The Australian Library Journal

Four decades of library automation: recollections and reflections

Hans W Groenewegen

Margaret Trask's career witnessed the transition from the conventional analogue library, which had only the most rudimentary form of mechanisation to the networked electronic library. In this transition we can identify at least five separate stages of technology development and adoption.

From roughly 1960 to 1965, characterised by a growing awareness in Australia of the possibilities inherent in the use of automation. Initially this was the result of reports of overseas experience, particularly in the United States, and led to the creation of conditions appropriate to initiate similar work in this country.

The decade from 1965 to 1975, a period devoted to what at the time was often called 'getting your hands dirty.' It involved widespread experimentation which helped to train the first generation of practitioners and to position the library within its parent organisation as a major user of IT infrastructure.

The decade from 1975 to 1985 saw the gradual transition from systems built by libraries in-house to integrated library management systems created by third party vendors. The two decades from 1965 to 1985 also saw the development of major strategic initiatives for content creation, including adoption of international standards and data sharing.

The late 1980s onwards saw advances in data storage, retrieval and access technologies that paved the way for the transition from systems delivering surrogates of print materials to systems delivering full text in electronic form.

From 1990 onwards: the advent of the personal computer and the growth of the internet which permitted the rapid progressive transition from analogue to digital libraries and from mediated to un-mediated access by users to library resources.

Bringing home the message (1960 to 1965)

In the early 1960s it was still a rarity for Australian librarians to travel overseas on fact- finding tours or to attend professional conferences. However things were changing and in December 1965 the Australian Library Journal could report that 'the number of Australian librarians travelling overseas professionally seems to be increasing.' Mentioned were Harrison Bryan of the University of Sydney and John Balnaves of the National Library, who attended the FID Congress in Washington.1

The timing of this increased travel was opportune. Particularly in the United States the age of library automation had started and university libraries all over the country were exploring the use of punched card (unit record) equipment and computers in a range of 'backroom' operations. Articles describing these initiatives were beginning to appear in the literature, tantalising readers with the vision of vastly improved efficiencies and/or service opportunities. Meanwhile Australian libraries of all kinds were on the edge of unprecedented growth. University libraries would soon reap the benefits of the reforms recommended by the Martin Report. Public library services would expand and flourish for a time as a result of subsidies introduced by enlightened legislation passed in all States. Librarians travelling overseas to view the miracles of automation described in the literature could do so with reasonable confidence that there would be money to try some of this at home. Their travels created awareness, built their enthusiasm, and clarified what was needed to start work.

Bryan had been one of the first Australian university librarians to express publicly his qualified excitement about the potential of 'library automation'.2 In typical fashion he found an original metaphor to express his enthusiasm and his reservations. Likening automation to a new horse, he acknowledged that it is a 'very, very new horse indeed, requiring new techniques of horsemanship ... not to mention his new and expensive fodder and feeding habits.' And whilst the old horse might still be 'the only horse for some of our work,' he put his money on the new horse, 'subject of course to a proper breaking-in and perhaps even to a demonstration trot or so.'

However, when Bryan returned from a visit to the United States and Canada in 1965, he expressed disappointment with what he had seen, or rather what he had not seen. He reported at a Sydney meeting of the Library Association that 'the dominant impression is not of the automation that there was but of the great number of places where it was not'.3 His report had the effect of injecting more realism into the automation plans of Australian libraries, but did not seriously dampen their interest. Indeed, a coda in Bryan's report was a short list of automation projects he had in mind for his own Fisher Library, including computer production of an undergraduate library catalogue, mechanisation of acquisitions routines, and automated serials check-in.

Hans Zwillenberg at the Weapons Research Establishment in Salisbury, who had already started the 'breaking-in' process, responded critically to some aspects of Bryan's papers. He commented that what was required was a shift of emphasis in the professional training of librarians, but not in librarianship.4 He lamented the fact that no one in Australia was as yet offering basic instruction in automatic data processing techniques and equipment. 'The sooner our institutions and the LAA incorporate the knowledge of ADP techniques in their syllabus, instead of padding the courses [with library history and book binding techniques] the more readily both senior and junior members of the profession will be in a position to look at automation practically'.5

Zwillenberg certainly was willing to do his share. In August 1966 he (and the author, in what is best described as a 'walk-on' role) conducted a week-long residential course in library automation at the University of New England. This initiative of the University's External Studies department was a key event in the early history of library automation in Australia. It stimulated many of the thirty librarians who attended, several of them senior managers, into coaxing the automation horse into a demonstration trot within their institutions. It was also important for another reason. 'On the last day of the workshop it was decided to form the Librarians Automation Group ... to provide a means of communication to those interested in automation in libraries and to provide a forum for discussion'.6 'LAG' later became 'LASIE,' an organisation which for over thirty years was influential in promoting the use of automation in Australian libraries by performing both a clearing house and training role.

