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1. Introduction to the early days and general overview
The journal known today as Program: electronic library and information systems was founded in 1966 at the then School of Library Studies at Queen's University Belfast (QUB). The mid-1960s was a time of expansion in higher education generally and in library education in particular, including, for instance, the founding of the College of Librarianship Wales in Aberystwyth in 1964. In 1961 Peter Harvard-Williams had become the University Librarian at QUB and had been involved in the setting up of the QUB School of Library Studies, which appointed three lecturers (Richard Kimber, Peter Lewis and Philip Whiteman) in 1965 and admitted its first students later that year. One morning, Peter Harvard-Williams came into Richard Kimber's office and said "What would you think about editing a newsletter to deal with library automation?". As [2] Kimber (1987) recounted at a celebration to mark 21 years of Program , "I thought it was a good idea. The timing was just right: too soon, and it would have not survived; too late and somebody else would have done it". The first issue (reprinted in this issue), had the title Program: news of computers in British university libraries and comprised four pages, with a red masthead. It was typed on the School secretary's Imperial 66 manual typewriter and printed by the QUB Reprographic Unit, and was available for free. Another journal, Catalogue and Index , was founded at QUB at the same time with Peter Lewis (who later became Director General of the British Library's Bibliographic Services Division) as its Editor; that journal is now the periodical of the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). In the early 1960s, staff in several university libraries in the UK, especially those at Southampton and Newcastle, had started to experiment with using computers to assist in the processing of information. As stated in the first issue, "the purpose of Program is to assist librarians in learning about what is beginning to be done in this field, to provide a medium for discussion of the problems involved, and to help establish direct personal contact between those working in similar directions".
Program continued as a newsletter, being published...