Caltech Library News

George Porter's Top 10 Adventures in Librarianship

This July, George Porter is retiring from his work at the Caltech Library after 27 years. George started at the Library as the Engineering and Applied Science Librarian in summer 1997 and then became our inaugural Repository Coordinator in spring 2023. George contributed so much during his time at the Library that we asked him to reminisce about some of the highlights on the eve of his departure. We will miss George very much and we're happy to share his top 10 adventures in librarianship.

1) Being in the right place at the right time—following a brief career in reference publishing, I completed my MSLS at Columbia University. I went to North Carolina State University Libraries in 1991. By 1993-94, I was chairing both NCSU and the Triangle Research Libraries Network OPAC working groups as we sought to implement the next generation integrated library system from DRA. 

The First International WAIS Conference was hosted at the Research Triangle Institute during this period, bringing Brewster Kahle, Paul Evan Peters, Tim Berners-Lee, and Cliff Lynch to town. This proved to be the only international WAIS conference. 

Brewster Kahle would sell WAIS, Inc. to AOL in 1995. And the experimental system Berners-Lee demonstrated with a NeXT workstation at that conference, the World Wide Web, would rapidly supplant Gopher as the predominant technology for finding and reading material on the Internet.

The menuing system I designed for NCSU to provide access to the new online catalog, the HYTELNET global directory of library catalogs, and access to a variety of locally hosted literature index databases (Medline, Agricola, MLA Bibliography) would be implemented in HTML and accessed using the text-based Lynx web browser.

2) At NCSU Libraries, I was the engineering reference librarian and coordinator of online searching. In the era of dial-up access to commercially hosted databases, mediated searching was the norm. Database searching was expensive. Special academic rates were available for searching after 5:00 p.m. I spent many an early evening doing database searches in Chemical Abstracts, INSPEC, and Engineering Index, for luminescence spectra data (electro-, photo-, chemi-) of a wide variety of III-V semiconductor compounds, especially III-V nitrides. This Army Research Office funded research gave rise to Cree Semiconductors’ white LEDs.

At Caltech Library, which I joined in 1997, I tackled some challenging reference questions:

3) An interlibrary loan request came in looking for a Bible that was published with a detailed timeline from Creation to the present day, which is to say, only a handful of years after Gutenberg invented the printing press. A few hours of research identified such a volume, but not one which could be borrowed through interlibrary lending. Fortunately, the professor understood that having the book brought to campus was not in the cards. He was delighted to have it identified so that he could consult and examine it at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

4) When Prof. Fred Culick was asked to speak at the Reagan Library’s dedication ceremony of the installation of the retired Boeing 707 which had served as Air Force One for seven presidents, he wanted to show a photo of the first time a US President had flown in an airplane. Knowing that the Smithsonian Institution had digitized thousands of historic photos in the mid-1990s, I was able to email a link to a photo of Theodore Roosevelt preparing to take flight in St. Louis in 1910 before Prof. Culick returned to his office.

5) Interlibrary loan questions were never referred to the subject librarians until the DocuServe staff had exhausted all likely avenues of research. One ILL request I worked on took more than six months to fulfill.  The request was for materials property data for Parthenon marble. The information had appeared in a special issue of a periodical published by the engineering school at the University of Thessaloniki. In the end, I received a complete copy of the special issue through the postal service.

6) In January 2001, I was asked to visit the ALA Midwinter exhibits to check on a vendor offering ILL automation software. Pigasys (yes, it was a play on Pegasus) proved to be vaporware, but a neighboring booth hosted Atlas Systems, which were trying to start a similar business with ILLiad. I took news of ILLiad and the developers' contact information back to Caltech.

I had worked with Sandy Garstang, head of access services, and Betsy Coles, software developer, in the fall of 2000 to create a local ILL webform to replace the ubiquitous document delivery request forms. ILLiad was designed for requesting returnables (books) and nonreturnables (photocopies of articles or chapters).

