your course's reading list, and then you could check out a photocopied journal article.

I also remember registering for courses by touch-tone telephone.
posted by KokuRyu at 7:34 PM on May 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

There was a database for articles in psychology and the human sciences that I can remember using for my education and human development classes.

For everything else, it was the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, or field-specific print indexes that the reference librarians would turn you on to. They also just had complete runs of and subscriptions to all the major journals, so once you found your article, you requested and read it in the print version.

I'm so glad I experienced libraries pre-digitization. It helped me create a really concrete information framework in some ways.
posted by Miko at 7:36 PM on May 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

In the early 1990s, I don't remember knowing libraries even held LPs in their collections. All I knew about were books, magazines, and interlibrary loan. I didn't start to recognize how fundamentally awesome my access was, as a patron, until the mid-1990s when the Multnomah County Library in Portland became a regular part of my life. I've used libraries for books since I was four years old, but I didn't know they could do more until about 1996.
posted by cgc373 at 7:37 PM on May 27

A lot of the computer stuff was via telnet to Gopher systems, which are 99% gone now. Here is an example of one that is still around, and frozen in time in 1993.
posted by smackfu at 7:39 PM on May 27

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 these databases from a set of computer stations, many of which would have access to just one or two databaes. You can google "silver platter" for an example of what the interface to this sort of thing lookd like. At other libraries I worked at in the mid-nineties, libraries [like the Freedom Forum News Library in Bucharest Romania] used a Silver Platter system to give people access to the complete text (can't rememeber date range but it was extensive) New York Times which was pretty darned cool and not duplicated on the web for quite some time. These were basically clunky interfaces to big text-based CD databases, very DOS-like
- online catalog - these have pretty much existed since at least the mid-eighties in colleges. UW had the best one I've ever seen, a homegrown one which was called WILLOW which is still, 15 years later, better than any other online catalog in terms of customization and ease of use
- terminals where students could access email and web-like stuff via gopher, telnet and lynx [we had access to UW stuff via gopher at least as early as I was in library school which was 1994, and pretty sure before that]. There was a lot of information on gopher.
- Usenet - which was a big deal in the early nineties.

Public libraries often had graphical catalog interfaces that looked more like windows-based stuff and the web sent people scurrying to get the "online catalogs" that were on screens in the libraries to actual "online" catalogs on the web. Many library software vendors still charge libraries for moving from a local catalog to one accessible on the web, for which they should be strung up by their toes. Anything else specific you are curious about?
posted by jessamyn at 7:40 PM on May 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Totally the opposite of digital, but in the early 90s I remember that the Stark County District Library (Canton, OH) had film strips available! A large collection of Our Gang and Laurel & Hardy, as well as some Chaplin films I think. I also remember that the library offered art; that is, various framed prints that one could check out for the usual loan period and hang up in one's living room if desired.
posted by Knicke at 7:44 PM on May 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

My public high school library had a newly acquired encyclopedia set on CD ROM which I remember being shown in freshman library orientation, 1994.
posted by frobozz at 7:45 PM on May 27

Sorry, that should be 35 mm films rather than film strips.
posted by Knicke at 7:45 PM on May 27

CD-ROMs - an entire encyclopedia on a bunch of CDs. Awesome!
posted by Frank Grimes at 7:47 PM on May 27

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 you could check out stuff like scanners and digital cameras (for use only within the library). This was before ZIP drives became popular so I remember using optical WORM drives for bigger multimedia projects.

I left in '96, but as I remember all of the "stuff" was in the books, and microfilm/fiche. The digital resources were the same as you'd find in any computer lab on campus at the time. Which was quite a lot really, between Telnet, FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Usenet, etc. There was a lot of data on the internet before the web happened. Most university computers were connected to the net, though most people didn't know it and only used the monochrome dumb terminals. There was a modem pool that the students could dial in for free and access the internet from there, so even then the data resources weren't limited to the library. (Though probably 1 in 100 students even had a modem at that time.)

On preview, what they said.
posted by Ookseer at 7:49 PM on May 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

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 there's this way called email that you can send letters for free"), and then gradually discovered that there was stuff like song lyric and dirty joke and Shakespeare archives, and MUDs and BBses, and it was downhill from there.

But all that was separate from the library at the time, at least at my school.

One thing I remember vividly about the library I worked in as a page in high school was that we had an entire room of phone books from around the country. Every now and and then we'd get a new one mailed and I'd have to replace the old one in its binder. This was how you found out about what businesses were happening in communities around the country. I spent a lot of time scouring these phone books during my very first job searches when I was looking for summer camp jobs out of state. That and the Peterson's Guide to summer camp programs were really the only way to find out what was out there.

The idea of messing around with the sheer bulk of hundreds of phone books seems odd now.
posted by Miko at 7:51 PM on May 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

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. Unfortunately you usually found something that was exactly what you needed but wasn't physically present in the library and many things that couldn't even be gotten on interlibrary loan.

Geographically this is in the Greater Boston area, so both within the Silicon-Valley-esque Massachusetts Route 128 region and within the sphere of Harvard and MIT and other early academic internet nodes, and hence for a relatively rural, not especially wealthy area it might have been more online and computerized than many similar parts of the world.
posted by XMLicious at 7:53 PM on May 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

Just to clarify, by "digital resources" I am thinking of things like CD-ROMs and databases in addition to stuff like Telnet or Gopher. One of the things I am curious about is if a typical end-user (and not a librarian) would have had access to something like PsycInfo or DIALOG in the early 90's. And thanks for reminding me that computers for patron use were resources available in libraries already in the early 90's!
posted by needled at 7:55 PM on May 27

a typical end-user (and not a librarian) would have had access to something like PsycInfo or DIALOG in the early 90's.

