Some notes on the origins of Systems Librarians =============================================== Back in, oh, '98 it was, I attended my first Access Conference[1]. Billed as "Canada's Premiere Library Technology Conference", Access back then was the place to be - at least, in North America[2] - for anyone interested in following the seismic changes in library work being wrought by the exponential growth of the Internet in general, and the Web in particular. My job then was not that of a Systems Librarian. But as the project coordinator for a provincial library consortium brokering Internet information services for post-secondary libraries, I was at least Systems Librarian-adjacent. The first night of the conference I recall going for post-reception drinks with a couple of veteran systems librarians, who spent the evening trading war stories about malfunctioning servers, recalcitrant vendors, misbehaving users, and sysadmins and programmers with personality traits one might charitably describe as "quirky". And as I listened, I experienced a growing ambition to join their storied ranks, envisioning that one day - many years down the line - it would be me recounting my war stories to some awed neophyte over whiskey and beer. That was almost 30 years ago. What I did not then realize was that their careers spanned an era that was shortly about to pass its zenith, that in which academic libraries ran their own IT infrastructure. While I would indeed have some stories to tell (who doesn't?) they would not be the same stories of midnight runs to campus data centres when a key component failed or when a data load went off the rails. That heroic age vanished into history with the advent of cloud computing, as academic libraries (like everyone else) outsourced their core operations to an ever dwindling number of winner-take-all vendors. My sense of being at the end of an era has lately sparked an interest in the history of my professional specialization. If I am near the end of the line, where was the beginning? Who was the first Systems Librarian? Perhaps surprisingly, I'd never really looked into it before, content with a vague awareness that it all probably started sometime in the 1960s, parallel to the advent of MAchine Readable Cataloguing, aka MARC. My research began the way all research does, consulting various online resources for the answer. My search did not, initially, turn up much of interest. It appeared that much of the relevant professional literature had not yet been digitized, leading one to speculate that the demand for sixty year-old books and articles about Library IT may not be all that widespread. I next dug up some history at my own institution. A visit to our Archives filled me in on the beginnings of library IT at our university. I learned that we hired a Library Systems Analyst in the summer of 1966, almost exactly 60 years ago. What's really notable about that is our university was only 3 years old at that point, so we've had technical personnel in the library for almost the whole time our university has existed. And I believe we only had one computer on campus at that time, an IBM 1620, that was not well suited to automating library work. That changed when we brought in an IBM System 360 mainframe a couple of years later and shortly thereafter implemented our first automated circulation system, replacing a labour-intensive manual process with a somewhat less labour-intensive automated process involving punch cards. At one time we had keypunch operators up in our admin offices, but that was long ago ... we barcoded all our books back in the 90s. All of that pre-dated me; I took up the mantle but a mere 20 years ago. But I digress. While this gets us somewhat closer to the origins of the Systems Librarian, obviously the specialization did not start at my humble institution, which was even more humble 60 years ago. And to be fair a "Library Systems Analyst" is not exactly a "Systems Librarian" though the two are roughly equivalent in terms of responsibilities. The former could be a Systems Analyst who happened to work in a Library, while the other was necessarily a Librarian with Systems responsibiities. There was some controversy back in the day whether it was better to hire someone with a computing background and have them pick up the library stuff on the job, or vice-versa. My quest next took me into the stacks - into Compact Shelving in fact, where the shelves trundle open and closed on rollers, perchance squashing the unwary between them, like what almost befell Luke, Leia, Chewie and Han in the Death Star trash compactor. Thumbing through "Automation in Libraries," a collection of essays published in 1967, I came upon William J. Kurmey's essay "Management Implications of Mechanization"[3] wherein it was noted that a number of libraries had created positions "variously called systems librarian, systems analyst librarian, librarian systems analyst ..." so we know that the job title goes back at least that far. From Paul Wasserman's "The Librarian and the Machine" (1965)[4] I learned that at the time, due to the laws of supply and demand, "the data processing expert has assumed the role of the modern hero of librarianship" [p.65]. (Did I write not long ago about always being late for the party? I sure as heck missed that one). "Individuals," he goes on to write, "equipped to participate knowingly in the dialogue between library interests and equipment purveyors and then, in the systems analysis leading to procedural modifications, are therefore in a buyers' market." - articulating, I would say, a pretty good capsule