The First Search Engines, Built By Librarians - Before the Internet became the advertisement generator we know and love today, int... - https://hackaday.com/2023/06/11/the-first-search-engines-built-by-librarians/ #softwaredevelopment #syracuseuniversity #searchengine #librarians #psychology #university #internet #research #library #network #search #supars

This is a beautiful read for anyone interested in #Libraries or in #GLAM - the story of Pauline Atherton Cochrane, a #Syracuse #librarian, who in the 1970s, worked on the #SUPARS project, one of the first #library search and information retrieval (#IR) systems.

It shows how the team anticipated shifts in how research would be conducted, and acted to support #researchers.

Beautifully written piece by Monica Westin, #lecturer at the #UniversityOfLondon via @aeonmag@twitter.com.

"Atherton’s team wasn’t predicting a world where expert librarians wouldn’t be needed; they were preparing for a world where research would take place in many disparate locations, too far from a reference desk for them to be able to help."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search

> As they worked with the modular terminal on campus, the #SUPARS team saw the future that was coming and what a world based on distributed, networked computing would lose: an ever-larger number of researchers were increasingly going to be working outside of the library, on their own, in need of support that #librarians wouldn’t be able to provide.