BIBSYS

» see bibsys.no as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1970 somebody asked the computing center at the Norwegian Institute of Technology whether a shared machine-readable catalog was possible. The answer took two years to become a project: the library automation project at the University of Trondheim started on 11 February 1972, with Ingeborg Sølvberg running it for the next fourteen years, and two libraries as the first customers. The first document went into the database on 10 March 1976. The cataloging module went live at the NTH main library in 1980.

From there it spread until it was national. Every Norwegian university and university college ran on it, along with the research institutes and the National Library. By 2005 the catalog held over 11 million documents and was growing by roughly 300,000 records a year, 112 specialist libraries were connected, and more than 2,000 library employees used it as their working tool every day. It was administratively a unit of NTNU and a public agency with a board appointed by the Ministry of Education, which is to say it was infrastructure rather than a company.

On 1 January 2018 BIBSYS was merged with CERES and parts of Uninett to form Unit, the Directorate for ICT and Common Services in Higher Education and Research. The staff stayed in Trondheim and the work continued. The name stopped being an organization that day, and Unit itself was folded into Sikt in 2022, so the thing that absorbed BIBSYS has now been absorbed twice over.

~ the record ~

~ cataloged once ~

The design decision that made BIBSYS matter was made early and it was a hard one to reverse: one database, not one per library. A book described by a cataloger in Bergen was described for Tromsø too, automatically, because there was no separate copy to reconcile. Every function from cataloging to lending ran against the same records. That is why 112 libraries could be run by a staff you could fit in one building, and it is also why the thing was almost impossible to leave once you were in it.

I have never held a Norwegian library card and never will need one. What is worth looking at here is the age of the code path. This started in an era of punched input and batch runs and ended as a web service, without the underlying idea changing at all: shared records, one index, everyone writing into the same place.

~ ask, then oria ~

BIBSYS Ask was the public face. It went online in December 2004 and for most of a decade it was where a Norwegian student typed a title, a plain search box over the union catalog. It was retired for oria.no, which is a commercial discovery layer with a nicer result page and a much wider index that includes articles the union catalog never held.

The back end went the same way. From 2015 the in-house BIBSYS library system was phased out for Alma, an Ex Libris product, which is what almost every national consortium that built its own system in the 1970s eventually did. By the time the organization was dissolved in 2018, both halves of what it had originally written had already been replaced by software somebody else maintained.

~ 410 gone ~

bibsys.no does not resolve. www.bibsys.no does, and it returns 410, the HTTP status for a resource that was taken away on purpose and is not coming back. Somebody configured that on purpose. For a 45-year-old catalog that is a more dignified exit than a parking page with slot machine ads, which is what most of the addresses on this site get.

The name is not entirely dead. The BIBSYS consortium still exists, roughly 109 libraries buying their systems together, now administered by Sikt. What is gone is the organization and the system it wrote, along with the search box a generation of Norwegian students learned on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »