Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Yellow Pages!

Next in our Throwback Technology series: the Yellow Pages!

But before we get into that exciting item from the past (also the present?), we need to answer the question posed last week:  what is this mystery item?

Now, we did not get a lot of guesses.  Some thought it might be some sort of electric curling device (for the Canadian sport, not your hair).  Maybe like those air hockey games?  Nope, not even close.  Much closer was the guess: "Degaussing - bulk recording tape eraser - essentially a giant magnet."  Now we're getting somewhere.

Yes, this item is a book magnetizer, which would be run along the spine of a book in which a thin magnetic strip had been glued.  Pressing the button activated the magnet, and made the book able to set off an alarm at the library's entrance if someone removed it without checking it out at the circulation desk.  At the desk there would be a large block magnet that would remove the magnetism from the book when you ran the spine along it (sadly, we appear to not have saved either of the ones we had).  The magnetizer would then be used as books were returned to get them ready and secure for the shelves.  You could have a whole cart full of books ready to shelve, and then run the magnetizer along each spine.

We used this magnetic process until we moved on to something else that I am not at liberty to describe.  I will just say "AI and lasers" and leave it to your imagination.

So, the Yellow Pages!  The pages above are inside the Yellow Pages book, but are actually white ("the business white pages").  The Yellow Pages were an alphabetical and subject organized list of businesses and organizations in a community.  This is the 2013-14 Middletown/Lebanon/Springboro Yellow Pages, and apparently the last one we decided to keep.  I chose that page because it points out why so many businesses would start their names with AAA or AAAAA so that they were listed in the front of the book.

This is the subject organized section of the book, more yellow, and lots of ads that businesses could buy to stand out from the basic listing of name, address, and phone number.

Your local phone provider would create the Yellow Pages for your quick reference when ordering pizza or finding a podiatrist or calling your local library.  They are still made, and, at least in my neighborhood sit on the sidewalks and driveways until they get wet and soggy, and then perhaps get tossed in the garbage or recycling bins.  But back in the day, when we had no Internet, this was the way to know your community and find stuff!  And of course, the Yellow Pages was the cousin to the Phone Book, which had white pages, and listed all of the residential telephone listings.  I recall when I was growing up that the two books were combined (white pages in the front and yellow pages in the back).  

It's interesting to think back to this time, and see how important such an organized list of names and  numbers would be.  You could call the operator to find a number if you knew someone's name, but if you weren't sure of your options, the Yellow Pages was key.  Likewise with people:  you might have all of your friends numbers memorized or in a small address book you carried, but tracking down the number of someone you just met (or were hoping to meet) would be hard without the phone book.

So, I think about these older ways of organizing, which I think are disappearing, if not from the world, at least from common understanding.  I think, for instance, that many of the students who come to our library don't know that most books have a handy alphabetical list of terms in the back called an index which can help you jump to the right spot to learn about a topic.  With e-books and keyword searching, these grow less important, but having a list of terms or an organization scheme really helps you track things down (like pizza).

If you'd like to see the Yellow Pages up close, stop by the library.   More throwback technology  is coming at you next week!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: a Mystery Item!

Next in our Throwback Technology series: a Mystery Item!

Well, we are back from our Thanksgiving break with an item for you to identify.  What is this thing in the image above?

It must use electricity . . . 

It's something you can hold in your hand, using a handle on the top . . . 

What is it, though, and why would it be in a library?

Just to note, the toll free number is no longer in service (at least for this device).

Post your thoughts in the comments, and I'll reveal the answer next week.

A bonus image and item for this week is one I mentioned briefly in our Throwback Technology Thursday for October 8 on the Palm Pilot.  It's my old Sony Clie PDA (personal digital assistant) with the included stylus.  It kept me well organized and able to take notes in meetings long before people thought I was playing games on my phone (I'm still just taking notes, mostly). 

If you'd like to see the Clie or the Mystery Item up close, stop by the library.   More throwback technology (and the big reveal) is coming at you next week!

