Information Literacy Skills > Electronic information source

The Early Days

Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the main information sources if you were wanting to find details on a topic were paper based. A common source would be an encyclopaedia. Other examples would be years of stored newspapers and magazines.

Gradually with the introduction of computers it became possible to transfer the information contained in journals, indexes and encyclopaedias on to databases. In the 1970's it was possible to carry out a search for information electronically. However, this would involve giving your search terms to a librarian or information specialist who would use a special terminal to interrogate the database. Several days later you would get a print-out of the results of the search.

Although this does not sound very radical compared to using a paper source, the vital difference was that it was now possible to move away from only being able to search using one search word (keyword) at a time. (eg The index of an encyclopaedia allows you to look for one word at a time.) Early databases allowed each article stored to be described by several keywords. These would be very quickly searched by the computer against the set of input keywords. Later as computer power became even greater and cheaply available, the searches could be carried out not just looking through the keywords assigned to the information but throughout every word of the text of the information.

So electronic information sources allowed more thorough and faster searching.

A key point about electronic data sources in the 1970's and 1980's is that they were subscription services: that is, a library or other organisation had to pay an annual fee in order to be permitted to search a source. They were additionally charged per minute of use. Because it was quite expensive to make a search use was very much restricted to professionals such as university researchers.

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