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The invitation to write this article presents an opportunity to revisit prognostications that Clifford Lynch and I made in 1983 in our article "Online Catalogs: Through a Glass Darkly"(1) In that essay we sought to make generalizations and offer speculations. We wrote: "Some of these may seem outrageous; some will undoubtedly prove incorrect." All in all, however, what we foresaw based on the collective experience at the Division of Library Automation (DLA) has proved to be accurate and properly oriented, if not leading, toward the future of library automation.
By 1983 I had seen monumental barriers in library service between patrons and their access to informative materials. Ten years earlier I had attended a lecture by David Besterman, who declared that if at that time he had needed to depend on the library service of that day he could not reproduce his Bibliography of Bibliographies. Even at libraries where the stacks were not closed, the bibliographic apparatuses were so fragmentary and inconsistent as to prevent the compilation of an exhaustive bibliography.
Shortly before writing "Through a Glass Darkly," I visited a prestigious university library in the Midwest. My host asked if there was any book that I would like to see. I requested Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity, a book that had been stolen from every library in which I previously had attempted to find it. My host escorted me to the rare book room.
There I found the two-volume set--four copies of it. Later, while being shown the library's new online catalog, complete with personal computer front-end, I discovered that a citation to Experimental Researches in Electricity was not in the catalog. My host explained that no rare books or manuscripts were represented in the "public" catalog: If casual readers knew that the library had such materials, they would want to use them, and these materials were available only to veteran scholars. I was reminded once again of Bestermans comments.
Even before hearing Bestermans admonition, I had learned much about the conscious building of barriers between readers and libraries' prized materials from having worked for major research libraries in New York City. However when the quest for Faraday's famous work was finally over, I realized fully for the first time that the first...