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Point Roberts: A blast from the past
Sep. 27th, 2020 05:18 pmI first heard of Point Roberts in the 1970s, while at library school.
In those days, doing online database searches through Dialog, Orbit or Medline was a big deal. People didn't have home computers in those days. Large organizations like universities were very much mainframe environments. Academics and librarians would connect to the vast database aggregators like Dialog (headquartered somewhere in California) by dialling the number for Datapac and connecting to them through terminal and modem. And of course, transmission speeds were painfully slow. It was expensive to connect to the databases so you had to plan your search strategy carefully in advance, in order to minimize online time and get the biggest bang for your buck. Printing to your local printer was also expensive, so thrifty searchers would print out just a few citations and then, if they seemed to be on target, get the rest of them printed out offline and sent to them via snail mail.
Lowly students like us could not be just let loose immediately to do our own searches. We would first have to be given a demo by our professor, then given practice reference questions for which we decided on our approach and developed appropriate search language. Then in our lab sessions, we would get to actually try them out.
Once we were somewhat proficient, we might get to actually do real-life searches passed on to the library school from the Southwest Ontario Regional Public Library System.
To make a long story slightly less verbose, I was eventually asked to do a search that somehow involved Point Roberts. I'd never heard of the place back then and I don't remember the exact question or problem I had to research, but I think I was told that it was the most northerly point in the U.S. (excepting Alaska).
I know I did get some results when I did my search and from what I can recall, the client was quite satisfied with what I found. But as this was some 45 years ago, that's about all I can dredge up from my memory banks!
So why, you might well ask, am I suddenly talking about it again now?
Well, apparently with border closures resulting from Covid-19, this town of some 1000 permanent residents, heavily reliant on Canadian tourists from Vancouver and southern B.C., is in serious economic trouble:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/point-roberts-covid-1.5740806?cmp=rss
Apparently, Point Roberts is an "exclave". I'd heard of enclaves, of course, so I probably should have known what an exclave was. Here's a definition:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/exclave
And as I read the definition, there was another blast from the past as I recalled my summer in Germany in 1972, back when there was still a West Germany (where I was) and an East Germany, and West Berlin was an exclave.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking of adding Point Roberts to my list of places to visit before I die:
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Point_Roberts#Q1203794
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
In those days, doing online database searches through Dialog, Orbit or Medline was a big deal. People didn't have home computers in those days. Large organizations like universities were very much mainframe environments. Academics and librarians would connect to the vast database aggregators like Dialog (headquartered somewhere in California) by dialling the number for Datapac and connecting to them through terminal and modem. And of course, transmission speeds were painfully slow. It was expensive to connect to the databases so you had to plan your search strategy carefully in advance, in order to minimize online time and get the biggest bang for your buck. Printing to your local printer was also expensive, so thrifty searchers would print out just a few citations and then, if they seemed to be on target, get the rest of them printed out offline and sent to them via snail mail.
Lowly students like us could not be just let loose immediately to do our own searches. We would first have to be given a demo by our professor, then given practice reference questions for which we decided on our approach and developed appropriate search language. Then in our lab sessions, we would get to actually try them out.
Once we were somewhat proficient, we might get to actually do real-life searches passed on to the library school from the Southwest Ontario Regional Public Library System.
To make a long story slightly less verbose, I was eventually asked to do a search that somehow involved Point Roberts. I'd never heard of the place back then and I don't remember the exact question or problem I had to research, but I think I was told that it was the most northerly point in the U.S. (excepting Alaska).
I know I did get some results when I did my search and from what I can recall, the client was quite satisfied with what I found. But as this was some 45 years ago, that's about all I can dredge up from my memory banks!
So why, you might well ask, am I suddenly talking about it again now?
Well, apparently with border closures resulting from Covid-19, this town of some 1000 permanent residents, heavily reliant on Canadian tourists from Vancouver and southern B.C., is in serious economic trouble:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/point-roberts-covid-1.5740806?cmp=rss
Apparently, Point Roberts is an "exclave". I'd heard of enclaves, of course, so I probably should have known what an exclave was. Here's a definition:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/exclave
And as I read the definition, there was another blast from the past as I recalled my summer in Germany in 1972, back when there was still a West Germany (where I was) and an East Germany, and West Berlin was an exclave.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking of adding Point Roberts to my list of places to visit before I die:
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Point_Roberts#Q1203794
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
