If you’ve ever seen the movie “Forrest Gump”, you know the premise. Forrest stumbles into every major event of the last part of the 2oth century, and therefore his life story is the story of his day. In preparing for a presentation I gave recently, it occurred to me that I’m the Forrest Gump of library technology. Well, to be clear, I’m not “the” Forrest Gump, but “a” Forrest Gump. As scary as this may sound, there are more of us out there.
So if you’re not prepared take a romp through the last several decades of library automation, move along, there’s nothing to see here.
My personal library automation odyssey began at the Owens County Public Library in Spencer, Indiana when I was 17. I volunteered there, where I quickly became familiar with a card sorter and the “library hand” that was on some of the cards I sorted with it. The manual typewriter was my first library technology. It lasted many more years than most of the technologies that came later. Sometimes I think if I knew what was to follow I might have run screaming from the building. But no, it was too late — I was hooked.
Next came working at community college library in California at 18, while I started to work out who I was and who I would become. It was there where I both wrote my first software program (in BASIC, on a Commodore PET, a library orientation program) and ran my first river as a commercial whitewater river guide. Both of those experiences would be far, far from the last.
In my early twenties, as a high school dropout with a newly-minted GED and a dream in my heart, I realized a B.A. and a Masters degree were ahead of me still. It was the early 80s, and personal computers were just hitting the scene. I could not imagine a future for libraries and access to information that didn’t involve computers. Therefore, I resolved to make computers a major part of my educational journey, but not the central part of it. At the time, those who majored in computer science toiled for hours in basements. As an outdoorsman, the idea turned my stomach. So I minored in Computer Science, and majored in Geography, which was much more my style.
I did this first at a community college on the California North Coast, then at Humboldt State University. It was there where I became one of the first system operators of a CLSI automated circulation system. I performed backups on the PDP-11/70 and it’s associated massive disk packs that held much less data than my phone does now.
After graduating from HSU, which also entailed experience programming on mainframe for a Geography professor’s research, I left for UC Berkeley. As I had at HSU, I landed a weekend/evening staff circulation supervisor position to enable me to work myself through school. When I graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies in 1986, I continued working at UCB and was eventually hired there as a librarian and entered the role of Automation Coordinator. I managed massive barcoding projects, served as the technical specifications writer for the in-house library automation system (dubbed GLADIS), and more.
As someone who understood the technologies but could also speak plain English, I quickly became a trainer in the technologies that were transforming our profession — including, and primarily, the Internet. A couple colleagues and I did a poster session on Internet resources at the 1990 ALA Annual Conference. At that time there were NO programs on the Internet at the conference. We were only just beginning to wake up to the potential as a profession.
Soon thereafter I co-authored the first instructional manual on using the Internet, with Anne Lipow and John Ober, Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook. For a book in the library profession, it was a huge success, and it launched my career as a library technologist and commentator. I further cemented that role later in the 90s when I pitched a “Digital Libraries” column idea to Library Journal. Thankfully, they accepted it.
As an LJ columnist I was able to write about a wide variety of library technologies, some of which took off and others which went nowhere. My track record of predicting which direction a given technology would take is spotty at best, but I never seem to stop trying.
The latest thing seems to be “the cloud” and running everything from your personal word processing to library integrated library systems in it. What will come next? Heck if I know. I just know that until I drop dead one day, I’ll likely find a way to stumble into the thick of it. Just like Forrest.
About Roy Tennant