Meanwhile the New South Wales government was adopting a pragmatic approach towards the introduction of automation in the public service and the training of practitioners. Having purchased hardware and software, it set about promoting their use by government departments by the simple mechanism of inviting them to nominate potential applications and staff members to implement them. The applications would be vetted for 'feasibility' by public service inspectors who would also train the nominated staff. Four weeks training was considered sufficient: two weeks of systems analysis and design and two weeks of programming.

Gordon Richardson, principal librarian of the Public Library of New South Wales, had only just returned from an overseas visit when this public service board invitation landed on his desk. Having been enthused as much as his colleague at Sydney University, he immediately grasped the opportunity to jump on the automation horse. Ambitiously, he nominated the automation of his library's serials acquisition (check-in) and binding records as the initial project and selected the author to conduct the feasibility study. At a meeting of special librarians in Sydney, the latter reported on the project's progress and, on the basis of all of six months experience in library automation, extolled the importance of getting in and getting the hands dirty. 'Until some of us, as librarians, have designed some systems and written and tested some programs we cannot say that we are familiar with the computer.'7

Certainly, by mid-1966, library managers all over Australia were setting up the conditions to 'get their hands dirty' and start work in automation. And in October 1966 an issue of the Australian Library Journal was, for the first time, dedicated to an automation 'theme.'

Getting your hands dirty (1966 to 1975)

At the 1966 Armidale workshop no opportunity was given to participants to describe existing systems. The workshop was intended as a practical course. However the first issue of the Librarians Automation Group newsletter carried brief reports on current projects in five Australian libraries. There was also a list of eleven other institutions that had commenced projects. These had been reported at a recent meeting of the Australian Advisory Committee on Bibliographic Services (AACOBS) subcommittee on automation, which had been appointed in February 1966, 'to consider the collation of information on the present and projected use of automation by Australian libraries and to identify the problems which AACOBS should investigate'.8

In 1967 AACOBS Standing Committee published a directory of Australian library automation projects, using information sought from libraries 'no matter how small its mechanisation or automation project' through a detailed questionnaire.9 Of the thirty-six projects reported, sixty-one per cent were still under development. The applications were in all areas of library operation. Fifteen of them relied chiefly on the use of punched card or punched paper tape equipment. Many used the computer primarily as a device to compile catalogues and similar listings. Several respondents indicated that they were entering into partnership with a commercial data processing bureau, variously cited as 'Adaps' or 'Data Control.' This was the beginning of almost forty years of active involvement in Australian library automation by the company's owner, Kim Jelbart.10

Other libraries were creating their own in-house systems departments. An early example was Monash University which, in 1965, advertised for a computer programmer 'to be responsible ... for the application of data processing techniques for the production of the library catalogue and for the development of other suitable applications'.11 It appointed Philip Snoxall, a lanky Englishman with a deliberate approach to project development, who would remain at Monash for over thirty years.

In 1968 the University of Sydney appointed Dorothy Peake as its systems librarian. Peake had been an active and innovative automator at the NSW Department of Main Roads library. Later she moved to the University of New South Wales and was replaced at Sydney by Mary Ellen Jacob, a fast-talking, enormously energetic librarian from Michigan. Jacob, Peake and special librarian, Lesle Symes (until the latter's untimely death), became the first of the 'LASIE ladies': a formidable team, later augmented by Carmel Maguire from the School of Librarianship at the University of New South Wales and Dagmar Schmidmaier, now New South Wales State Librarian. They were the driving force behind the creation of LASIE in 1970 and steered its program and activities. It was a 'non-professional, non-profit-making organisation in which data processing staff, librarians, information scientists and administrators can meet to discuss problems arising from the computer manipulation of bibliographical data.' LASIE's aims were announced as 'Standardization, Information Exchange and Education.' It published a journal from the start, the final issue of which appeared in August 2002. The influence and contributions of LASIE and the 'LASIE Ladies' to the development of library automation in New South Wales and nationally were of great importance.12

The impact of these and similar appointments at other institutions was manifold. Through them, libraries were learning at first hand about the technology and developing the appropriate skills to exploit it. Importantly, they positioned the libraries within their parent institutions as early users of computing resources. Not only was this good public relations for the library, it was also essential to secure access to hardware, software and training facilities. Most parent institutions were still unaware of the heavy demand on resources that would eventually result from their involvement with automation. Libraries by getting in early, for a time at least, secured priority access.

An integral aspect of the automation process was the need to convert the manual files, including parts of the library catalogue. Unfortunately, the absence of standard record formats and, indeed, the primitive nature of the data capture devices (limited character sets, all in upper case were the norm), did mean that much of this work had to be done again in later years.

As time went by, learning opportunities multiplied. During the late 1960 and early 1970s LASIE and the Special Libraries Section of the Library Association of Australia (LAA) organised several seminars and workshops and imported leading practitioners from overseas to conduct them. These included Hillis Griffin of the Argonne National Laboratory and Professor Alan Rees from Case Western Reserve University, to name two who particularly impressed the author.

In 1976 a meeting of some sixty Victorian librarians decided to set up a Victorian Chapter of LASIE. Within a few years this grew into a new organisation, the Victorian Association for Library Automation (VALA). From then on it was the VALA biennial conferences, which commenced in 1981, and the Information On-Line/On-Disc conferences of the LAA which created the major opportunities to hear and meet leading overseas practitioners and to keep up to date with developments in library automation both within and outside Australia.13

In 1969 the LAA for the first time offered for its registration examinations an optional subject, R404 (Data Processing and Information Retrieval), in which for some years the author was co-examiner. Two years later, in another issue of the Australian Library Journal devoted to automation, Boyd Rayward referred to the projected establishment of several new schools of librarianship in institutes of technology and colleges of advanced education. He noted the need to provide not just introductory courses in systems analysis and computing but also to include 'an account of the new directions the computer appears to be charting' in the traditional organisation, administration, cataloguing and reference courses, and to teach 'not only what has been done, is being done or may be done ... [but to] encourage a critical stance'.14 By the early 1980s, automation issues permeated most subjects taught in Australian library schools. There were even proposals to move the study of librarianship from the humanities to the information technology faculties. And indeed such a move occurred in the mid 1990s, involving, rather ironically, Monash University's Graduate School of Librarianship, perhaps the most 'traditional' library school in the country.

At a panel discussion on education for systems librarianship, held in conjunction with the 1992 ALIA Conference, Joanna Richardson of Bond University questioned the feasibility of producing systems librarians by coursework.15 She suggested on-the-job training, as the preferred alternative. However by this time many of those who wanted to specialise in computing and automation aspects of librarianship were increasingly choosing to obtain a separate qualification in computer science to add to their library qualification.

Creating content (1970 to 1990)

It soon became obvious to the early library automators that the cost and complexity of data conversion was a major impediment to library systems development. Many libraries were re-keying manually created catalogue records into formats designed in-house. However, an early attempt to arrive at intra-institutional standards, a bibliographic data format for use in a projected Sydney libraries network to facilitate data sharing, did not succeed.16

As it was, most universities concentrated their data conversion activities in areas such as undergraduate and serial collections. This would permit them to automate their circulation procedures, particularly for high volume, short term, undergraduate loans. It would also enable them to produce short title catalogues in printed form which could be updated rapidly and frequently, for on and off-campus distribution.

Because their collections were relatively small, data conversion was a less imposing problem for public libraries. And because the economic and service benefits of automation of their main activity - that is, lending - were very apparent, a number of public librarians, such as Cec Churm in Sydney, and Peter Stansfield, Tom Woodrow and Laurie Brown in Melbourne, energetically pursued the objective of automating that service. The Victorians found a willing partner in Jelbart father and son, whose company, Data Centre, saw a major commercial opportunity in supplying libraries with data conversion hardware (Flexowriters) and data processing services.17 By the beginning of 1970 this partnership had delivered automated circulation and/or book catalogue production to a number of libraries including the Heidelberg Regional Library, the Camberwell Regional Library and the Essendon Public Library.18

Meanwhile, news of the Library of Congress MARC project, conveyed by overseas travelers such as University of Queensland librarian, Derek Fielding in 1968, was eagerly received. His expectation was that it would revolutionise 'the whole situation in respect to applications of machines to cataloguing'.19 So, when Barbara Markuson of the Library of Congress delivered a detailed paper on MARC at the 1971 LAA Conference, she could not have wished for a more interested audience. A three-day seminar on MARC which she conducted afterwards in Sydney was attended by more than fifty librarians, programmers and systems specialists. At this seminar Arthur Ellis of the National Library reported on his institution's 'threefold interest in MARC ... as a creator of cataloguing records for the international system, as a reprocessor of records for other Australian libraries, and as a user of MARC in its own operations'.20

The National Library's plans took a step forward when it acquired the BNB MARC programs and again, when it entered into an agreement with the Library of Congress to distribute catalogue records in MARC format to Australian libraries. The Australian MARC Record Service (AMRS) was operated initially (from 1973/4 to 1978) through a service bureau facility provided by Jelbart's company. AMRS made it possible for libraries to build up a machine-readable catalogue of current acquisitions of US imprints without incurring the cost of keyboarding every record. In subsequent years the National Library also incorporated into AMRS records for UK imprints from the British National Bibliography and Australian records that it had prepared in-house.