Caltech Library System had a very high traffic level, including document delivery for materials held by the library. In developing our local webform, we had mapped out the metadata needed to efficiently process journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, theses, and standards. The critical innovation was wedding the detailed CLS metadata schema with ILLiad.

The Atlas staff spent parts of February and March 2001 ensconced in the basement of Sherman Fairchild Library, working the more detailed Caltech Library metadata schema into their system which would execute automated lookups for material in the local catalog and in the national OCLC ILL service.

7) Caltech’s electronic thesis program got off to a somewhat bumpy start. The Library invited Ed Fox, the electronic thesis pioneer and CS professor at Virginia Tech, to campus for a one-day symposium on electronic theses during spring break 2000. Arden Albee, the Graduate Dean, was quite taken with the possibilities, but became emeritus that summer. Library communication with the Grad Office broke down for a while. 

The next Graduate Dean, Rod Kiewiet, was a regular participant in the Environmental Quality Lab discussions on Tuesday mornings in which I often participated. I broached the possibility with Rod of pitching an electronic thesis program to the Graduate Studies Committee. I made that pitch during spring term 2002 and received the unanimous approval of the GSC. Dean Kiewiet stepped down from the office in summer 2002.

With a go-ahead from the GSC, voluntary deposit of electronic theses began for the class of 2002 with a requirement to be implemented for PhDs beginning with the class of 2003. I worked with Michael Hoffmann as Graduate Dean to roll out the mandatory electronic thesis requirement.

8) OpenURL linking has become so ingrained in the digital library age that it may be hard to remember when it didn’t exist. The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative in October 1999 led to two fundamental protocols that form the bedrock of digital libraries: OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative–Protocol  for Metadata Harvesting) and OpenURL linking. Eric Van de Velde, Caltech Library’s Director of Library Information Technology, was a participant in the Santa Fe Convention and chaired the NISO committee for OpenURL 1.0 (Z39.88).

Caltech Library became the North American launch partner with Ex Libris to introduce the first commercial implementation of OpenURL, SFX. My contribution in this innovation was hosting a session of RUSA MARS Hot Topics (American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association, Machine Assisted Reference Section) focusing on OpenURL at the ALA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in June 2001.

Library conferences are not usually known for crowd control issues. The fire marshals at SF’s Moscone Convention Center came to the 90-minute session twice to clear the people sitting on the floor and standing in the hall outside of the meeting room. With a live demonstration of the technology and representatives from Ex Libris and the NISO committee on the panel, the 75-seat room was inadequate for the 200 or so librarians trying to attend. Internet connections in convention center meeting rooms were extraordinarily rare in 2001, in part because they were prohibitively expensive. It was $1000 well spent!

9) I spent a great deal of time exploring the world of free academic electronic journals in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The CLS Online Journal Database (OJDB), implemented by Ed Sponsler, CLS software developer, and curated by me, provided a ready home to document the titles and extent of access. The OJDB permitted the Library to track click-throughs, giving us insight into:

• e-journal packages of interest to the campus for potential licensing;
• user behavior when looking for an e-journal (PNAS vs Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; JACS vs Journal of the American Chemical Society vs American Chemical Society. Journal);
• and a place to document access to large collections of e-journals from the global south, SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) and Redalyc.

The free e-journals I described were early contributions to DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) and often reposted in Peter Suber’s Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter, which later became Peter Suber’s Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter, which later became SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Open Access was not yet widely adopted in the late 1990s as shorthand for the free and open dissemination of scholarly content.

10) Across more than three decades of librarianship, I’ve been honored to speak at the North Carolina Library Association, California Library Association, California Association of Research Libraries, American Society for Engineering Education – Engineering Libraries Division, American Chemical Society – Chemical Information Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, American Library Association across three divisions (RUSA, ACRL, and ALCTS), Open Repositories, ORCID Annual Meeting, SCELCapalooza, the Charleston Conference, SPARC national meetings, and the inaugural Digital Initiatives Symposium. None of which would have been possible without the support of my family, my institutional home libraries, and my many collaborators within and without of those libraries.

Photo Credit: Penny Neder-Muro