RFC-286
by Darius Kazemi, October 13 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Network all the libraries
RFC-286 is titled “Network Library Information System”. It's authored by Ernest Forman of MITRE, and dated December 21, 1971.
The technical content
Georgetown University is building a digital catalog for their holdings, and the author floats the possibility of making this catalog searchable on the ARPANET.
He also suggests designing a general system to query all libraries everywhere that he calls the “Network Library Information System”. He asks interested parties to contact him.
Analysis
This is........ not a small task. To get a sense of how difficult this problem is (and I imagine that Forman, not being a library scientist, had little idea of the true difficulty), you can read about this history of the library catalog in American Libraries Magazine.
How to follow this blog
You can subscribe to this blog's RSS feed or if you're on a federated ActivityPub social network like Mastodon or Pleroma you can search for the user “@365-rfcs@write.as” and follow it there.
About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.