Of course AMRS predominantly covered new publications. It was of little or no assistance in the retrospective conversion of card catalogues. However there was another model in the United States that attracted Australian attention: the model of the bibliographic network established co-operatively by a group of college libraries in Ohio.

The Ohio College Library Network (OCLC) database combined the MARC records produced by the Library of Congress with catalogue records contributed by OCLC members. The database could be accessed on-line by library processing departments, which could extract from it records for publications in their collections. The model captured the imagination of librarians everywhere. In Australia, following a LASIE-sponsored visit in 1974 by Fred Kilgour, president of OCLC, it led to the creation of several regional 'shared cataloguing networks' notably CLANN (College Libraries Activity Network of New South Wales) and of CAVAL (Cooperative Action by Victorian Academic Libraries) both formed in 1978, and ultimately to the establishment of the national bibliographic network ABN.

Throughout the 1970s, Arthur Ellis, assistant director-general for Networks and Co-ordination at the National Library of Australia, had promoted at every opportunity, his organisation's vision of a national bibliographic information network.21 In 1976 this was developed into the BIBDATA network proposal. A number of factors, amongst them failure to identify suitable software as a platform for a national service, delayed implementation of the original plan. However in 1980, having secured the rights to use the Washington Library Network software, the National Library of Australia launched the Australian Bibliographic Network (ABN), which within a few years achieved wide acceptance as a national bibliographic utility and the foundation of a national bibliographic database to support library resource sharing activities, such as inter-library loans.

The possibility of interfacing ABN with local, integrated library management systems was investigated at an early stage but for several years the most practical approach remained the provision of bibliographic data through a magnetic tape service. Down-line loading was introduced towards the end of the decade. Here again, Jelbart's company played a significant role by developing an effective system solution, called GRAVITY, which created a down-line loading interface between ABN and local systems.22 Up-line loading did not become an option until the mid-1990s. By then the National Library of Australia was caught up in an ambitious plan, in partnership with the National Library of New Zealand, to migrate ABN to a new generation of software, tailored to their respective needs. However the company commissioned by the partners to develop the software was unable to deliver, and the Library was fortunate to escape relatively unscathed, to acquire software from Canada, adequate for the requirements of the new generation of ABN, now known as Kinetica.

From in-house systems to integrated library management systems (ILMS) (1975 to 1985)

Almost right from the start, the demand by libraries for computer processing 'time' on institutional computers had grown apace with the growth in other institutional data processing applications. More and more frequently, in situations where applications were competing for computer time, data processing managers were rating the requirements of the library below those of other functional areas of the organisation. In that scenario migration of library applications to other host computers, perhaps a smaller dedicated machine, perhaps a service bureau, perhaps a combination of both, became an alternative. If these solutions could be combined with the possibility of outsourcing the software development or buying 'off the shelf' software, this would be an added bonus to libraries that were beginning to see a growing portion of their budget being allocated to automation.

In the early 1970s major developments in semiconductors and other technologies opened up remarkable possibilities for miniaturisation. Within a short time a number of new and innovative computer manufacturers had adopted these technologies to develop a new generation of computers, the so-called 'minicomputer.' These computers were almost as powerful as the previous generation of 'mainframe' computers, but were much more affordable, far more compact, easier to house and much less complex to manage and operate than the mainframe machines. Soon entrepreneurial software developers began to develop application software tailored for specific minicomputer platforms. By entering into partnership with minicomputer hardware manufacturers these software developers could then offer a complete 'package solution' or, in the nomenclature of the time, a 'turnkey system.'

One of the first such entrepreneurs in the library field was Bela Hatvany who founded Computer Library Systems Incorporated (CLSI) in the United States. CLSI developed LIBS100, a turnkey library circulation system running on a DEC minicomputer platform. When it installed the LIBS100 system in 1979, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Library became the first Australian library to install a turnkey system. Again, there was involvement by Kim Jelbart, who had secured Australian sales and service support rights for this product.

