Archaeology and evolution: What happens when you clean your office

Abstract

T o celebrate the arrival of some new of flee furniture, the inhabitants of the Elec\xad tronic Formats Unit in the Marston Scie Library at the University of Florida cleaned the entire area. We w ere fortunate to have Student Assistant Allan, w ho doubles as com\xad puter geek and neatnik, on the payroll dur\xad ing our cleanup. Those of us w ho have survived the tech\xad nical revolution in libraries tend to react with bemusement when we encounter relics while cleaning our offices. But Allan is in his early 20s, and he reacted with wonder, amazement, and reverence as he dug through the layers o f accumulated treasures. Allan unearthed a Hypercard package, circa 1990. “I don’t know what this is, but it looks pretty cool!” I explained how Apple developed the program to hyperlink discrete “cards” within a “stack,” years before the Web exploded. Next came a stack of floppy/CD mailers, made of corrugated cardboard. Allan asked if he could toss them. I said that we used them frequently back in the good old days, w hen we mailed floppies around and had to return outdated CD-ROMs to the publishers. He looked puzzled, and I explained that librar\xad ies subscribed to CDs for years before the jewel case was invented. Allan’s eyes filled with pity. Faculty mem\xad ber John added, “Yes, and the first CDs were made of wood!” nce Then came the prize—a box with a DOS 3.30 manual and an accompanying 5.25 dis\xad kette. “I knew these existed, but I’ve never seen or touched one before!” Allan especially appreciated seeing “IBM” splashed over the manual and diskette. He knew that DOS was originally developed by Microsoft for IBM, but he was unaccustomed to seeing IBM re\xad ceive the top billing. Allan m ourned that he lacked access to a 5.25 floppy drive. In addition to the DOS manual, Allan was surprised to see the number of older soft\xad ware packages that contained printed manu\xad als. We explained that people did (and many still do) prefer to consult printed manuals, and also that old diskettes didn’t have enough room to store manuals as well as programs. Perhaps I should feel embarrassment over the length of time it took us to clean out the office. But I’m happy we saved the archaeo\xad logical dig for Allan, w ho truly appreciated handling the relics and learning about the evolution of the technology from physical pieces to networked resources. He regarded the process as a history lesson. Allan’s reactions will serve to remind me of the perspective of the current generation of students. They handle CDs and floppies, but they expect all library resources to be net\xad worked and Web-based. And the next time one of your networked services crashes, spare a moment of thought for the days when we had to reload crashed programs from floppies. ■