BPN 1674: From trade literature to toilet paper

Although the sun is shining, it is today a sad day in Amsterdam. Today, the library of the Royal Tropical Institute will close. The last books - several thousand of titles: doublets, journals and written publications, mainly in English and Dutch - can be sorted and taken along. Then comes the old paper merchant who will takes the remains to recycle. The collection was already cruelly torn apart and components moved to other collections ranging from the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt to the Knowledge and Documentation Center for Medical History in a small Dutch fishery village, Urk. That is the irrevocable end of the KIT Information & Library Services (ILS).

In the second half of the eighties of last century, I dealt with the ILS department of KIT. I was working at the newly founded Society for Information Services ( MIS ), which became active in 1986 and mainly worked in the market of electronic publishing. In their portfolio was CD-ROM. In 1987 the company produced the first test disc of the Legal Database Kluwer Datalex. Further, the company produced in 1988 several CD-ROMs amongst others KIT Abstracts for the Royal Tropical Institute, the CD-ROM version of the online database TROPAG & Rural (Tropical Agriculture) .

TROPAG is one of the oldest Dutch online databases with abstracts of official publications and so-called grey literature on tropical agriculture in Africa, Asia , the area of ​​the Pacific and Central and South America. The database was created from a magazine in which the summaries of articles from scientific journals were published. The texts were put in the graphic company Samsom Publishers. Here, in the second half of the seventies, the texts were already stored into a computer with a paper punch tape. Once the text was saved, there was a magnetic tape ready to be sent ​​by snailmail to host computers (servers, they are called now),  at that time the U.S. information services Dialog, SDC, and BRS. The database was included in the portfolio of the Dutch host organisation Samson Data Systems (SDS) for a short period (1981-1983).

However, online was costly and certainly for the developing countries. The telecom connections were also a major technical obstacle for those countries. Using the online database was not an overwhelming success. However, the advent of the CD-ROM in 1984 offered a different perspective for a text database. Although PCs with CD-ROM drives were not readily available in abundance in the second half of the eighties, the KIT ILS department, headed by Hans van Hartevelt, placed more CD-ROM players than there were available in the Netherlands from 1987 onwards. MID was commissioned to produce the text CD–ROM.. Since the CD-ROM production software was still in its infancy, the production and especially the mastering took longer than expected. But when the diffulties were overcome the CD - ROM went all over the world.

The TROPAG & Rural file still exists, but is now part of the CD-ROM portfolio of CAB International and available online with Wolters Kluwer daughter OVID. TROPAG & Rural will be a painful reminder of the rich stream of literature, while the last remaining books and magazines will be recycled to toilet paper.

My museum of content related artefacts (16)

1995: CD-ROM covers











CD-ROM covers show history. You can read from the covers whether they are text CD-ROMs or multimedia CD-ROMs. Up to 1992 CD-ROMs were mainly used as carriers for large textbooks, usually medical handbooks, encyclopaedias and dictionaries, or databases. After 1992 when the Multimedia PC standard was agreed upon the multimedia CD-ROMs came onto the market and the covers became more interesting. I have a CD-ROM collection of 766 artefacts of which I will show a few.












CD-ROM was based on the same production technology as audio CD. That process was already well known. But putting other data than music on the disc was another hurdle. Storing music on a disc was a simple process, but storing text on a CD-ROM and retrieving this, required more action. When the process was finished a glass disc, also called direct disc, was produced and tested. On top of the disc a label was fixed. in the case of the legal disc AROB test CD a silver label was fixed. VNU New Media had a glass disc produced of the text of their general encyclopaedia. By 1996 the glass disc disappeared as a simulation machine was developed by Elektroson.












I was personally involved in the production of the Kluwer, KIT, Nijgh and Lexitron discs. They were produced with three different software packages. The Kluwer and KIT discs were produced with Status, a database and retrieval package, developed by the UK nuclear organisation in Harwell. Both discs should be covered with gold as their production was so expensive. The software package was for a mainframe machine and adapted for PC. With memories of 600Mb it was possible to very large text databases on a disc. But Status stopped at 99.999 documents and in the case of Kluwer we processed over 100.000 documents. Before this handicap was discovered and mended we were a few cycles further. The Nijgh disc was produced with a package software, Dataware. The Lexitron disc of Van Dale Lexicografie was produced with the database package Wordsheet, developed by Walter van Rozendaal.












All kind of marketing techniques were used, like numbering the discs as was the case with a German telephone directory. The LiteRom is probably the most costly CD-ROM in Dutch history as the producer got a court case against him. The CD-ROM contained book reviews from newspapers. They could be consulted in libraries. But when the reviews were copied onto a disc, the newspapers and the reviewers started a court case against the publisher in 1992 and won the case in 2002.














From 1992 multimedia CD-ROMs were published. It gave an impulse to the sale of PCs as they were sold with bundles of multimedia encyclopaedias and other titles. This led to multimedia departments of publishing companies. For example in the Netherlands the consumer book and magazine division started a multimedia department which bought foreign productions, translated them and put them on the market. Later on it yielded productions as CD-Dom about the Duomo in Utrecht and Escher.












As broadband was not yet developed into the Mbps, CD-ROMs were the carriers for beautiful multimedia productions such as Anne Frank and Sviatlana, just to show two winners of the Europrix. Of course the first overall winner of the Europrix in 1998 was a CD-ROM production: The Ceremony of Innocence; IMHO one of the most beautiful CD-ROM productions ever (which can only be played with a Windows 95 software).








With the advent of the multimedia CD-ROMs the covers started to change. There was more artwork on the labels and on the boxes as the products had to compete with books in the bookshop and with the boring packaging of software. The nicest CD-ROM box I have in my collection is of the disc Burundi Black; the box is attractive and tactile. A soft tiger motive piece of textile is on the cover.

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Blog Posting Number: 827

Tags: digital heritage