Happy 50th, HNFE!

As HNFE begins to celebrate its 50th year, I began to think about what the curriculum was like in 1960-61.  What would my job, as the HNFE librarian, have been like back then?  What sorts of resources would I be helping you all find?  If I were really interested, I could certainly dig through University Archives to find old course catalogs and similar materials.  However, I think it may be more interesting to imagine what it would have been like...


First of all, there would be no EndNote, no PubMed, and no Web of Science.  Medline, in fact, wasn't in existence in 1960.  The first "medical index" was developed in 1874, and the first iteration of the Index Medicus was published in 1879 (Coletti & Bleich).  In 1927, the Index Medicus merged with the AMA's medical bibliography, and truly standardized subject headings (think early MeSH) arrived in 1951.  Interestingly, Medical Subject Headings, as we know them today (conceptually) is also celebrating a 50th anniversary this year!  In 1971, the National Library of Medicine introduced MEDLINE, which originally required extensive training to use.  


If you, as a student or faculty member in HNFE, were coming to see me in 1960, we would be digging through the physical Index Medicus, which filled a 3-volume set annually, and we would probably be figuring out how to use MeSH as a new organizing principle for all of this information.  University Libraries does still own early volumes of this index, available through Addison (view the record here).  You can even order the 1960 volumes--currently, they're in storage, but we do have 1960-2000.  


In 1960, research collaboration would also have been completely different. There was no Zotero, Mendeley, or Google Docs that allowed for easy sharing of documents and data.  Open access journals and Google Scholar were also just dreams at this point.  

Finally, I like to think that, in 1960, we would have been using some of the fabulous items from the University Libraries' Culinary History Collection.  The resources in this collection span three centuries of historical information about domestic sciences, eating behaviors, food choices and habits, and scientific and technological progress related to food and nutrition.  Many cookbooks in the collection are digitized, which makes for some really fun reading.  Check out a full list of related items here.  This collection also has quite a few images from the VPI College of Home Economics, such as pictures from the Metabolism Study Collection (1956-60).  The picture below is one of these items, and features a dining room and participants in this study.  

From the items that found through the University Libraries holdings, I get a very clear image of what my job, and yours, would have been like in 1960.  Although I'm definitely glad I'm living and working in 2010, it's still very interesting to look back at these resources and imagine...


References


Coletti MH, Bleich HL. Medical Subject Headings Used to Search the Biomedical Literature. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2001;8(4):317-323.