The Library Innovator Who Made the Card Catalog Obsolete

Ward Shaw, a library industry leader, died on July 2, at age 79. Ward’s development of the CARL integrated library system more than 40 years ago changed the library community in ways that are still felt today.

In the early 1970s, Ward came to the University of Denver from Colby College in Maine to serve as associate director of technical services. By 1973, academic library deans and directors in Colorado, along with the City Librarian for Denver Public Library, had begun to work together on cooperative collection development initiatives and a vision for a shared computer system that would use the latest technology. Most other integrated library systems of that era were focused on circulation and could not handle the large bibliographic databases and transaction loads that were needed in a shared system, a problem that Ward solved by innovative design.

That cooperative effort became the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL); Ward was appointed as its first executive director. Under his leadership, CARL was originally incorporated as 501(c)(3) in 1978; he began the development of the CARL integrated library system shortly thereafter (Fisher, 2009).

The CARL System launched in the early 1980s and over the next fifteen years incorporated a number of features not available in other systems. Ward had the vision to create a fast, powerful keyword search engine that didn’t require the user to know the arcane nuances and fields in catalog records. This was a precursor to Google’s approach for discovery; Ward was just decades ahead of most other database builders.

The system could support either single libraries or consortia on a common platform. Ward also introduced the idea of loading other datasets into the shared system. CARL included abstracting/indexing services, encyclopedias, and specialty databases, all of which were offered in an old-school, character-based interface.

In 1988, CARL split into for-profit and nonprofit entities. Alan Charnes became the executive director of the nonprofit side, and Ward was CEO of the for-profit side, which was named CARL Systems Inc. (later CARL Corporation).

In the 1970s and 1980s, doing library research through the published literature required using either paper indexing/abstracting services or timesharing systems (e.g., Dialog, Systems Development Corporation (SDC), Bibliographic Retrieval Services (BRS)). These online systems were very expensive and charged for use by the minute and by the number of citations printed or downloaded. Ward, in collaboration with Rebecca Lenzini (the newly named President of CARL Systems Inc.), came up with the idea of a table-of-contents (TOC) indexing service that would be free for searching and printing but would charge for articles delivered via fax.

The journal subscriptions for the entire CARL consortium were mailed to the central office in Denver. There, staff would enter the TOC for each journal issue into a database for immediate retrieval before returning the journal to the owning library. When an article was requested, CARL staff embedded at each member library would pull the article and fax it to the requester within one workday. If the article had already been scanned it could be immediately delivered via fax—a real game changer for interlibrary loan before the Web. The concept of not charging by the minute, as timesharing systems did, was revolutionary and changed how the library database market evolved.

The CARL system was so successful that by the early 1990s, it had been adopted by many major public and academic libraries and served a significant portion of the US population.

CARL Systems Inc. was sold in 1995 to Knight Ridder Information, a division of the newspaper publisher that included the database hosting service DIALOG. The sale included the CARL integrated library systems and UnCover. The ILS was eventually acquired by The Library Corporation (TLC), and the UnCover system became part of Ingenta in 2000.

In the years that followed, Ward played important roles behind the scenes in initiatives such as the Ingenta board, the Fiesole Conference, and The Charleston Advisor. (TCA was sold to Annual Reviews and later evolved into Katina.) Ward’s work in the library automation industry continues to influence how library systems and other online services operate today.

References

Fisher, S. (2009). Research library collaboration in Colorado – the birth and early evolution of CARL, the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, 1(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.29087/2009.1.3.05