[Professorial Lecture series post four]

When I began my Ohio State career in 1992, the criteria for promotion and tenure at University Libraries was clear and straight forward. There was no dilemma.

“Candidates are expected to produce research/creative work of high quality and scholarly significance. The work is be be widely disseminated through publication and/or presentation.”

To meet this criteria I got to work on identifying my first research topic for my first publication.

At the time, FTP was the tool which was used to distribute documents on the Internet. The leading emerging Internet technology was system developed by the University of Minnesota called Gopher.

Gopher (SUNY Cortland)

Gopher was designed by a team led by Mark P. McCahill as a method for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents on the rapidly growing number of servers on the Internet. It’s text-based hierarchy menu interface was well-suited to the text-oriented computer systems which were common at the time. It joined existing services such as including WAIS, FTP and Usenet. There are still Gopher servers online today (video: The Hidden Internet: Gopher Protocol).

Having explored Gopher I found it a great tool to help facilitate library user access to the resources that began to populate Gopher. So, after exploring and using the system I got to work drafting my first manuscript, entitled A Gopher on the Reference Desk. I submitted for publication in the summer of 1993 and when it was accepted without revision my scholarly career was launched.

However, between the time that I submitted the paper and when in was actually published in 1994, Mosaic happened. While the World Wide Web had been in development for several years, it didn’t become accessible to Windows and Macintosh computers until Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in September 1993.

The dilemma I immediately faced was that for all intents and purposes the already rapidly changing Internet landscape, coupled with the lag time of traditional print publications, turned my paper into a historical piece even before it was published. While many will say that remains a useful scholarly communication since it documents the technology of the day. However, my professional goal was to influence the deployment of new technologies in other libraries.

[Next: Technology is like a Fish]