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Introduction
Our point of departure is the ideal of a friendly, knowledgeable librarian who knows the collection and is familiar with its readers. We can think of the scholar librarian of general libraries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when collections were so much smaller than now and the knowledgeable librarian mediated access. "The gap between the primary museal function of the library and the occasional need of library visitors to actually locate an individual book was bridged by none other than the librarian, which is to say: by his local memory (memoria localis ) and his polyhistoric knowledge" (Garrett, 1999, p. 111).
There are, however, problems with a human librarian as a service provider. There are limits to how many topics can be mastered, how large a collection can be known well, and how many readers can be helped in a day. In engineering terms, a human librarian does not scale well and, as in other fields, only self-service scales affordably. Worse, a human librarian is prone to catastrophic failure: the librarian may leave or die or become forgetful. Library "hi tech" and the origin of library science, by that name, can be seen as a response to these problems.
Around the end of the seventeenth century many monasteries in Europe were closed and their libraries confiscated. In Bavaria 200 monastic libraries were sent to Munich to be added to the royal library. The librarians were unable to cope with this flood of material until librarian Martin Schrettinger (1772-1851) understood that technical systems were needed to enable readers (as well as librarians) to find what they needed by themselves quickly and easily. It was for the technical guidelines that he developed that he coined the phrase Bibliothek-Wissenschaft (library science) in his textbook Schrettinger (1808, p. 11) which began "A 'library' is a large collection of books whose organization enables every knowledge seeker to use every treatise it contains without unnecessary delay according to his needs" (Transl. Garrett (1999, p. 116), emphasis added).
The central idea was that with a unique identifier for each volume, a good catalog, and a link from the catalog record to the volume's shelf location anyone could make satisfactory use of the collection whatever the arrangement of books on...