As mentioned, CAVAL, the Victorian academic library co-operative, had been established in 1978 as a shared cataloguing network. Following the arrival of ABN, CAVAL's active role in shared cataloguing ceased, creating an opportunity to offer several new services to its members, including a systems consultancy service. From 1980 to 1990, the author, at that time CAVAL's executive director, was regularly invited to assist academic libraries in the selection of 'turnkey systems.' The product range varied during the decade, or, rather, the position of particular 'brands' in the popularity stakes varied, with new brands replacing old ones, not necessarily always because the new product was superior. There was definitely an attraction, unacknowledged but real nonetheless, in being the first library to install a new product, rather than something that another library was already using. This was not necessarily as perverse as it may seem. It often gave the customer library a price advantage, as new vendors were anxious to secure their first contract and a reference site. Unfortunately this market spread diluted the long-term viability of many vendors, severely reducing their capacity to invest in long-term support and continuous product development. Another disadvantage was that with the proliferation of different 'brands,' and the lack of industry-wide standards other than MARC, any notion of building viable consortiums of libraries by networking their various systems was largely hypothetical, although much-discussed.

One major library that resisted the transition from in-house system to turnkey system was the State Library of Queensland, which in 1977 had begun to develop its own, main-frame based, library system, ORACLE (later ORAQLE).23 In 1984 the author called ORACLE 'a miracle to come out of Australian library automation'.24 Little did he realise at the time that the miracle had hardly begun. The State Library of Queensland developed and refined ORACLE over more than twenty years, and it was not until 2001 that the Library finally replaced it with Endeavor's Voyager.25

One reason why the State Library of Queensland remained for so long with ORACLE may have been that the so-called integrated library management systems that were on offer during the 1980's were rarely complete. Generally, one or two modules were still under development. Commonly the vendors' aspirations were that the income from sales of the incomplete package would be able to fund the development of the final modules. This was rarely the case. So, over the years, a succession of products appeared on the Australian market: LIBS100, Dataphase ALIS, ADLIB, GEAC, VTLS, URICA, Dynix. Like comets they lit up the sky for a while until they were eclipsed by the next star.

Of these URICA merits special mention. The system originated in South Africa, where it was 'discovered' by AWA Computers when it wanted to tender for the supply of a library system to the University of Tasmania. AWA's offer of a URICA/REALITY system was successful, but it soon became clear that the functionality in the South African URICA was inadequate for the needs of the University of Tasmania. So the library systems team, under the direction of Dick Goodram and headed by David Fraser worked with an AWA software development group to create an Australian version of URICA.26 The system seemed capable of performing better under load than other minicomputer-based systems because it used a relational database and PICK, a very efficient operating system. So for several years in the 1980s it was the best-selling library system in Australia and was installed in many libraries, large and small. It was marketed with some success in Europe by AWA and in the United States by McDonnell-Douglas, the manufacturers of the hardware.

However, ultimately it became clear that the use of so-called 'minicomputers' - even those running the PICK operating system - as a platform for library applications was fundamentally flawed. The hardware architecture was incapable of handling the high processing demands placed on it by typical library applications in large and even medium sized libraries. Almost invariably, response time problems led to great frustration on the part of library users and staff and resulted in significant loss of productivity.

A few institutions had recognised the risks and opted to take a conservative approach by sticking with mainframe platforms. The State Library of Queensland migrated ORAQLE to a Fujitsu mainframe and several university libraries, including Queensland, Monash and Wollongong and the Brisbane City Library selected PALS which ran on UNISYS mainframes.

By the mid-1980s distributed processing technologies began to replace mainframes. One such distributed processing system was Carlyle Systems' TOMUS online public access catalogue. This was for some time the platform for CAVAL's regional database COOLCAT.27 As distributed processing evolved into client-server architecture, platforms based on this architecture, coupled with a robust relational DBMS, made persistent response time problems in library systems largely a thing of the past. Innovative Interfaces was one of the first to implement client-server technology for its Innopac system and for a time dominated the Australian library market. This continued until the late 1990s when Endeavor Information Systems captured significant Australian customer sites with its Voyager product.

The key factor in client-server was of course the development of the personal computer. The use of 'X Windows' and other implementations of windows and office automation software demonstrated the enormous productivity improvements that could be achieved in library technical processing departments and at loans counters. This further hastened the adoption of systems based around the client server architecture, even though the cost of a personal computer on every desk was initially quite daunting to most libraries. But although the personal computer stayed as an indispensable tool for office automation, it took only a few years for the specialised cataloguing, acquisitions, circulation, and particularly the OPAC windows clients to become obsolete. The inconvenience and inefficiency associated with the need to install and regularly update the clients and the impracticality of doing this for remote users, made the adoption of a web-based front end, when it came, very attractive. And those library systems which did not adapt quickly enough to this latest development fell by the wayside.

