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#38 OK Computer

Today we’ll look at how computerisation came to the Library catalogue. Thursday 30 November saw a number of events run by the Library to celebrate International Digital Preservation Day. This featured a pop-up museum in the Berkeley Library of (mainly) obsolete computer equipment, including several from the Library’s own collection. 

The machine above is an ADM-3A which the Library began using in 1978. It had no internal memory so acted as a “dumb terminal” only, displaying information from a computer elsewhere and acting as an operator interface. The top flips back to display the gubbins inside, rows of soldered chips and a cathode ray tube for the monitor. 

Following the Printed and Accessions Catalogues we covered in our last post, when the sod was turned on the Berkeley in 1963 cataloguing staff began a more flexible initiative – the card catalogue! This is what most people recognise as the quintessential physical catalogue associated with libraries. In some very particular parts of the Library, variants of the card catalogue are still in use. 

Image: Lorna and Simon Mills for FRANC magazine.

Now, over to cataloguer Niamh Harte to take up the story:

In computer terminology, the card catalogue was a sort of analogue precursor to the flat-file database; each record was written or typed onto a card and filed alphabetically in wooden drawers. In 1965 the Dewey Decimal system of classification was introduced, which we still use to create the shelfmarks for our open shelf and lending books.

In February 1966 groups of Library staff visited the College’s Department of Electrical Engineering to see a computer at work! Five years later there were 225,000 books in the card catalogue, and the Library was looking for a better solution.

Within a year of the ‘New Library’ being opened, Trinity was embracing the brave new world of computer technology. The former Librarian Peter Fox has written “the building acted as a catalyst for what was to be a complete transformation of Library services”. In 1969 the Library went into partnership with Trinity’s recently-formed Computer Laboratory to establish a machine-readable record (MARC) based system of cataloguing. We were very early adopters, the MARC standard having only been developed and piloted by the fascinating Henriette Avram (at the Library of Congress, USA) by June 1968.

The Library of Trinity College Dublin was chosen as the primary participant in a 1968 project funded by the British Office for Scientific Technical Information to determine the feasibility of sharing and reuse of catalogue data between institutions.

In the issue for January 1969, Trinity News heralded the acquisition of a £250,000 mainframe computer, the IBM 360/44, the only one of its kind in Ireland. John Moriarty, manager of the Computer Laboratory spoke at the launch about managing the large volume of Library acquisitions. In an early suggestion of ‘personalisation’ he said “it would be an aim of the computer to harness these new acquisitions and perhaps maintain a profile of interests of academic staff so that new material in their particular fields would be brought to their attention”. John Byrne, former Professor of Computer Science, recounted that the computer was Government funded, had 128 KB of memory, and was housed in a hut beside the Berkeley Library.

Image: Trinity News

By 1971 we had a ‘computer-printed catalogue’, and by 1973 staff were working at terminals generating records. Around this time the catalogue was switched to microfilm and then microfiche. By 1980 distributed microfiche catalogues (in College Departments) and a computerised circulation control system were in planning, and the Trinity Computer Laboratory was proud of its COBOL library indexing system, ‘one of the most advanced in Europe’.

Today, the Library’s Bibliographic Data Management Department continues with the skilled and nuanced work of creating original bibliographic records for the Irish imprint and a portion of the UK imprint for sharing with other libraries as well as for our own catalogues. Cataloguers also create and contribute author ‘authority records’ to the Library of Congress, these records are used internationally to provide clear identification of authors. Our bibliographic records are shared, and used globally via the RLUK and WorldCat databases.

Main image: Gill Whelan.