Did we have computers in the library 20 years ago?
Yes, the library had three computers. Two of them were not really computers like today’s , actually they were just terminals. A terminal was a monitor with a keyboard, physically connected to the main frame at the main library. The one terminal was used for circulation – checking out and returning of books. The other terminal was used to access the catalogue. The third computer had a stiffy disk drive which was used to access databases. The databases such as CAB Abstracts were sent to us by post on a monthly basis in a stiffy format. To do a literature search you had to put these stiffies in the computer and search them one by one. Later we received what we called a juke box. This was a CD ROM changer which housed 6 CD’s. This made life a bit easier because it was now possible to search across 6 CD’s simultaneously. But still this was only available within the library.

Personal Computers more like today’s computers, started to appear on the scene and all the personnel got computers and were connected to the Local Area Network. This led to the moving of the CD’s to the LAN Server of the faculty which meant that more CD’s could be made available for simultaneous use. When the library occupied too much of the available server it was decided to provide the library with its own server. We had to become IT specialists overnight to run this LINUX server. Several times a week we had to run to the “server room” and reboot the tower or remount the CD’s - very nerve-wracking for librarians to become IT fundi’s. As the network connections became more stable it was fortunately decided to move these CD’s to the main library’s server from where everybody could access the databases.

In 1998 the number of computers in the library increased from 3 to 12. One of these was for the brand new system for the electronic sending and receiving of documents. The new computers had a processing speed of 200MHz, 32Mb RAM and a hard disk drive of 2,1 Gb . These days memory sticks are bigger than this.

The operating system of the computers changed from DOS to Windows and we have seen many editions of Windows since the first Windows days.

Today we can hardly imagine a work situation without computers. Without a moment’s hesitation we will use the computer to