A Brief History of Library Databases

This is not so much a real history as it is a basic outline of how the databases we use today took their form. Many of the oddities of today’s databases are directly due to the way they developed. Knowing some of that history can help you understand how to use databases more effectively, and help you work around some of the problems that still exist today.

Library Search Before Databases

You may be familiar with using card catalogs to locate books in a library. These allowed you to search for items using the title, subject, or author of a book by simply thumbing through alphabetized cards. This system worked pretty well for books since there are fewer books than articles in a typical library. Imagine at least three separate cards for every single article published in every newspaper and magazine available in the library! It would have become impossible to navigate very quickly.

Readers Guide to Periodical Literature

Instead of using cards, by the beginning of the 20th century there were books called article indexes that contained entries for every article published that year from selected groups of journals. Much like card catalogs, these included entries by author name and by subject. Of course, there were some major differences as well: article indexes were published periodically, usually one volume per year, and they couldn’t tell you if the library actually had the item in the collection.

Users of public libraries probably remember the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, but many others existed as well. Specialized indexes were created for specific disciplines, like the Science Citation Index or the Bibliography of the History of Art.

As a researcher you’d have to sit down and search through volume after volume, looking up the same author names or subject terms in each volume and then skimming through all the article titles to find what you want. There was no way to search the abstract or full text of articles, and there was no way to combine subjects to create a more precise search. It was extremely time consuming. It could take an entire afternoon to gather the same number of articles as you can with a single 2 minute search in a database today.  (I know this from painful experience!)

Electronic Indexes Appear

Just as computers allowed the card catalog to become electronic, article indexes began to appear in electronic forms. At first many were on CD-ROM. You’d get the appropriate CD from the librarian, plug it into one of the desktop computers near the reference desk, and search away. For the first time you could search multiple years at once and even combine subjects to create a precision search. CD-ROM indexes were quickly out of date, since new items had to be added in the form of a new version. Once you found something listed in an index, you still had to check the library catalog to know if the library actually had the item. Also, the cost of putting all that data onto a CD meant that many indexes only started at a recent date. Researching back in time meant going to the shelf full of print indexes.

One of the biggest differences between the old CD-ROM indexes and the databases we use today was the complete lack of full text. Computers at the time just couldn’t handle all that data.

Databases Go Online

A Library Catalog on Telnet

Long before the Internet became a household term, library databases were moving online. Using Telnet you could connect to a database from a computer anywhere in the library and do your search. No more waiting for the last user to return the CD!

Telnet required using keystroke commands, which took some practice. Once you mastered those commands, you could search and collect citation information at the speed of light! When databases began to transition from Telnet to the web interfaces we recognize today, many experienced searchers were frustrated by the slowdown.

As computers began to grow in memory and speed, so did databases. Soon it became feasible for databases to include not just citation information but the entire text of the article. Today it is not unusual to find databases that include full text for every item in the databases. Still, most databases include a mixture of full text and citation-only records. Even databases that say “Full Text” in the title may have items with only citation information. Why? Well, when they named the database it was so exciting to be able to offer at least some full text, that feature was included in the name. Now that people are used to the name, it’s hard to change it.

One of the greatest–and often overlooked–benefits of databases today is that so many can directly link you to holdings information for your particular library. Even if the full text isn’t housed within the database you are searching, you can find it elsewhere much faster than in the past. Here at Walden you can link to the full text in another database if we have it, and at brick-and-mortar libraries you can quickly check print holdings in the library catalog with a single click. No more searching the catalog for items you just found by searching in a database.

With memory, transmission speeds, and search algorithms improving every day, it’s hard to know what databases will look like in the future. It’s tempting to dream of an intuitive, seamless, single search that can get you exactly what you want, when you want it. That may not be reality for a while (or ever). We’ll talk about why in a later post.

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