97. Automation of the Dalton Library

When Chuck Rice automated the Dalton library in 1974–75, the IBM computer he used took up half a room! Since 1999, when Adele Bildersee and the librarians digitized the card catalog, Dalton has enjoyed using a sophisticated and easy online system, with extensive online resources accessible for all.

What’s a card catalog? Ask someone born after 1990 and they have probably never used one or even heard of it. Card catalogs went the way of dial phones and electric typewriters — detritus of the modern age.

Dalton was one of the early schools to automate the library. When Chuck Rice first automated the library in 1974–75, the IBM 1130 computing system he used took up half a room! He modified a base program given to him by IBM to suit Dalton’s needs. Every school day, manually created punch cards for check out and the student cards were run through a card processor on the fifth floor to generate a report. Mr. Rice  distributed the report to  the House Advisor’s mailbox.

In 1998, I became Director of Libraries and Information Services with a charge to automate, or digitize the library’s card catalog, a behemoth relic needy of transformation. I found the “perfect” software — SIRSI — not too basic and not too complicated for a K–12 school with three distinct libraries. We undertook a “retrospective conversion,” digitizing paper records and installing them into an online catalog system. We librarians organized the catalog cards for over 50,000 items and sent them away to be converted. Sounds easy? The process also included affixing corresponding printed barcodes to every item, a tedious hands-on job! This was accomplished during the summer of 1999, officially the hottest on record! Since then, Dalton has enjoyed using the sophistication and ease of the Goldman Library’s online system.
—Adele Bildersee, Former Director of Library and Information Services with
Tim Delaney, ILS Administrator/Library Technician