From surrogates to full text (1975 to 1995)

The core database for all integrated library systems is the library catalogue. As we have seen, the creation of this record in machine-readable form was greatly expedited by the emergence of the co-operative cataloguing utilities, OCLC in the USA and its local emulations, first CAVAL and CLANN, and then ABN. The growing number of libraries that had part or all of their catalogues in machine-readable form stimulated library systems vendors to add On-line Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) functionality to their software. In turn, the availability of OPAC software spurred libraries on to new efforts to convert their catalogues. By the mid-1980s library systems had moved from the backroom to the front room. And after a period of somewhat traumatic re-education28 library users began to appreciate the versatility and convenience of hands-on computer searching of the catalogue. Soon they began to demand similar convenience in searching the journal literature. This became possible with the arrival of the CD-ROM in the mid-1980s.

Prior to then most electronic databases had been stored on central computers. Already in 1969 the National Library of Australia had entered into an agreement with the National Library of Medicine to establish an Australian MEDLARS service, with the intention of offering on-demand search and recurrent off-line bibliography services.29 Following persistent lobbying by the Institution of Engineers, Australia and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and other interested groups, the Federal government established a Scientific and Technological Information Services Enquiry Committee (STISEC), which recommended, inter alia, that the National Library of Australia should take on a proactive role in providing database services.30 This resulted in the local mirroring of the MEDLARS and the ERIC databases and ultimately led to the establishment of AUSINET, a consortium of the National Library of Australia, nine major libraries and several database suppliers. In 1980 ACI Computer Services, originally a partner in the consortium, took over the full operation of AUSINET on a commercial basis, although with limited success. The reasons have been identified by Denis Richardson, the first chairman of the AUSINET Users' Committee. Lack of capital to develop and sustain Australian databases was a major factor. So was the tightening of library budgets, following the defeat of the Whitlam Government in 1975, which meant that library uptake of the service was slower and less widespread than expected.31

Moreover access to overseas databases had become faster, cheaper and more reliable, first with the establishment of database services such as Lockheed's DIALOG in the United States in the late seventies, and then by the creation of OTC's MIDAS packet switching network in the early 1980s. The latter resulted in a significant reduction in the trans-Pacific tariff, which had previously given AUSINET a competitive edge. Nonetheless, the cost of using the overseas services remained significant, particularly if the use was inexpert, and so librarians continued to act as intermediaries and interrogated the databases on behalf of their users, following a 'reference interview.'

The development in the late 1980s of the CD-ROM as a compact, cheap and robust mass data storage medium revolutionised the way in which databases were distributed and accessed. Libraries and the industries that served them were amongst the first to recognise the potential of the CD-ROM and to adopt it. The first CD-ROM databases were cataloguing databases, containing MARC records derived from the Library of Congress. Very soon thereafter, publishers of abstracting and indexing services began parallel publication of their products on CD-ROM, packaging the data with a search engine. Database users quickly recognised the superiority of CD-ROM as a format over print, as it eliminated tedious searching of many indexes. And because use charges and telecommunication costs were eliminated, users could now be given hands-on access. Don Schauder, institute librarian at RMIT and a great lateral thinker, saw the opportunity offered by the CD-ROM as a platform for the storage and distribution of Australian databases. He negotiated with producers of several small, specialised Australian databases for the rights to sell them on CD-ROM. The AUSTROM product filled a glaring need for an efficient tool to retrieve Australian published information and became the nucleus of RMIT's highly successful database publishing business, Informit.

Commencing in the early 1990s, libraries began to set up local area networks to access the CD-ROM databases that they had acquired. Not without difficulty, particularly in the early years, due to a number of technical problems. So it was not unwelcome when, by the end of the decade, vendors were again mounting their databases and other information resources on servers under their direct control and providing access to them via the internet. This became possible as a result of major advances in information technology, in particular the universal availability of cheap and powerful PC workstations, greatly improved telecommunications as a result of the growth and commercialisation of the internet, and huge reduction in the cost of mass storage.

The incentive for the publishers was that it gave them much tighter control of their intellectual property. This in turn expedited the change to full-text. Initially electronic databases had been electronic versions of abstracting and indexing services, ie citation databases. These often disappointed their users because of an expectation that they would contain full text. In the late 1980s publishers began to package full-text electronic publications and deliver them to subscribers on CD-ROMs for storage and use on a local server. Examples were UMI's Business Periodicals on Disk and Elsevier's ADONIS. Factors contributing to these developments were the transition to computerised photocomposition, cheap digital storage, and more efficient text conversion software. These made large scale creation of electronic full-text a practical proposition. And centralised mounting of the data, with controlled access, protected the publishers' intellectual property rights in the text in a way that had been impossible when the text was distributed on CD-ROM.

