As the world grapples with the growth of artificial intelligence and changes to work in many fields, it may seem odd that we are only about a half century into the digital era. Coincidentally, Milner Library at Illinois State University is 50 years old this month. In the year Milner opened, the library helped plant an early seed that grew into the massive information sharing we have today.
The new Milner Library opened in July of the nation’s bicentennial year, 1976. The old Milner Library is now known as Williams Hall. Both were named for Ange Milner, the first professional librarian at the university. By ’76, ISU had needed a new library for more than a decade as enrollment grew to more than 19,000 students.
“The old Milner library was built for a kind of a sleepy, staid teachers’ college. By the time of the move to the new Milner Library, Illinois State Normal University had become a thriving, much larger, multidisciplinary public university,” said Bill Kemp, librarian of the McLean County Museum of History.
Educators were in the early stages of adapting computers to the field. Academic and governmental libraries were having trouble cataloging items. They often cataloged the same items, which wasted staff time in noting each book, journal and magazine at every institution.
“An interconnected catalog that academic and governmental libraries could share was really groundbreaking, perhaps even more than people realized at the time,” said Kemp.
Until then, libraries had card catalogs, 3x5 cards you had to physically flip through to find whether a school had a given work. Cards couldn’t tell you what other libraries had. Card catalogs were organized alphabetically or by subject.
Milner Library joined what was then called the Ohio College Library Center [OCLC].
“The consoles resemble a television screen that is attached to a typewriter. The operator merely types in the title and author, waits a second or two for the message to travel by telephone line to OCLC's computer in Columbus, and for the computer to search. And presto, the complete card catalog information is presented as if by magic on the screen,” wrote the Bloomington Pantagraph newspaper in 1976.
OCLC was initially a group of Ohio libraries that got together to share resources and create an electronic online database.
“That survives today,” said Kemp. “OCLC supports WorldCat.org, the largest in the world. It is internationally organized. It's a nonprofit, and it's a library consortium. Milner Library has been a member since pretty early on.”
Joe W. Kraus was ISU’s director of libraries then.
“‘The goal of good libraries always has been that anyone who wants to read a book should be able to get it, wherever the reader is, or wherever the book is,’ Kraus said. With systems like OCLC at ISU and interlibrary loan, that goal has been achieved for almost everyone who wants to read,” wrote the Pantagraph.
When Milner joined there were a few hundred academic libraries in OCLC. Forty were in Illinois, including the University of Illinois and the Chicago Public Library. The total number of records was about two million. Users could also find what other institutions had. Today, there are tens of thousands of libraries and other institutions. It is the world's largest bibliographic database.
“Several years ago, there were at least 540 million bibliographic records in some 480 different languages,” said Kemp.
ISU had leased two consoles from OCLC, connected by phone line to Columbus, Ohio. As part of the move, ISU bought four consoles, which were more cost effective than leasing.
“The technology in 1976 was rather alien to most people,” said Kemp. “Something we take for utter granted today was truly magic back then.”