Join us Online! January's Middletown Book for Discussion: The Memory Police

 

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, January 19.  Our title is Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police.  Here is a brief summary of this memorable mystery (or mysterious memory):

"On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, things are disappearing. First, animals and flowers. Then objects--ribbons,bells, photographs. Then, body parts. Most of the island's inhabitants fail to notice these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the mysterious 'memory police,' who are committed to ensuring that the disappeared remain forgotten. When a young novelist realizes that more than her career is in danger, she hides her editor beneath her floorboards, and together, as fear and loss close in around them, they cling to literature as the last way of preserving the past."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio.  We are back in the library and have both OhioLINK deliveries and statewide delivery from Search Ohio's public libraries running.   We do have our curbside pickup operating as well as in-house pickup.
  
• Amazon has the paperback, Kindle, and audiobook available, and Bookshop.org has links to purchase the title from independent booksellers.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  On December 1st, the members of the group also shared these titles to add to your reading/viewing lists:

• Jeff Sommers shared an interview with the author of our December book:  A Conversation with Erik Larson on The Splendid and the Vile with Amor Towles (who, coincidentally, is the author of our April 2018 book, A Gentleman in Moscow)
• In the Heart of the Sea: the tragedy of the whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Philbrick
• In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden, Kathleen Cambor
• Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose
• David McCullough (various titles)
• The Good War and Hard Times, both by Studs Terkel
• "This Happy Breed" and "In Which We Serve" (films based on Noel Coward plays)
• Tana French, The Searcher
• Hillbilly Elegy (book and Netflix film)
• Ordinary Grace, William Krueger
• Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
• London was ours : diaries and memories of the London Blitz, Amy Helen Ball and Wartime Women: A Mass Observation Anthology, Dorothy Sheridan (not books we discussed, but ones that might answer a question we considered where to find the person on the street's experience of the Blitz)
  

We will meet at 12 pm on the 19th in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting https://miamioh.zoom.us/j/86343143232?pwd=cG1oOHE0NHhvZTBNb3dwSGJQdkU2dz09

You may also join by calling +1 301 715 8592

 

Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom and calling information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Forgotten Island" by localben is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  

New books (and more) added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in November!

If you've been thinking about reading a book, we have many new ones (plus a lot of older ones) ready to go!

Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection during November 2020! We added 147 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title.  There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are ten titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• The boundless sea : a human history of the oceans / David Abulafia
• The nine lives of Pakistan : dispatches from a precarious state / Declan Walsh
• Leave only footprints : my Acadia-to-Zion journey through every national park / Conor Knighton
• The kidnapping club : Wall Street, slavery, and resistance on the eve of the Civil War / Jonathan Daniel Wells
• 57 scientifically-proven survival foods to stockpile : How to maximize your health with everyday shelf-stable grocery store foods, bulk foods, and superfoods / Damian Brindle
• Culture warlords : my journey into the dark web of white supremacy / Talia Lavin
• Lean semesters : how higher education reproduces inequity / Sekile M. Nzinga
• Uncanny bodies : superhero comics and disability / edited by Scott T. Smith and José Alaniz
• Sea wife / Amity Gaige
• The alignment problem : machine learning and human values / Brian Christian

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

Thank you for all of your suggestions and requests!  If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Amy Carmichael (carmicae@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways.

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Typeball!

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Typeball!  

Also known as a "golf ball" (probably due to its size), or a typewriter element, the typeball contained all of the characters that a typewriter could type out on paper.  It was a revolutionary invention in 1961 by IBM that saved space inside the typewriter (from the individual characters on metal stems that would come up and strike the paper on older typewriters -- as shown in the photo below).  It also allowed for the easy changing of the typewriter element so that you could type different fonts by popping out the typeball and setting a new ball in its place.  Much of the above information (and some below) comes thanks to the Wikipedia entry on the IBM Selectric typewriter.