definition of just what a systems librarian - or library systems analyst - typically does. Wasserman then elaborates on distinction between the two (as above) without ever explicitly mentioning either job title. Did Wasserman's book precede the formal "systems librarian" designation, perhaps? Not quite. The very first instance of "Systems Librarian" in a job title that I have been able to find dates back to 1963. Hillis L. Griffin held the title "Information Systems Librarian" at Argonne National Labaoratory in Illinois, as documented in the proceedings of a conference on "Libraries and Automation" published by the Library of Congress[5]. In addition to his work at the Laboratory, beginning in 1964 Griffin was one of the instructors for a summer course offered at the University of Illinois, "Computer Programs for Library Operations", for professional librarians "wishing to acquire a knowledge of the concepts of computer programming in relation to library operations." [6] So, can we positively date the origins of the "systems librarian" back to the early 1960s? That would seem reasonable, although librarians were exploring various means of automating routine work as far back as the 1930s; an article describing the use of punch cards to automate lending activities dates to 1936[7]. But if we accept the common definition of "systems librarian" as one who mediates between library operations and computers, then such a thing could not have existed much before the late 1950s at the earliest. Eventually it did occur to me that perhaps I was going at this the wrong way; that instead of looking for the first instance of "Systems Librarian" as a job title, I should instead be researching the earliest implementations of computers in libraries. Surely there, at that inflection point, is where we would mark the origins of systems librarianship? Well, maybe. It turns out the use of computers in libraries goes all the way back to the early 1950s, when a fellow named Harley Tillitt at the Naval Ordinance Test Station (NOTS) in China Lake, led a project to automate indexing and search of scientific reports[8]. Was Tillitt, then, the very first systems librarian, avant la lettre? That claim rests on shaky ground I fear, as Tillitt was in fact the head of the NOTS computing section, not a librarian. Perhaps Tillitt could lay claim to being the first library systems analyst. For whatever it's worth, Google ngrams notes a small uptick in "systems librarian" sightings in the late 1950s[9], but clearly the 1960s are when the term gets properly established. It's even more interesting what happens in the following decades. Use of the term rises rapidly until around 1996, after which it enters a period of marked decline. Some of that is likely due to the emergence of alternative job titles (including everyone's favourite, "cybrarian", yech) that flourished in those years, but I think even more so it reflects libraries' move away from managing in-house IT infrastructure. But "systems librarian" has not yet fallen entirely into disuse; for now it appears to have bottomed out at where we were around 1980. One still sees job postings for systems librarians every so often, even if the job descriptions don't quite match up with what the position used to do. While I can't regret the course of my career - in many ways it's more interesting now than it was when I was more involved in managing infrastructure - I can't help feeling that academic libraries have taken a wrong turn. Even leaving aside pressing issues like vendor lock-in and the ever increasing likelihood of third-party surveillance of our users' research habits, the fundamental issue here is that libraries are infrastructure, whether we're managing books on shelves or bits on transient storage media. If we outsource all the digital stuff - and it's mostly digital, these days - what will ultimately be left of us? Notes & References ------------------ 1. Access Conference Website https://accessconference.ca/ 2. The European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conferences date back to 1979, predating Access by 14 years or so, and covered a lot of the same ground. But based on what I can glean from their website they seem to have fallen by the wayside after 2022. Access skipped a year in 2025 for the first time ever, but is back again in 2026. 3. William J Kurmey. "Management Implications of Mechanization", in Automation in Libraries: Papers presented at the C.A.C.U.L Workshop on Library Automation, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, April 10-12, 1967 Canadian Association of College and University Libraries, 1967 4. Paul Wasserman. The Librarian and the Machine. Detroit: Gale Research Co. 1965 5. Libraries and Automation: Proceedings of the Conference on Libraries and Automation held at Airlie Foundation, Warrenton, Virginia, May 26-30, 1963. B.E. Markuson, ed. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1964 ERIC Document ED051844 6. Linda C. Smith. "From Mechanization in Libraries to Information Transfer - Information Science Education at Illinois", in Ideals and Standards: The History of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1893-1993. University of Illinois, 1993, p.134-156 7. Ralph Parker. "The Punched Card Method in Circulation Work," Library Journal 61, December 1936, p903-5 8. Jim Segesta, Keith Reid-Green. "Harley Tillit and Computerized Library Searching", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2002-07, Vol.24(3), p.23-34 9. Google ngrams https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=systems+librarian Tue Sep 1 13:11:37 PPT 2026