The seeds of this oral history were planted in 2017, not long after I came to Penn State. Even though we’d been using Sirsi’s Unicorn/Symphony system for the past 17 years, LIAS lingered in the memories of my coworkers and left traces in the MARC data I was using. As I gathered requirements for a new library catalog in 2018, people began telling me little anecdotes about LIAS. This sparked my curiosity.
In 2019 and early 2020, I began reading documents related to LIAS in Penn State’s archives. These ranged from committee minutes to printed emails to memos from library administration. I encountered challenges of early computing and our competing development priorities alongside triumphant releases of new features. I found the story of our attempts to make LIAS the next NOTIS or VTLS, records of demos and sales trips, and system assessments passed on to us by friendly contacts at other institutions. I learned about MicroLIAS, a precursor to citation management tools, and the clash over its potential utility vs. the daily needs of the library’s staff. I watched LIAS grow from a simple bibliographic recordstore to a Z39.50-enabled tool supporting search of databases such as ERIC and AGRICOLA.
I began to compile a list of people involved with the project. I wanted to talk to the people who shaped it, not just the developers but the regular workers who spent their days in LIAS, provided feedback, and watched it grow. Some of them were current coworkers. Others had retired over a decade ago and needed to be tracked down. Starting in 2021, I began meeting with them, on Zoom and in person, to record their stories. Interviewees include the LIAS’s architect and several technical leads, its Network Services Coordinator who later became our head of library technology, catalogers who’d used it from the mid-80s until 1999, the circulation supervisor at a campus library, a music librarian who dove in deep to fix its title indexing, and two deans and an associate dean with strong connections to LIAS or library systems work. Unfortunately, some key figures involved in its development, such as Dean Stuart Forth and Associate Dean Gordon Rawlins, passed away long before the project began. Others declined to participate. There are many stories of LIAS not captured in this project. I hope those will continue to be told.
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