"typewriter 2" by spikeyhelen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The two typeballs in the image at the top of the post (and the handy IBM carrying case) were used in the library by past staff members.  They are for the Prestige Elite and Delegate fonts, and, from a bit of research, appear to be from either Selectric I or Selectric II typewriters.  The Selectric II arrived on the scene in 1971.  Both of those typewriters had 88 characters on the typeball, which appears to be true for these balls.  When the Selectric III came out in 1980, its typeballs started allowing for 96 characters.

In my library career, I feel like I keep arriving in libraries at the tail end of various technologies.  I did use a typewriter as a student assistant to type "See Also" reference cards for the Michigan State University Library's card catalog (where I also shelved catalog cards from my freshman to junior years).  "TYPEWRITER see also WORD PROCESSOR", and so forth.  I helped move the card catalog into storage during my senior year.

Here at Gardner-Harvey, my arrival in 2002 came at around the time the staff decided to move our single public typewriter (which bothered some as too noisy for a quiet space like a library) onto the lower floor of the library (then, as now, a study area.  It sat there for a few years, mostly unused, until we decided that our lone staff typewriter was not really needed anymore, and that the public one might as well go, too.  Of course, we did have two different people come looking for a typewriter to use the week after it was removed (that is sadly part of the ragged end of one technology and the transition to another -- ask me about fax machines some time).

If you'd like to see our typeballs (but sadly not a full typewriter) stop by the library.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Headphone Splitter!

 

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Headphone Splitter!  

Now, you may have used a headphone splitter before, just a Y-shaped cable that has its single end lead into a phone and its forked end lead to two spots to plug earbuds or headphones into for a shared musical or audio experience.  But in a library or a school setting, these splitter boxes were common for a time.  

The basic operation was to have a line or cable coming into the box from an audio device like a stereo, a record player, a cassette player, or a VCR or DVD player.  Then, in each corner of the box you'd have a place to plug in a set of headphones.  In the image above, you can see the black cable leading from one corner and twisting around to the 3.5mm plug in the lower center of the picture.  That would go into the audio device, and then the four silver circles would be where you would plug headphones in.  The boxes were purchased when the larger 1/4" jack was used on headphones and other devices, and two of them have metal or plastic adapters in them to accommodate the smaller 3.5mm jack.  There are also short silver-colored sticks in the center of the box that were used to adjust the volume for each of the pairs of headphones that were plugged in.  

This speaks to me of a different time and place related to technology.  First of all, you might only use a splitter like this in a place where you wanted to, at the same time, allow multiple people to listen, but also contain the sound.  So, a library or school setting makes sense, where a small group of students might watch a DVD together, or listen to music without disturbing others around them.  But we also have to think about a time when the devices to play those sounds might be less common (like a VCR), and too expensive that every individual who needed to use it could have their own.  And certainly, these devices were readily used in classrooms or homes without headphones.  We could also imagine a situation where the medium you were using (a VHS tape, record, cassette, or DVD) might be in limited supply, so that everyone would have to come to the library to listen or watch.   

That certainly drove the need for the splitter, where four students might come and sit in the library's instructional materials center (IMC) room and watch a nursing videotape(that doesn't leave the library), while next to them another four students might watch a DVD for another class.  In a limited space you could accommodate multiple listening needs for not only individuals, but small groups, too.  

Now, the splitter is limited to four users, and today we might think of other ways to accomplish a shared listening experience.  With more study rooms, you could have a larger group watch or listen to something together without headphones.  Or, you could have any number of people listen individually to something in the library with headphones or earbuds from their phones or laptops, or a library computer.  And depending on the media (streaming video comes to mind), individuals could view a streaming video from home or anywhere else.  

If you'd like to see the splitter and imagine listening in the past, stop by the library.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Cassette Tape Adapter!

 

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Cassette Tape Adapter!  

OK, why does that cassette tape have a tail?  That is no tail, my friend, but rather an example of a moment in transitional technology.  We all face these transitions, when technology Y starts to supplant technology X, but we still have technology X and we want to keep using it.  And only when we get to technology Z do we decide we might just need to give up on X.