In any case, the spectacular growth of the internet and continuing massive reduction in the cost of digital storage made CD-ROM publication obsolete. By mid-1992, journal publication across the internet had taken off. The development of the World Wide Web hastened this process even further. But it also introduced a potentially devastating problem. Whilst researchers appreciated the many advantages of web publishing, there was increasing concern, worldwide, that, because of its ephemeral nature, much of the rapidly growing body of information existing only in digital form might be lost over time. To its great credit, the National Library of Australia was amongst the first to tackle this issue. Its PANDORA Project (Preserving and Accessing Networked Documentary Resources of Australia) has earned international acclaim as a model for an effective and sustainable web archiving strategy, as more and more organisations and institutions world-wide are tackling the challenging problems of digital preservation.32

From analogue to digital library (1990 to date)

As the various technological developments converge, they point increasingly towards a future library in which the most heavily used information resources are digital and in which the most frequent form of access is un-mediated and remote. Whether in fact that future organisation can still be called a 'library' and whether it still offers a useful role for someone called 'a librarian' are matters that have been debated at length. They are well beyond the scope of this paper.

Whatever the future of the library as an organisation and librarianship as a profession, there are a number of major issues in information access and storage whose significance has increased in the transition from the analogue library to the digital library. These include issues arising from the transition from mediated to un-mediated user access, issues arising from the extreme vulnerability of digital materials to loss and destruction due to technological obsolescence, and other factors and issues revolving around IP rights management in a digital environment.

There is a great deal of innovative work being done in these areas, in Australia as elsewhere. Much of it within libraries and by library professionals in institutions. For example, during the author's period of employment at Monash University, the library under Edward Lim developed several highly effective and innovative IT applications. These included projects in web-based information literacy education (the Virtual Librarian), document delivery of articles in current research journals (READS), and digitisation of undergraduate study materials: past examination papers, reserve collections33 and recorded lectures.34 And in 2002 the library devoted significant resources to a major trial of portal technology. 35, 36

Much is also being done outside libraries, by commercial publishers and database vendors or within universities and research institutions. And there remains substantial collaboration between the library industry and the information technology industry.

As in the past, much of this work remains within the domain of the systems specialists and the information technologists. However it is important to recognise the significant role played by the library manager in the evolution of the electronic library. In an article, not unlike this one, written by Dorothy Peake for LASIE in 1996, she paid tribute to 'the heroes and heroines of a new age ... Those with the courage to implement new systems' 37. Many of those named in her paper, as in this account, were library managers. There is a good reason for this. It was often the managers who first identified an appropriate technology for solving a problem. It was they who recognised that a particular technical development offered an opportunity to improve a service or process. It was they who bore the responsibility of allocating financial and staff resources. And It was generally they who oversaw the management of the project and accepted the ultimate risk of failure. As the proportion of library resources spent on automation have continued to grow and the reliability and effectiveness of the library's systems have become critical to the successful performance of its mission, so the decisions and actions of library managers in this area have become ever more complex. It is certain that Margaret Trask foresaw that this would happen, when she took the initiative in establishing the Australian Information Management Association and steered it through its first critical years. And so her work in improving the management skills of Australian librarians has meant that she made a major contribution also to Australian library automation, even though she probably never in her life wrote a line of code or used a screwdriver to open the back of a computer.

End notes

1. 'Australian librarians abroad'. Australian Library Journal 14: p183, December 1965. Australian Library Journal 13: pp163-167, December 1964

2. Bryan, Harrison 'Automation and us'. Australian Library Journal 13: pp163-167, December 1964.

3. Bryan, Harrison 'Automation in libraries'. Australian Library Journal 15: pp24-38, January 1966.

4. Zwillenberg, HJ 'Automation and us: a reply'. Australian Library Journal 14: pp213-215, December 1965.

5. Zwillenberg, HJ 'Automation in action: other aspects'. Australian Library Journal 15: pp181-183, October 1966.

6. 'Developments in automation in Australian libraries'. LAG 1: pp2-6, September 1966.

7. Groenewegen, HW 'Some problems encountered in the design of an automated serials system and their implications for computerization of library routines'. LAG 3: pp5-12, March 1967.

