Analysis and news
The evolution of an industry Roger Valade traces developments in scholarly communications over the last couple of decades, from CD-ROM to artificial intelligence
Technology has been a fascination of mine long before it became a career. On Christmas morning in 1984, I woke to find a life-changing present beneath the tree: a brand-new IBM PCjr computer with a glorious Epson dot-matrix printer (those crisply perforated pin-fed sheets!) and not one but two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives. How my father revived me from my rhapsodic loss of consciousness remains a mystery. I think I wanted a Commodore 128, but he was certain an IBM would set me up with better skills for the business world and, as with so many other things, he was right. I don’t think I left that computer for a week and I’ve been technology-entranced ever since. Almost a decade later, my first job was as a writer and editor at Gale Research in Detroit, a position I was very happy to land as a recent English graduate (physics, my other love, didn’t stick after we got to Schrodinger). We were using IBM PS/2s and I dived straight in, writing macros in WordPerfect to help automate the publishing process. That was that – it was probably the first time I realised technology could be a career and not just a hobby. I started working on the interactive CD-ROM products Gale was building and eventually our first online search products. Since then, I’ve worked in energy, automotive, consulting, publishing and in education, but I’m thrilled to be back in the information industry. Now, as CTO at ProQuest, it’s
remarkable to reflect on how the industry has evolved with technology – and how
“When Research Information
vendors and publishers can use new services to continue to meet the evolving needs of users. A lot has changed since I left. And a lot hasn’t.
published its first issue 16 years ago, if you wanted to do serious research you had to go to the library”
14 Research Information February/March 2019
2002: The end of an era Sixteen years ago, when Research Information published its first issue, if you wanted to do serious research you had to go to the library. If you wanted to watch a movie, you had to go to the theatre or Blockbuster. But things were right on the cusp of a significant change. Students and scholars still relied
heavily on databases to access reliable information, and they trusted librarians to help them find it. Academic journals and texts were still the key sources of
information for research – and, in most cases, they were incredibly difficult to access outside of an academic library or other university resources. Vendors and publishers supplied academics with the content they needed to support faculty and students; faculty and students came to the library to use it. But as the internet age first crashed
around like a toddler and then started getting its legs, vendors and publishers become less passive and more entrepreneurial in meeting users’ needs. Advances in technology no longer meant that libraries had to wait for users to come to them.
Google Scholar was just two years from its launch in beta; streaming video,
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