The "WWW" & the Library

The history of the World Wide Web, or WWW, and the Internet is a fascinating phenomenon, not only for how much it has changed things, but how it has developed over such a short period of time. You can see a nice time line for it here.

Here at Drake Library the history runs more or less as follows. In the early 1990s we had two "dumb" terminals that were set aside to search the Internet, using that early search engine, Archie. Then in the summer of 1995 we got our first two PCs that were connected to the Web; what a change that was, going from the text only interface of terminals to the image rich content of the Web on a PC!

It's startling to think of how things have changed since then. Who even remembers the early browsers, like Netscape, or those pre-Google search engines, like HotBot? The early article databases that we had with a content list of a few hundred titles have long since expanded to include literally tens of thousands of titles, and have almost completely replaced the role of print journals.

A lot has changed but we still are here to help you navigate through all our varied resources, whether online or in print, so that you can get exactly what you need to write that paper or article or book.