8. Yocklunn, John 'AACOBS Committee on Automation in Libraries'. LAG 2: pp4-5, December 1966.

9. Australian Advisory Council on Bibliographical Services. Current projects in library automation: an Australian directory. Canberra, AACOBS, 1967.

10. Bundy, Alan L 'Data Centre to Libramatic: changing the pace of Australian library service'. LASIE 10: September-October 1979: pp19-29.

11. Campbell, DVA and Brian Southwell. 'Data processing in Monash University Library'. Australian Library Journal 15: pp176-179, October 1966.

12. Maguire, Carmel. Editorial (final edition of LASIE) pp3-6, August 2002.

13. Jilovsky, Cathie 'Systems librarianship in Australia: a historical perspective'. Library Hi Tech 21: pp297-308, 2003

14. Rayward, W Boyd 'The new technology and education for librarianship'. Australian Library Journal 20: pp12-15, June 1971.

15. Richardson, Joanna P 'Computer literacy: a system manager's perspective'. ALIA 92: the heart of the matter. Proceedings of the 2nd Biennial Conference, Australian Library and Information Association, Albury, 1992, pp308-309.

16. Peake, D and A Dobrovits. 'The NUNCAT Project'. Australian Library Journal 19: pp448-458, December 1970.

17. Jelbart, JM 'The relationship between the service bureau and the librarian'. Australian Library Journal 20: pp21-24, June 1971.

18. Brown, WL 'A computer-controlled charging system at Essendon Public Library'. Australian Library Journal 16: pp231-238, December 1967.

19. Fielding, Derek. 'Following the Fisher man: American automation in action in 1968'. Australian Library Journal 17: pp293-300, October 1968.

20. MARC Seminar.(News note) Australian Library Journal 20: pp32-33, October 1971.

21. Ellis, Arthur. 'Bibliographic access: the national view'. Australian Library Journal 25: pp313-316, October 1976.

22. Trier, Pamela. 'GRAVITY Part one: downloading from ABN in the University of Melbourne Library'. LASIE 19: pp38-41 Sept/Oct & Nov/Dec 1988.

23. Bastow, Stan and Bishop, Mike. 'The ORACLE on-line system'. Australian Library Journal 29: pp54-58, May 1980.

24. Groenewegen, HW 'Library automation'. Bryan, H and Horacek, J Australian academic libraries in the seventies, p96. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1984.

25. State Library of Queensland. website http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/corp/slqhistory.htm

26. Goodram, Richard. 'The AWA URICA library system and TULIPS: its application at the University of Tasmania library'. Program 18: pp46-65, January 1984.

27. CAVAL Limited. The COOL-CAT Trial report. Melbourne, CAVAL, 1987.

28. Henty, Margaret. User response to URICA: a catalogue on line. Canberra, ANU, 1987.

29. MEDLARS. (News note) Australian Library Journal. 18: p84, April 1969.

30. National Library of Australia. Report to the Council...by the Scientific and Technological Services Enquiry Committee. 2 vols. Canberra. 1973.

31. Richardson, W Denis. 'MEDLARS to DIALOG and beyond'. Bryan, H and Horacek, J Australian academic libraries in the seventies, pp132-144. St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1984.

32. Cathro, Warwick, Webb, C and Whiting, J 'Archiving the Web: the PANDORA Archive at the National Library of Australia'.

33. Lim, Edward and Kate Roberts. 'The READS project: resource sharing using e-commerce service strategies'. Books and bytes Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference and Exhibition, Victorian Association of Library Automation, Inc. 16-18 February 2000. p219-229.

34. Groenewegen, Hans W 'Electronic reserves: key issues and innovations'. Australian Academic and Research Libraries 29: p1-12, March 1998.

35. Harrison, Andrew and Binns, Georgina. 'Monash Lectures on Line: cost effective flexible delivery'. Books and bytes Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Conference and Exhibition, Victorian Association of Library Automation, Inc. 16-18 February 2000. p273-287.

36. Groenewegen, David and Huggard, Simon. The answer to all our problems?

37. Peake, Dorothy G 'The heroic age of Australian library automation and its immediate aftermath'. LASIE 27: pp4-17, December 1996.

Biographical information

Hans W Groenewegen, BA (Syd), DipLib (NSW), Grad Dip Appl Sci (RMIT) retired from his position of deputy university librarian at Monash University on 31 October 2001. From 1998 to 2003 he taught part-time in Monash's School of Information Management and Systems. Hans worked with Margaret Trask when both were on the staff of the University of New South Wales library. During the 1960s they were both members of the General Council of the then Library Association of Australia. Later, when Margaret was Executive Director of AIMA, Hans served for several years as a member of the AIMA Board.