"Goodbye 'Readers' Guide'"

It’s tough to say goodbye to a dear and trusted friend, but the time has come. Beginning with this new year, the Library is abandoning its paper copy of “Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature”.

Practically anyone over the age of forty learned to use the “Readers’ Guide” in high school to locate magazine articles for term papers. Back when I was in school in the early 1960’s, this venerable index—it was started by the H.W. Wilson Company in the early 1900’s—was the mainstay for magazine and journal research for all high school students.

It wasn’t until I graduated and moved on to college that I learned there were other types of indexes like the “Essay and General Literature Index”, “Biology Index”, “Chemical Abstracts”, “Play Index”, etc. Back then, the paper indexes were the collective memory of all things written. Library staff was forever helping people use the indexes to locate citations to magazine articles. Larger libraries had full-time staff who spent their entire days fetching copies of old magazines from the depths of the buildings. Libraries were judged by the extent of their magazine and journal inventories, as well as their book collections.

The library world began changing around 1990 with the introduction of computers and the digitization of the paper indexes. While this library has been offering computerized indexes to its patrons for a number of years, the “Readers’ Guide” in its hunter-green buckram binding remained available to the more traditional library user.

Unfortunately, our “Readers’ Guide” has been sitting, unused and gathering dust, on the shelf next to the Reference Desk for a number of years. Students—both high school and college—prefer to use the electronic indexes. Not only do these new indexes lead the researcher to the article, oftentimes the user can print the entire text of the article. No longer do we send employees to the far reaches of the building to pull old magazines for patrons to read or photocopy.

With later evolutions of the electronic media, a researcher does not need to visit the library to locate journal articles. The “http://www.nlc.state.ne.us/nebraskaccess/” website allows a user to access the articles from classroom, home, or office. This tremendous on-line resource is being financed by state money though the Nebraska Library Commission and it is intended to help every Nebraskan---high school student, college researcher, businessperson, etc. ---locate information pertinent to his/her studies, interests, or livelihood.

It’s farewell, au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, dear old trustworthy “Readers’ Guide”. The new age of pluses and minuses has engulfed us.