In my last post, I described the characteristics of libraries during the century before 1975. During that century, libraries faced no fundamental changes and were fully in control of how they presented themselves to patrons. That stability and control have now been shattered. Why?
The first crack came with the automation of library card catalogs in the 1970s and 1980s. Though a positive change on the whole, automation had three negative effects on libraries:
- Most libraries no longer maintained their own finding aid, the catalog. They continued to provide the content, but the actual software was bought from vendors.
- Most libraries no longer maintained the interface to their finding aid, the OPAC; that, too, was bought from vendors, most of which did not allow libraries sufficient ability to customize their OPACs.
- The new OPACs did not work well with the old subject headings, which had been designed to be browsed in a card catalog. Even after 30 years of development, OPACs do not enable patrons to easily browse traditional subject headings, thus crippling one of librarianship’s three canonical means of bibliographic access (those being: by author, by title, by subject).
Automation of the card catalog had great benefits for libraries, but it was also the first crack in their century-old enjoyment of stability and control. There would soon be others.