1982 Infoserve manual 52/25/1 #fp13 #technology, a photo by Hecuba's Story on Flickr.
Who remembers Libramatics? I took this photo to post when I was gently taken to task by @petahopkins for throwing out old IT manuals and old copies of LASIE without taking notes or photos. Libramatics were cutting edge library technology in Melbourne in the 1970s and 1980s. They worked with us at Carringbush to produce the world's first computerized catalogue in Greek script (and had a good go at Turkish as well).
This is a page of a 1982 manual for coding community organizations in Infoserve, an automated community directory developed using Ausmarc fields. It was very cool - on fiche of course. Libramatics were great at stepping outside the box when ideas came up. Peter Stansfield had the brilliant but simple idea that if we had Ausmarc tags set up for cataloguing why could we not use them for other sorts of databases, such as a community directory. 245 could as well be the title for a community organization as for a book. And so the concept of Infoserve was born and Libramatics developed the coding for us.
So Peta, thanks for making me think about the importance of this manual in the development of library systems in Australia. I haven't thrown this one out.
