Captain’s log #6. 21 November 2025. We have had a day of time travel last week: travelling back to the early 1990s. We went back for 1 day to a situation where we did not have any internet in the building. Reflecting on this is not a massive achievement of analytical prowess. Basically: we could not access our catalogue, could not do much of our normal work. In fact this blog post was written on that lull day’s afternoon, and saved locally on my computer. All library-specific software is in the cloud, all our borrower’s data is on “someone else’s hard drive” as well as the records for our books. Without the internet we needed to show a lot of HI – human intelligence. Someone walked into the reading room and asked whether we had books by a specific author. Luckily, I had come across the books we have by Margaret Silf; I even remembered where they were shelved. Maybe not so much a case of HI, but HM (= human memory)! Later that day, a student came into the Library, and she had a list of about 5 books she wanted to find. Sadly, she had not checked our catalogue before turning up. Of the 5 books, I found 3 by going to the correct shelf; for the other two I had to search the catalogue, using my mobile with my provider’s “mobile data”. Maybe the biggest takeaway of our day of internet outage was: it is still useful to remember some things, and not only rely on a computer which needs not only electricity but access to the internet.
CG
What are your thoughts about the above?