The History of the Implementation of the Library Computer System (LCS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writer would like to thank John Straw of the University Archives and Patricia F. Stenstrom of the Library and Information Science Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for their help in locating and obtaining materials pertaining to less public aspects of the LCS project. She would also like to thank her advisor, Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield, for sage advice, copicous encouragement and the occasional firm prod which ensured the completion of this thesis. Finally she would like to thank her longsuffering computer, Blue Max, without whom this could not have been written.

L. H. K.

INTRODUCTION

History begins with the written word. However, the writings of a civilization are of little or no use unless they are organized in an orderly manner so they can be accessed in a useful way. Scholars must be able to locate the specific text that has the information they need in their research. In a small collection with few users, such as a professor's personal office library, it is possible to simply remember what each book contains and where it is located. But once the library grows beyond a few hundred volumes and is used by a number of people, some sort of formal organization becomes essential.

The formal listing of the items in a library is its catalog. Over the centuries library catalogs have taken many forms, from a clay tablet in an ancient Mesopotamian city through lists on the ends of shelves in Medieval monastery libraries to the book and card catalogs of the modern era. The development of computer technology has opened the possibility of placing the catalog in electronically searchable form.

The development of the lending library, which permits patrons to remove its books from the premises to use at other places, introduced a new wrinkle into the issue. If books are to be circulated, it is necessary to make and maintain some record of who has borrowed which book and when it is to be returned. In a very small collection, such as a classroom library, it may be possible to simply write down the names of borrowers and the titles of the books on a sheet of paper, then cross them off as the books are returned. But with a collection of any size some systematic approach to circulation control becomes essential. The most basic method is to prepare a card for each book with a header giving the title and author of the book. Each borrower signs the card, which the circulation staff then dates and files until the book is returned. These cards may be sorted and arranged in a number of ways according to the preference of the librarian in charge of circulation.

With a collection the size of a major research library and the vast numbers of patrons who use it, the management of such a card file quickly becomes too unwieldy to handle, leading to the development of mechanically-based schemes to automate circulation control. Many of these involve cards that were punched in certain places for certain days, which are then sorted by running a rod through particular punch holes and collecting the cards which fall out when the group is turned on its side. However these still present the problems of damaged or torn cards, which could give false overdues, and still have to be sorted and given to clerical staff for printing up overdue notices. The computer can keep track of circulation activities even more closely, and since a computerized circulation system of necessity requires data on the complete holdings of the library to be useful, combining the circulation system with the automated catalog is an obvious step. Such an integrated system can not only provide a more flexible and accurate system of circulation control, but will also increase the usefulness of the catalog to the patron. Unlike a book or card catalog, it can not only provide ownership information but also indicate whether the book is available for borrowing or charged to another patron.

Although libraries have always been essential tools of the historian, the historical profession has paid little scholarly attention to the development of these institutions over time. Thus historians overlook the way in which changes in the way the library profession provides services will in turn change the way that scholars do research. Although library history may be considered a branch of intellectual history, since libraries are the repositories of ideas, such leading intellectual historians as Franklin Baumer have paid scant attention to the role of the library in the dissemination of those ideas among both the intellectual community and the populace at large, or how changes in technology had profound effects upon the manner in which ideas were recorded and transmitted. Instead almost all writings in the history of libraries and librarianship have been done by librarians and thus concentrate primarily on library professional issues rather than the larger historical ones. A librarian writing a history of a particular library is thus working primarily with the practical questions of how the experiences of one library may be generalized to allow other libraries to better serve their user populations. As a result the historiography of librarianship is a largely untouched field, and thus one with a paucity of available works.

What few truly historical (as opposed to library-professional) studies of library history do exist have centered around major figures of library history, such as Melvil Dewey, and how their particular personalities have shaped the library profession. The larger issues of how the development of the library has been shaped by changes in technology and has in turn shaped the nature of society and the growth of the technology that in turn further changes the way in which information is produced and disseminated has been by and large an area where easy answers and superficial conceptions have held sway. The Heroic Head Librarian introduced the Automation Project which did away with the Big Bad Backlog and everyone in Libraryland lived happily ever after. Such fairy tales may be satisfying for small children, but adults searching for real understanding need deeper answers. The obvious factors that are believed to have led to a certain change may not be the only ones, or they may actually be secondary issues at best while something entirely different was actually driving the change.

Such is the case with the development of online catalogs and circulation systems in libraries. Very little has been done to study the complex interrelationship between the multiple causes that led to the development of automation in libraries. Some people seem to think that they were developed simply because the time was right and the technology was there. But in real life such major projects do not just happen—they are the product of considerable planning and are undertaken to fulfill a pressing need that cannot be met more effectively by any other means, including refinements of existing methods. Some of the needs that provided an impetus for the decision may be obvious with a little examination, but these may not be the only reasons, or even the primary reason.

Such is the case with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and its automation project. What factors led to the decision to automate? The library's own homepage on the World Wide Web states that Hugh Atkinson took the library into the age of automation in order to deal with a cataloging backlog of over one million cards.[1] Certainly this statement was true, since the library was experiencing grave problems with backlogged cataloging and card filing which was interfering with the ability of the library to serve its users. In the beginning the traditional card catalog had served UIUC well, but as the collection grew to make it the third largest academic library in the nation, with departmental libraries scattered across the campus from the hard-science collections in the north engineering campus to the veterinary medicine collection in the South Farms, the card