What’s in a library database? Everything.

By ANGELA KELLOGG-HENRY

Cleaver Managing Editor

It’s hard to believe one could get sentimental about a database but that’s exactly what happened to me last week when nostalgia got the better of me during the recent migration to a new web-based integrated library system called Polaris. When I’m not wearing my editor hat, I work part time at the Harrison District Library at the circulation desk and manage the library’s historical collection.

Our old database was called Horizon and in 1991 it went live when I was a teenager working at the library under the tutelage of director Anne Smith. Prior to this computerization, as we called it, we had library cards with a metal plate that stamped the patron number on a card inserted into a pocket in a library book's cover, used to record the borrower's name and the due date. Many will remember when you signed those cards. Signatures had been replaced by numbers for privacy of patrons. I can still hear the mechanical “chunk” sound of the stamp as the card was inserted into the machine.

I still have my old metal library card too. Sheila Bissonnette, library director for the Harrison District Library and Pere Marquette District Library in Clare mentioned she still has one of the old metal library card machines and I’ll have to remind her to dig it out…for nostalgia’s sake.

Prior to Horizon going online in 1991 we received 1,000’s of smart barcodes. Only smart because each sticker had a barcode and the name of the book and author. We had to match each book to its sticker so that all the items the library owned would be in the new database. It was an undertaking that took us months to label books properly and register our library patrons for their own barcoded library card. One can still see a few of those original barcodes in books that are still in the collection.

This may not seem like such a big deal now but remember there was no google in 1991. The library checked out books, magazines, and VHS tapes! We looked up reference questions in encyclopedias, vertical files, and books such as The New York Public Library Desk Reference, a large book which we purchased a new copy every few years to stay up to date. The card catalog was still the only way to find an item in the collection.

Horizon didn’t change much over the years. I left the library in 1995 and moved away from home. In 2008, I began working at the library once more and it all came back to me. I remembered how to wrap a book and Horizon was virtually the same except we had a better scanner.  

As I look at this photo taken in 1991, I have to laugh at the banner behind us. Printed on banner paper that automatically fed into a dot matrix printer. Talk about nostalgia! If you’re over a certain age you might have read “dot matrix” and the sound of an old printer in your mind started zip zapping away. Sadly, Anne Smith and Kathy Wright have both passed away. Connie Calkins and I both still work part time at the library and said goodbye to the old system!

Anne Smith was always a champion of technology and moving the library forward to better serve our patrons. She would have been proud of this database change and the seamless way it was implemented by Bissonette and assistant library director Nick Loomis. Anne was a mentor to Bissonette, Loomis and anyone in the library world in Mid-Michigan.

This time around the transition from one database to another was easy for library employees. It was made easy by the expertise of our leadership and the competency of our library consortium. For patrons of both the Harrison and Clare libraries, the transition is seamless with more features and services. For more information visit the Harrison District Library online at www.hdl.org or the Pere Marquette District Library online at www.pmdl.org or stop by either library for more information.