Last Thursday a bunch of librarians were standing around reminiscing about their ancient library school experiences. I nodded along for most of it, faintly remembering using the card catalog in high school, and also typing in ridiculous command lines on my 286 back in the late 80s as a DOS-literate 5 year old. Yes, things have not always been slick and easy and handed to you on a silver platter. No one learns or cares how to do a command search now that incoming college 18 year olds expect everything to work exactly like Google.
Not until these very same librarians all started crooning about this thing called Dialog. Then, oh boy, could they tell some stories. Dialog searching, where you can see the charges rack up by the second for each additional command and each wrong turn made. Even my recent library school grad co-workers admitted to having to learn it, if not just for the sake of bragging rights. "You will never need to use this again," they were told by professors. So why learn it? Why seemingly go backwards rather than forwards in this increasingly techno-geeky library world? From what I gather, it's one of the biggest rushes librarians have ever been subject to in the past twenty or so years. Hopefully within the course of the next two years I'll be able to join these ranks and claim record speed and accuracy parallel to none other.
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