Communications advances have brought many changes in the library field The Russian philosopher Gurdjieff used to train his scholars to stop at a moment's notice.

Communications advances have brought many changes in the library field

The Russian philosopher Gurdjieff used to train his scholars to stop at a moment's notice, be chilled their positions, and think about what it was they were doing and thinking at that instant. Certain years have that force on us, and the last of the significant years is about to pass our way.

Like many population of my generation, I went to descry the film 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and came away feeling like I had been to space. There are millions of us who can't hear The melancholy Danube without thinking of space stations. For years we aweed "What will the world really be like in 2001? Will there still be an Earth? Will I still be here? Will family still drive in cars?" by the agency of now, as we mark the last small in number weeks of 2000, we can be comely certain of the answers.

Between that screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the at hand there have been many milestones for me as an information professional:

* 1976--I gave up reading science fiction because I decided that real life was becoming more interesting than the stories.

* 1977--The library where I worked as a paraprofessional bought its first computer plan The titles and authors were input from temporary workers. We were still cleaning up the mes 10 years later.

* 1984--Another famous year. After a week or pair nobody cared.

* 1985--I started working with microcomputers, developing an interest that continues to this day. That first machine ran forward a pair of 5-inch drives. Memory and storage capacity were measured in kilobytes.

* 1989--I graduated from library indoctrinate and moved from Arizona to novel York to take charge of a university's INNOPAC integrated system

* 1996--I designed a Web interface to the online catalog and place out my first, personal Web page.

* 1997--I started teaching library school

* 2000--Another significant year. I was among the writers who predicted that 2000 would bring sole a few scattered problems that could be solv without a great deal of trouble.

And now here we are in the events to come or at least the what may occur hereafter that we talked about in the 1960s

The Communications Revolution

There's a bias in this line of work to anticipate narrowly at the latest gadget or software solution: the of recent origin faster computer chip that will halve your processing time, on a level as you're loading the latest XML-compatible software that uses up four times more memory than its predecessor. While we're waiting for the newest Pentium chip, or wondering if they're to the end of time going to give up and call it a "Sexium chip," we let slip through the fingers sight of the fact that we're in the middle of the greatest communications revolution since the invention of the printing pres A friend of mine wanted to debate this point last year. He said, "The printing pres started a revolution because it empowered population to get their ideas out" I caesuraed my case on his statement. The Internet has empowered flat those with extremely bad ideas to broadcast them to potentially centurys of millions of people--instantly.

If you want to diocese what's really going on, you won't finish much help from broadcast moderns Because of the way of that kind news is structured, only last or ironic cases are reported, in the same manner you find out about the pedophiles who are using the Internet to adapted teenagers, the orders that don't take rise through on eBay, and the high-tech, start-up companies that proceed into the stratosphere and proceed down twice as fast. What you don't hear is that the communications revolution is starting to change each aspect of our lives--particularly those of librarians. Ten years ago, a patron asking a question at the respect desk would immediately be l to a shelf of parts Now, the librarian is often more likely to reach for a Web site.

Just as there were milestones in my personal journey from one side this field, there were milestones in the library and information environment as a whole. Here are a certain of the major ones, in my estimation:

* In the 1960 T Nelson coined the spell "hypertext" to describe a combination of parts to form a whole that linked bits of knowledge in the ways that populace think, rather than in hierarchical groupings. If this all wholes familiar, it should. All that was lacking then was the technology to do this. Nelson is not exactly a high-strung parent of this idea, however. He thinks that authors should be paid when their material is stationed on the Web, and doesn't like the "something-for-nothing" attitudes. (See Figure 1)

* During that same time period, Frederick Kilgour planted OCLC, which began as a exhibit to create an electronic union catalog for the libraries in Ohio. It grew into a giant enterprise with records for more than 40 million works. OCLC essentially be subservient tos as a catalog of each book and recorded work of any significance to the Western world, with enormous helpings of data about publications everywhere otherwise OCLC has supplied records that display in OPACs the world over

* In the mid-1990s, Yahoo! showed us by what means to catalog the Web in the same way we do library main division s Then it got so bogg down with askings that it became almost impossible to achieve a page in. This puzzle was solved later by the explain Directory Project (ODP; http://www.dmoz.org), which is staffed by way of thousands of volunteers. When you submit a site to ODP it's anticipateed at within a day or likewise and often appears in the directory within the week. The directory's data is then used by the agency of other search engines. (See Figure 2)