APOCALYPSE NEARLY

The beginning of 1995 was also almost the end of the world. This was because Norwegian and US scientists launched a rocket packed with scientific equipment with the purpose of studying the aurora borealis over Svalbard. Problem was, the course of the projectile closely resembled that of a US Navy submarine-launched Trident missile. The Russians were spooked, and President Boris Yeltsin was given the briefcase which held the nuclear button. Luckily, they realised the rocket was actually heading away from Russian airspace. Considering this was four years after the end of the Cold War, the fact that the Norwegian rocket incident, as it’s known, was the only time a ‘nuclear briefcase’ was ever activated and set for a nuclear counterattack– as far as most know– is quite remarkable.

Also remarkable is the story of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who as a six-year-old in 1995 was declared the 11th reincarnation of the Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama, which was nice. But the Chinese rulers of Tibet didn’t agree, and he was detained just three days later and has not been seen since. China says he’s now a university graduate and living happily in a non-lama way, though it has never offered much in the way of proof for this.

In sport, one of the feelgood stories had to be South Africa’s victory in the Rugby World Cup, just five years after the end of apartheid. Rugby had always been seen as a white man’s game, and Nelson Mandela wearing a Springboks jersey at the final, while a small thing, was a big message of reconciliation for South Africa.

The events above were made into a film, Invictus (2009), as was the extraordinary story of Nick Leeson, Rogue Trader (1999), who back in 1995 lost Barings Bank some $1.4bn while speculating on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

This year saw its own big film releases, too, including Toy Story, Pierce Brosnan’s debut as 007 in Goldeneye, and trend-setting high school movie Clueless, while the release of the Oasis classic Wonderwall was also in 1995.

In tech, 1995 saw the launch of eBay, and one of the first sales on the platform was made by founder Pierre Omidyar, who managed to shift a broken laser printer, while Amazon launched as an online bookseller this year– it was originally going to be called Cadabra, but founder Jeff Bezos changed this after a lawyer misheard it as ‘cadaver’.

This was also the year that the Internet was privatised in its entirety, with the US government withdrawing its public funding. In some ways it was the start of the Internet age as we know it, something that was reflected in the first issue of The Law Librarian in 1995 …

SUPERHIGHWAYS AND 1954 CHEVYS

Reading the March 1995 issue of The Law Librarian, which was dedicated to ‘electronic networking’, it’s difficult not to be struck by how similar what was being said then about the emerging world of the Internet is to what’s being said now about AI. Like AI now, it was certainly the hot topic of the time, for as ‘Special Issue Editor’ David Byrne wrote: “It seems you cannot open a newspaper or journal nowadays without being bombarded with discussion of the Internet or Information Superhighways.”

This point is brought home in a piece called ‘Beyond the Internet: Developing Library Services’, which cites research that found that mentions of ‘Internet’ in 17 mainstream newspapers increased from just eight before June 1992, to 9392 between June 1993 and June 1994.

It was certainly a subject that was exercising the minds of law librarians across the globe, as was highlighted in a piece entitled ‘The Current State of Networked Information in the United States and Why You Should Care About It’, which makes this point: “The challenging question for us is that if the Internet is made that rich in data and that easy to use, will there be a need for librarians?”

The answer to this was a call to arms that is as relevant to AI now as it was to the Internet then: “So heed this as a clarion call and warning. Networked information, designed to bypass the librarian’s mediating function, is headed your way. It cannot be stopped. Throwing yourself in front of it will only get you squashed. Take control of it and see that it heads in a direction that serves the goals of our profession, and not just the balance sheet of a multinational.”

There is article after article on electronic networking and the Internet in what is a very thick issue of The Law Librarian, but it’s not all about travelling along the ‘Information Superhighway’ (whatever happened to that expression?), and later on in the journal Gayle Davies from the Family Court of Australia penned a very interesting report on the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) conference in Havana, Cuba. It was a city Gayle loved, for many reasons, not the least of which was: “Libraries are plentiful [in Cuba], to judge by the number of Cuban librarians who attended the Conference. There is an incredible amount of ingenuity on the part of teachers and librarians in ensuring that literacy levels are maintained despite the lack of even the most basic of teaching materials– as much ingenuity as must go into maintaining the 1940s and ’50s cars still driven around Havana.” Not sure how many libraries there are now in Cuba, but those old cars are certainly still going.