In the meantime, though, something like this cassette tape adapter might just work for what we need.  In this case, this fine object, a headphone jack and cable on the end of a cassette, might seem like an odd merging of devices.  But this is no mere gluing together of objects with the hope of attracting attention, or making it easier to find your favorite cassette by tying it to your arm.  

The cassette adapter came about as a way to plug a cassette into the cassette player of a car, and then plug the cable into a CD player.  That way, you could play one of those newfangled CDs in your car without installing a car CD player.  You could use a much cheaper portable CD player instead.

Of course, as with all technologies, this had some issues.  The one I experienced the most was that the tape on the cassette would break, rendering the device useless.  But for the most part, the tape would stay together and keep transmitting the signal from the CD player or other device through the car's audio system.  And other devices clearly became important as we moved beyond the CD for media to listen to.  Anything you could plug into a headphone jack, an iPod, your phone, an MP3 player, could send out sweet sounds for your driving enjoyment.

This device may not be completely in the throwback category.  According to this 2011 New York Times article, the last car manufactured with the option of a factory-installed cassette player was a 2010 Lexus SC 430.  So, while there are certainly cars on the road with cassette players (Car and Driver in 2020 estimated that the average car is 11.9 years old), they are rarer and rarer indeed.

We've now moved on to Bluetooth transmission of audio from your phone to your car, or using an AUX cord, with a stop along the way for the FM transmitter (which, when plugged into your device) could send your audio onto an unused radio station address on the FM dial).  

This will likely not be our last example of transitional technology (I know I have an FM transmitter somewhere).  If you'd like to see the cassette tape adapter, or one of our cassette player/recorders, stop by the library.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Need help with a final paper or project? Try a research consultation!

A recent survey of Middletown campus students revealed that only 30% of you know that we offer research consultations to give you advice on where and how to search for information on your research assignments.  We are here to help you save time and find quality information to improve your grades!

Of course, in a normal semester, many students just drop by the library with a question about searching, sources, or citations that can lead to a longer conversation.  This semester, we are receiving many questions by email or chat, but we also wanted you to know that you could arrange a time to talk with us about your research needs on Zoom.  It can be helpful to work through your research together.

You may watch our new two-minute tutorial on how research consultations work (starring Theo-Saurus the library dinosaur), or you can request a consultation.  We are committed to finding a time to meet that is convenient for you.

TEC Tuesday Online! Dog Toys project is posted!

Update:  the project video has been posted at the link below!  Enjoy the project, and if you need anything, let us know!

Did you know that you could easily make a toy for your dog?  We'll give you all the steps to make it happen and give your dog something new to chew.

The TEC Lab is moving online this semester to bring exciting making projects to you on the first Tuesday of each month.

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, we will post a video and instructions on easily creating a dog toy to bring your pooch (or someone else's) hours of fun.  In addition, if you need any supplies for the project, we'll make them available for you to pick up from the library.

See the TEC Lab Makerspace: Workshops page for more details (posted on the 3rd)!

The above image was provided through a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license by Ralph Daily.

New books (and more) added to the Gardner-Harvey Library in October!

If you've been thinking about reading a book, we have hundreds of new ones (plus a lot of older ones) ready to go!

Take a look at our New Books shelves or skim down our new materials list of items we added to the collection during October 2020! We added 127 books, e-books, DVDs, and other items during that time, thanks to your selections and suggestions. The list can be sorted by call number, area of our collection, or by title.  There is definitely something here for everyone!

Here are eight titles from the list, to give you an idea of what we've been buying: 

• Live not by lies : a manual for Christian dissidents / Rod Dreher
• What were we thinking : a brief intellectual history of the Trump era / Carlos Lozada
• Body snatching in Ohio : a century of digging up corpses in the Buckeye State / by Curt Dalton
• Is rape a crime? : a memoir, an investigation, and a manifesto / Michelle Bowdler
• Solutions and other problems / Allie Brosh
• The searcher / Tana French
• Owls of the eastern ice : a quest to find and save the world's largest owl / Jonathan C. Slaght
• To make their own way in the world : the enduring legacy of the Zealy daguerreotypes / edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, Deborah Willis

This tag will show you all of the prior lists of new materials, in reverse chronological order. We are eager to hear from you about individual items you would like us to buy, or types of items we should be on the look out for, or general subject areas we should build up in the collection.

