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.
