Everyone knows technology moves fast. Remember what the Western New England University website used to look like a mere 20 years ago? Today we’re throwing even further back to 25 years ago. The below article from The Westerner from 1993 is a fun example of how much library technology has changed in as little as a quarter of a century.

Blurb about D’Amour Library from The Westerner, December 1993.

The article highlights one of the library’s databases, UNCOVER. Databases, as we know and love them today, help researchers find articles they need by searching through thousands of periodicals, and, in many cases, linking directly to articles. Database subscriptions, as well as subscriptions to the periodicals databases search, are not free, but the library pays these costs for students. But it may come as a surprise that this wasn’t always the case!

UNCOVER searched through thousands of periodicals, but when the time came to actually get your hands on an article, you’d have to pay up! If the library didn’t own the hard copy of the periodical (which you’d have to search for in the stacks then photocopy yourself), you’d pay on average $9.50 per article. One can imagine this greatly affected how students researched. When $10.00 was on the line, you can be sure students were absolutely positive the article they were requesting was going to be pertinent to their project!