PsychInfo is probably the one I'm thinking of. Yes, the students had access to it without librarian assistance. At the beginning of the academic year there were training sessions to familiarize students with what was available in the library and in what format.
posted by Miko at 7:58 PM on May 27

You know, I think my high school actually had a local copy of PsychInfo if I'm remembering correctly and if it was indeed sold in that format. It was kind of stupid and annoying because that was the only computerized resource we had that returned references to periodicals but the only course the school had that touched on psychology at all was a half-semester intro course that didn't even run most years because not enough people signed up for it.
posted by XMLicious at 8:11 PM on May 27

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 CDs, but indexes and full text magazine CDs were very expensive for us. I managed to get a free trial for a few months, but our budget wouldn't stretch to a full subscription. We had several computers with Net access in the library, plus all the ones in the computer lab, so this was where are students started to do online research. Our grade 13 computer class started a project to create an online catalogue to replace the card catalogue, but it was never implemented.
posted by maudlin at 8:20 PM on May 27

I feel like the answer to the DIALOG question is "no" but stuff like PsycInfo is a definitely maybe. When I was in college [late 80's] I could get a librarian to do what I *think* was a DIALOG search for me to track down magazine articles on a topic that I was writing a paper on. This would have been maybe 1989 and I had to tell her what I was looking for and she returned a list of citations that she had gotten from the database and then I had to go look up the magazine articles myself.

At the Natural Sciences Library [94-96] I know we had AGRICOLA and some sort of rainfall abstracts, but I'll have to check the Internet Archive to see what else we had... Hmm thanks to a robots.txt file the web page I made in 1996 is no longer accessible! You can see what the forestry library had available in 1996 though, for example and here's what UW's engineering library had in 1996. This set of guides might also be important. Some of these would be web based but most were likely locally networked, though maybe just web ported if they were on the web.
posted by jessamyn at 8:23 PM on May 27

I had access to DIALOG and AGRICOLA but I seem to remember having to take a class to use DIALOG. There was another databse that I want to say was called BIOSCI or BIOLOG or something like that?

We also had access to the entire UC system via the online catalog. I can't remember what it was called but I remember it being very irritating to use. Microfiches, digitized maps and GIS-based info was just starting to become available as a reference though it wasn't very nifty or interactive and you had to go use special computers to look at it. Finally, in 92 or 93 we had this online study aid thing that we could access from library computers but that no one used because it was so difficult. I think they brought it back to life a few years later as Blackboard.

There were some text books or reference books on CD but they tended to be crappy like Encarta and made us all think that putting info on the internet was a waste of time. We also thought that computers with an entire gigabyte of memory were totally ridiculous unless you were coding DNA or something. Ah, youth. Three years later I was working for a media heavy website.

Stuff changed incredibly fast in the early 90s so I bet there was some nifty library stuff that got overlooked.
posted by fshgrl at 8:50 PM on May 27

I would add that my university's library also had a massive vinyl LP collection, and, before the age of the internet, Amazon and YouTube, this vinyl collection was the only way to learn about, say, soukous music in the Congo, for example.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:21 AM on May 28

In Maine our school and town libraries had Infotrac and Newsbank (I think) running on computers with text in orange or green. A few had card catalogs online. I thought those things were just about the coolest thing ever until we got an internet connection and I found I could connect to Hollis via telnet. It was hard to know what books were available to request from other libraries without something like that. Gopher was cool in theory but never seemed to have much in it. Only a few places invested much into it. U Michigan stands out for some reason. Not sure why.

There were only a few CDROMs available. The only one I ever bothered with was the phone directory and encyclopedia ones. They also had shareware. There was some Newsbank like thing that had info on CIA type things (people, events, etc.). I don't remember it's name though. 'News' might have been in the name. I think the CIA World Factbook was available as well.
posted by jwells at 5:44 AM on May 28

I started grad school in 1988, and had use of Emory University's well-funded libraries (though I wasn't a student there), so I was really on the front line of a lot of the digital developments. When I started, nothing was on CD-ROM (at least nothing that I needed). Within a year or so, though, things started really moving. The MLA bibliography came out on CD; only one student could use it at a time, and in the library, only. Soon came the ability to download the MLA search results to a floppy disk, which saved me immense amounts of time. Then it got put on a server so multiple students could use it. Online catalogs were just coming out, then early internet access to those catalogs came along. There really was something new every month or so, it seemed, and those of us who were early adopters had huge advantages over those who weren't--hell, probably 95% of students were using typewriters at the time.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:05 AM on May 28

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 time was so expensive. I also remember a course exercise in which we used an IBM punch card machine (even then it was an antique) to run an SPSS analysis.

(This thread is making me feel as old as the one in which someone asked which Star Trek series to watch in order to understand the new movie. Sigh.)

These days, I teach part-time in a local community college and try to help my undergraduates understand that just because something can be found on the web, that doesn't mean it qualifies as an academically-appropriate resource for a paper.
posted by apartment dweller at 9:35 AM on May 28

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.
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 8:49 PM on May 28