Joan Starr
Joanstarr@earthlink.net
San José State University
Background
From the perspective of all of human history, a twenty-year period— one score —is a brief moment. In the immediate context of our harried electronic age, however, twenty years are enough for three or four technological lifetimes. Indeed, the twenty years from 1983 to 2003 were witness to profound and rapid change that altered the very heart of the library profession, “the process of acquiring, storing, and accessing information” (Kwasik, 2002, p. 33). Prominent sociologist Manuel Castells (2000), arguing that the last quarter century ushered in a most fundamental social transformation, identified “new information technologies” (p. 693) as a key contributing factor.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (1996) and Zakon (2004) chart this social transformation and the adoption of these new information technologies by way of a timeline that shows the most significant contributory events as milestones. Some milestones are reflective of the changes observed in society, such as when Time magazine named the computer as its “Man of the Year” in 1982; other milestones denote major advances in technology, such as the completion in 1983 of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP )—the basic communication mechanism for the Internet. The next five years mark the first CD-ROM, Gibson’s new term cyberspace, community-based bulletin boards, and e-mail systems, and, by 1987, over ten thousand host computers connected to what would come to be called the Internet. In the 1990s Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web prototype, and, in 1996, start-up commercial ventures began offering competing search engines to help information seekers cope with the already overwhelming number of web resources. By 2000, best estimates of the Internet’s size were greater than one billion pages…
Cite: Starr, J. (2004). A measure of change : comparing library job advertisements of 1983 and 2003. LIBRES, 14(2), 1‑18. https://doi.org/10.32655/LIBRES.2004.2.1