How has technology changed your job?
I’ve only been in my current job for a year. My previous job, science research, changed considerably over the thirty-plus years I did it.
Back in the old days
Science and research relied on manual methods when I started in science, doing my undergraduate degree at Loughborough from 1989 to 1993. In the university library there was a mix of card indexes and a new computer system.
Finding the book you wanted meant being familiar with the library layout and knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system. I spent a lot of time in the 540s (Chemistry) and later, in particular, 541.35 (photochemistry) for my final year project.
What neither the card index nor the computer index could help you with was looking for a journal article. If you knew the details of the article, from another article, for example, then it was easy enough. Locate the journal in the library and hope that the volume you want is available. Otherwise it was the dreaded Inter-library loan (ILL), which cost money and took weeks.
If you didn’t know the particulars of the article you wanted, only that it was written in the mid-1970s by PF Morgan in one of the American Academy of Sciences journals, you were pretty stuffed.
Web of Science
With the advent in the 1990s of the Web of Science in the 1990s, you could search for a term. This meant that you could search for Morgan, PF and add search terms ‘silicone dioxide’ and the year range 1972 to 1978. And bingo! You found that article you were looking for five years ago and can no longer remember why you wanted it. Mainly because you were investigating photochemistry in 1992, but in 1997 you are working in a geology lab.
All this seems pretty lame by today’s standards when we are all search-engine savvy. But it was a revelation at the time and exactly what computers are for.
This means you can find a reference in a journal you don’t have in the library. And furthermore, now you can download the journal article often for a hefty fee. Last I looked the top fee was $60 for access to a single article. This does not encourage the flow of knowledge.
The flip side of easier research is that expectations are higher. When I had my PhD viva (in 2002), the external examiner was keen to point out that I’d missed what he considered a vital paper on the subject. He had published it in 1978, and I could only apologise and accept his comment that I shouldn’t have relied on computer searches. I checked afterwards. The article hadn’t been cited since 1985. No wonder I missed it.
Today, there really would be no excuse for missing even a very old article. The web of science is everywhere. However, I don’t know whether non-English articles get pulled into the web of science.
Statistics and computers
One other thing that is now much easier with the use of computers is statistics. In 2019 I completed a Masters in Quality by Design. This technique for improving the quality of manufactured goods relies heavily on a variety of statistical methods. To say this would be difficult, tedious and prone to error without fast computers would be an understatement.