This is Havana in 2019, but it could easily be 1995, or even 1955

REGAL INFORMATION

The second issue of The Law Librarian of 1995 had an international flavour, so it was fitting that the first piece was by world-renowned law librarian Willi Steiner, who predicted future trends in law librarianship across the globe. Among Willi’s expectations was that knowledge of information technology would become more important for law librarians, but he warned: “The librarian should be in a position, in particular, to demand that the computer be bent to suit the job rather than the job be bent to suit the computer.”

While Willi Steiner was certainly a big name in law library circles, he was probably outdone by one of the other authors in this issue, Crown Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, who contributed to a piece entitled ‘Refugee Sources for Lawyers: The Documentation Centre of the Refugee Studies Programme’.

Elsewhere in this issue there is a piece on information management at Amnesty International, which made the point that: “Amnesty is effective in its campaigning because it can show its claims are both accurate and objective: it’s for these reasons that governments have had to take notice and act.” It might be worth catching up with this, 30 years’ on, just to see if that’s still the case.

ALL BY MY SHELF

Themes were very much the theme of 1995 when it came to The Law Librarian, and the third issue of the year went with ‘management’ as its topic of choice, although one of the most interesting of the pieces published is actually focussed on the experiences of a solo librarian.

In ‘All by Myself …’ Veronica Benjamin, then the Librarian at Wedlake Bell, quoted from the Fats Waller song Ain’t Misbehavin’: “No one to talk with, all by myself, No one to walk with, but I’m happy on the shelf.”

There were difficulties with working alone, Veronica wrote, but “Networking is the answer to a lot of the problems. It is essential when you work on your own. However sympathetic other people within the firm may be (if you’re lucky!), they cannot offer any practical advice or really understand the processes involved in information work.” The best way to network, according to Veronica? Then as now, it was BIALL events.

It’s not just solo librarians who struggle to get noticed in the wider firm but also library teams, and in ‘Making your Library the heart of the Firm’ Jenny Wu, from San Francisco firm McKenna & Cuneo, had some distinctly Californian ideas on how to do this, including: “My motto has always been ‘if you bake it, they will come’. Who can resist fresh, home-baked cookies?” She also suggests you should “Be part of daily life in the firm. Do not hide in the library. Do not wait to be asked.”

There are also a couple of interesting pieces on disaster management in this issue, one of which focussed on the two City of London bomb attacks of the early ’90s and their impact on Norton Rose. “The glass, debris and dirt was shocking to see on entering but amazingly not one book had been blown from the shelves and all the bookcases remained upright!”

PRINTS OF WAILS

These days, of course, there would be far fewer bookcases to stay upright, and this was actually examined 30 years ago in the final issue of 1995, in a piece called ‘Death of Print: a Few Predictions for the Year 2000’. This stated that in the year in question “at least 75 per cent of all new sales by the leading law publishers will be of electronic product”. That was not necessarily a bad thing for the readers of this publication, though, for as the article went on to predict: “There will be a need for all this to be managed and the obvious people to do it are currently law librarians. The job will change in detail, but not in substance.” Safe to say, that was pretty much bang on.

Elsewhere in this issue there’s more on emerging tech in ‘Information Superhighways and the Internet’, which handily points out that: “For as little £150 per year one can get access to the Internet via one of the many commercial Internet providers. This provides e-mail capabilities and the ability to get information from the World Wide Web …”

The above, like many of the articles in this issue, is based on papers from that year’s Conference in Manchester, it was explained in the Editorial, where Laurence Eastham also brought attention to the fact that this was the last issue Christine Miskin would be responsible for– she co-edited it with him. Laurence wrote: “It is only right that her immense contribution to the magazine over the last five years should be acknowledged in these pages … In recognition of her departure, the Editorial Board has decreed that this issue shall be printed in black type.”