Thank you for all of your suggestions and requests!  If you have a suggestion of something to order, please use our "Tell GHL to Buy It" form, email Amy Carmichael (carmicae@miamioh.edu), or drop by the library with your request. And pass your general suggestions or comments about the collection to us in those same ways.

Thanks again for keeping our collection vibrant and your information needs met!

 

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Compact Disc!

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Compact Disc!  

Well, I said last week that we would cover CD-ROMs soon, and here they are!  Now, there is actually a lot of ground to cover, in that CDs (compact discs) were originally developed for audio storage in the early 1980s.  The disc could hold 74 minutes of sound, which made it attractive as an improvement over the record and the cassette tape, which were limited to 45 minutes per side.  You wouldn't have to flip the CD over to keep listening.  

By the late 1980s, the primacy of cassettes was yielding to CDs, and at the same time CDs started to be used for computer storage.  With a CD-ROM drive (as shown above), you could write data on to the disc, which could accommodate 650 megabytes (MB).  In time this was tweaked up to 700 MB.  The CD-ROM could be used as a portable storage mechanism, with files saved on the disc then moved between computers as needed.  It could also be used to just write data once onto the disc for storage. CDs became a primary way to purchase and deliver software.   

In time, both the audio and computer storage versions of the CD ran into new means for storage and music delivery.  With speedier data transfer speeds through the Internet, it became more and more feasible to download music files from the Web.  Eventually online storage of files was much faster and could replace external storage media.  In between, the appearance of USB flash drives made the size and relative slowness of the CD-ROM passe.  

These discs served their purpose well, and have remained as a storage mechanism.  The disc shown in the image above includes a recording of the dedication ceremony when the Middletown campus opened in 1966.  The data is actually etched into the disc, so it is not as easy to lose the memory on there (as with the magnetic storage methods of a computer hard drive or the USB flash drive).  But, it's only useful to have things stored on a CD-ROM if you have the right drive to read the disc.  As those have disappeared from laptops and desktops, it's harder to find a way to get to that data (or to music CDs, as CD players are fewer and farther between).

If you'd like to see some CDs and CD-ROMs (and the drive), stop by the library.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Dr. Tammie Gerke's National Park Talks: White Sands National Park

Join us as Dr. Gerke talks about White Sands National Park (the newest National Park!). She will discuss the geology and other interesting information about the park.

This session will run Wednesday, November 18th from 4:45pm to 6:15pm with time for questions and discussion. The event will be held as a free online meeting.  Add this event to your Google calendar!  

When it is time for the event, use the link below to join the presentation:

Join Zoom Meeting https://miamioh.zoom.us/j/84379457768?

All are welcome to attend.

"White Sands" by Woody H1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

TEC Tuesday Online! Dog Toys

Did you know that you could easily make a toy for your dog?  We'll give you all the steps to make it happen and give your dog something new to chew.

The TEC Lab is moving online this semester to bring exciting making projects to you on the first Tuesday of each month.

On Tuesday, November 3, 2020, we will post a video and instructions on easily creating a dog toy to bring your pooch (or someone else's) hours of fun.  In addition, if you need any supplies for the project, we'll make them available for you to pick up from the library.

See the TEC Lab Makerspace: Workshops page for more details (posted on the 3rd)!

The above image was provided through a Creative Commons CC-BY-2.0 license by Ralph Daily.

Join us Online! December's Middletown Book for Discussion: The Splendid and the Vile

The MUM Book Discussion group will next meet on Tuesday, December 1.  Our title is Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile.  Here is a brief summary of this biography of Winston Churchill:

"In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Winston Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless."  The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today's political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when-in the face of unrelenting horror-Churchill's eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together."  

Here is where you can find the book:

• There are several copies available through Miami, OhioLINK, and SearchOhio  .  We are back in the library and have both OhioLINK deliveries and statewide delivery from Search Ohio's public libraries running.   We do have our curbside pickup operating as well as in-house pickup.
  
• Amazon has the paperback, Kindle, and audiobook available.

Our group is always finding interesting titles to share, and we look forward to the new things you'll bring to the table.  On October 27th, the members of the group also shared these titles to add to your reading/viewing lists:

• The children's books of Alexander McCall Smith (and Jo Nesbo's Fart Powder series)
• Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park, Conor Knighton
• Diana Gabaldon's fifth Outlander series book: The Fiery Cross  
  
• Before We Were Yours, Lisa Wingate
  
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Swing Time, Zadie Smith
• Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, David Giffels
• The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman

We will meet at 12 pm on the 1st in Zoom at 

Join Zoom Meeting

ID: 84245447382
Password: 401749

Add this event to your Google Calendar!  (which includes the Zoom and calling information)

Please come along to our discussion to share what you've been reading/watching/listening to/experiencing!

If you're looking for something interesting to read, check out our page of past and future reads at http://www.mid.miamioh.edu/library/bookdiscussion.htm

"Bletchley Park - Hut 8 - poster - Winston Churchill - Let us go forward together" by ell brown is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Floppy Disk!

 

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Floppy Disk!  Same ground rules apply:  I'll share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I will use a broad definition of technology to include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose.  And, I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.

We've dealt a little with storage media so far, mainly audio storage on cassette tapes and visual storage of information on microfilm (and storing contact information on paper in your Rolodex).  This week's topic, floppy disks, speaks to a method for portable computer information storage.  Now, there was a time in the 1950s through the early 1970s when you didn't really need to have a portable method of storage for what you were working on using a computer.  This was because you were running programs and storing files on a mainframe computer.  You might only work on one of these at a time, you didn't have one at home, and for the most part they were not connected together with a network.  You could possibly walk around with a big reel of magnetic tape, which was used to back up files on a mainframe, but that wouldn't be very convenient (you wouldn't have a way of accessing the information on the tape).

But, with the creation of the personal computer, there was a need to have a way to store files and other data in a way that was more mobile.  You might need to work on files at multiple different computers, or, especially in the early days before computers were networked together, you might just need to move files between computers in the same room.

The floppy disk came to the rescue as a relatively inexpensive way of carrying your files with you.  It was (as shown in the image above on the left) a squarish, 5-1/4 inch piece of plastic that does indeed bend and "flop" as you wave it up and down.  You would insert the floppy into a floppy disk drive either as an external unit you plugged into your computer, or as an internal drive that would have a slot for entering disks right on your computer.  

Developed at various larger sizes in the early 1970s, by the 1980s and into the early 1990s the 5-1/4 inch floppy was very common, usually holding just 360K of memory.  That is not a lot of space, but it was sufficient for the level of memory that many files of the time required.  Over time, though, as files and programs grew in size, and started to require multiple floppy disks, larger capacity media.  Two examples of that are in the image above - in the center is a 3.5" disk (still called a "floppy", though it was not) that could hold 1.44MB, and a Zip disk (this one held 250MB).  They both required separate drives.  

I remember having a floppy disk when I was in the Computer Club in high school (mid 1980s), and then several in college.  They didn't do well in extreme temperatures, and while I only remember ruining a couple of them, leaving them in a hot car or walking around in the winter were always sources of fear about losing files. 

Portable storage kept evolving, most notably over the last 20 years with USB flash drives that could regularly store multiple GB of data, up to two terabytes.  For the most part, we have seen portable storage devices become eclipsed by storing stuff in the cloud, in our ubiquitous online file storage locations like Google Drive.  And, I'm skipping over CD-ROMs, which we'll likely cover soon.

If you'd like to see (and shake) a floppy disk (or any other ancient storage media), stop by the library.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Put the library on your resume! We have a student assistant position open

We have an opening for a student assistant in the Gardner-Harvey Library on the Middletown Campus.  Read the detailed job description and apply today!

Gardner-Harvey Library Middmester Newsletter: Hidden gems and dinosaurs on campus

What do dinosaurs, voting, and pools all have in common? They are all highlighted in the Gardner-Harvey Library Middmester Newsletter!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: Microfilm!

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  Microfilm!  Same ground rules apply:  I'll share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I will use a broad definition of technology to include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose.  And, I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.

So microfilm is really, really tiny film.  No, that's not right.  OK, it's a really, really small image of something, stuck on a piece of film.  Yeah, that's closer.  The basic idea is that you can create an image of a page (or typically two pages, side by side) of a magazine, journal, or newspaper.  And then you can take that image and shrink it onto a long piece of film.  Then, you can repeat the process until you have hundreds of pages captured on the same piece of film.  The standard length of the film is 100 feet.  Now, you could just loop the film around your arm (many times) and go carrying it around and try to convince people to hold it up to the sun and squint and be amazed that you're carrying two weeks of the New York Times with you (it's so light!).  But, after you get over your initial excitement, you should sit down and think about the practicalities involved.

So, microfilm came about to make it easier to store more information in a smaller space.  By shrinking roughly 700 pages of a periodical onto a reel of microfilm, you end up with a little box that is less than 4" x 4" x 1 2/3".  You can put a lot of those boxes in the same space it would take to hold the equivalent stacks of newspapers.  

Now, the cost of saving all the space was that you had to have something to view those tiny pages with (holding them up to the sun and squinting is not recommended, and not at all effective even for people with perfect vision).  With a microfilm reader/printer, you could make the small images large again on a screen, as you ran the loop of film between two reels and underneath a magnifying lens.  You could even print individual pages or sections of pages to take them with you.  Another cost, though, was that in the race to photograph all of those pages, sometimes pages were left out (accidentally, or in the case of advertisements, on purpose -- who needs those, some people thought).  And many color images were captured in black and white, because it was cheaper than color microfilm.  That made some microfilm incomplete, or left historians without interesting information that had been in the original periodical.  

Of course, you have to imagine the introduction of microfilm taking place before we had computers and scanning and the production of periodicals in digital formats from the beginning.  If we were designing things now, we'd just find ways to save our digital articles, etc. online, and share them around.  That is how most articles are experienced these days.  But in the microfilm days, it was a great way to keep more information available when the alternative was keeping issue after issue after issue of journals and newspapers, all stacked on shelves, and prone to getting out of order.

What is a little crazy is the transitions that libraries have had to make, from print periodicals, to microfilm (along with recent print periodicals), and then eventually to full text articles and journals online.  But, at each step people thought they were doing the right thing to preserve the past.  The most controversial step was the argument to remove print and replace it with microfilm because the microfilm would last longer.  That might be true (estimates now say microfilm will last 500 years), but paper lasts pretty long (maybe hundreds of years in the right conditions), and the loss of quality or content during the microfilming process was frustrating.  Our rush to digitize may have lost some elements of print periodicals, too, and the magnetic media that computer memory is stored on may last only about 10 years (so all of the servers we stick stuff on are being constantly updated and replaced so we don't lose stuff). 

In the end, we need to think about what is involved in using a particular manner of storing information (paper: your hands and eyes, microfilm: a reader/printer, digital: your phone or laptop).  And we need to think about longevity.  Microfilm was one approach that made some sense at the time, and is still around, though much reduced in use (we just have some sample reels left over from our collection, and no reader/printer).  If you'd like to see what a reel of microfilm looks like, stop by the library and take a look.   More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

Theo-Saurus Helps You Stay Healthy While Staying Connected with the Gardner-Harvey Library!

The Gardner-Harvey Library dinosaur, Theo-Saurus, has the answers you need when using library materials and resources.  Check out Theo-Saurus' tutorials on book checkout, the book drop, curbside pickup, social distancing, using study rooms, and other ways to stay healthy when visiting the library.

Here is a YouTube playlist of 6 videos on how we are safely conducting library services during the COVID-19 pandemic.  You can also see all of our tutorials and other videos on the Gardner-Harvey Library YouTube channel.

Be like Theo-Saurus, be safe, and stay well!

Throwback Technology Thursdays: the Palm Pilot!

Next in our Throwback Technology series:  the Palm Pilot!  Same ground rules apply:  I'll share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I will use a broad definition of technology to include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose.  And, I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.

This is a great technology to follow the Rolodex.  The Palm Pilot took the Rolodex mission, easy access to your contacts, and digitized them into something you could carry in the palm of your hand (as it were).   But that's not all!  The early Palm Pilots could also do so much more:  it could store your calendar, keep a to-do list, take notes, use a calculator, and read emails (which you downloaded through your computer).  You could easily make updates to any of these while on the go, using the touchscreen and a stylus to tap options and to even write on the screen. It was a type of personal digital assistant (PDA) that you might carry alongside your flip phone that did not yet have any of those capabilities.

The Palm shown in the picture above is a Palm IIIC, which came out in 2000, along with a foldable keyboard (which is pretty close to a full size keyboard like you would find on a desktop computer.  The Palm would plug into the slot above the 5, 6, and 7 keys on the keyboard so that you could easily enter text into the Palm.  The Palm IIIC is notable because it was the first color Palm Pilot, with 8MB of RAM.  It was like a heavy, bulky cell phone, but it actually had no phone or online connection (though later models morphed into smartphones).  Any document you wanted to add to the Pam had to travel through a serial cable from your computer.  That was how you would update emails, or keep your calendar, memos, and contacts backed up online.  

I started using the Palm IIIC in the latter part of 2000, and kept at it until about 2004, when I switched to a Sony Clie PDA.  That in turn was replaced by an iPod Touch 2 in 2008 or 2009 (but I will leave some of that for a later Throwback Technology Thursday).  It really gave one a sense of freedom from carrying a very heavy laptop, or being tethered to a desktop computer, and also the ability to discard notebooks and pens. It was an interesting transitional device between some cross of paper organizers and a desktop computer on the one hand, and the smartphone or ever-lighter laptop on the other.  I moved to the Palm from a Franklin Day Planner, a datebook/to-do list/address book combo, and found that change very freeing.

So, feel free to drop by the library and hold the Palm IIIC (I think I have my Sony Clie somewhere, too).  More throwback technology is coming at you next week!

The Forgotten Pool - a Miami Middletown Mystery

"It's another ordinary spring semester day.  You've just left class at Levey Hall, and headed over to the library to sit and study for a bit." So begins your chance to solve a mystery:  is there a pool on the Middletown Campus?  Where is it?

This digital escape room is designed to teach you a little about the history of the Miami University Middletown campus and a little bit about searching for information and using archival resources.  Can you solve the mystery?  Enter the search for The Forgotten Pool!  We hope you enjoy it!  

If you have questions about The Forgotten Pool, please contact the Gardner-Harvey Library staff.

TEC Tuesday Online! Phone Holograms project is posted!

 

Update:  the project video and resources have been posted at the link below!  Enjoy the project, and if you need a transparency sheet, let us know!

Did you know that you could make a video that looks like a hologram?  Did you know that you could project this video (and lots of other holograms from YouTube) from your phone?

The TEC Lab is moving online this semester to bring exciting making projects to you on the first Tuesday of each month.

On Tuesday October 6, 2020, we will post a video and instructions on easily creating hologram videos and also creating a viewer that brings your hologram into the world to amaze everyone.  In addition, if you need any supplies for the project, we'll make them available for you to pick up from the library.

See the TEC Lab Makerspace: Workshops page for more details (posted on the 6th)!

"Hologram" by m_hweldon is licensed under CC BY 2.0