Christopher J. Dubay collection on the Biomedical Information Communication Center

Groundbreaking for the new Biomedical Information Communication Center (BICC) building took place on August 10, 1989 with Senator Mark Hatfield at the event. The five-floor building was mostly completed in summer 1991 and would win an architectural award the next year. From August 26 to September 10, 60,000 volumes were transported from the Old Library into the movable stacks in the BICC building. Most of the Library staff moved in then, too. Opening day was September 9. The building was dedicated on Friday, November 8, 1991.

Not only was the building a commemoration to Senator Mark Hatfield's role in the Library's history, similar to Dr. John Week's role more than a half-century earlier, but the building was again deeply symbolic as the 1939 building had been, although in a different way. The BICC building brought many different University functions together in the synergistic way envisioned by the IAIMS concept: library services, educational communications, training and support, computers and network services, medical informatics research.

That fall the Old Library really became "the Old Library" and a renovation of it was begun. By spring 1993 all the Library staff remaining there had moved into the BICC building.

The Library established the Oregon Memorial Library for Bereaved Parents in September 1990. This is a consumer health-oriented collection focused on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and other books on grief and bereavement intended to be used by parents who have lost a young child. It is not separately shelved, but integrated with the general circulating collection in Main and Old Libraries.

In 1991 another NLM product became available in our region 6: Loansome Doc. This was an enhancement to the Grateful Med program and DOCLINE which allowed Grateful Med users to tag citations on a retrieved screen that they would like to have photocopies of. Grateful Med then logged into NLM's ELHILL computers and sent a request to the user's primary health sciences library.

NLM renamed our Regional Medical Library (Pacific Northwest Regional Health Sciences Library Service) to: National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), Pacific Northwest Region in late 1991. It is based at the University of Washington Health Sciences Library in Seattle.

In early 1992 the BICC announced a partnership between ORHION and an outside company called U.S. HealthLink which resulted in many changes over the next two years. The Rural Health Information Project, for example, began in summer 1992 and provided outreach services to 43 rural hospitals, most of which did not have hospital librarians. In the Library, Medline and other databases provided by U.S. HealthLink replaced the older databases from the INFONET days.

One PORTALS initiative was the introduction in 1992 of Ariel specialized workstations as a way to transmit documents between libraries. Since then, Ariel workstations have become our preferred way to send certain documents quickly with high-quality imaging results.

In 1993 the Library was beginning to provide electronic services remotely to nursing students in Ashland and elsewhere throughout the State.

In September 1993, help desks of Networks & Computing and the Library were brought together inside the Library into a single unit known informally in the beginning as The Bridge. The Bridge split into two segments in summer 1994. First there was a phone-only Help Desk, staffed by customer support staff from Networks & Computing, for answering phone questions about network, computer, and software problems. Second there was a walk-up Information Desk, known today as the Info Desk, separate from the circulation desk. There was much remodeling in the BICC building at this time and several departments such as the Edu-Tech computer store and Educational Communications were relocated within the building.

The Internet had become a major topic of interest for our Library in 1992. Librarians had begun subscribing to library-oriented discussion lists on the Internet such MEDLIB-L and PACS-L. The lists would proliferate throughout the 1990s and be a vital source of information for the staff. The Internet came to dominate Library thinking and library services. In 1993 and 1994, gophers (Internet programs) were being used to find Internet resources, and the Online Northwest conferences those years had many presentations on ftp'ing and gophers. By 1995, gophers were being replaced by the World Wide Web.

Many changes in technology on campus occurred in the early 1990s. In 1991, the old INFONET email system was replaced by AT&T Mail. In 1993, a three-year campus phone conversion was completed. Networks & Computing merged with the Hospital Information Systems Division to become the Information Technology Group (ITG). The campus began a conversion of all the separate networks into one single campus network with the start of the OHSU workstation installation in the BICC building in early 1994. The new OHSU workstation provided a common set of core services to everyone on campus (databases, email, address book, etc.). AT&T Mail was replaced by WordPerfect Office, later called Groupwise. Three years later, in May 1997, the campus network conversion to a single system connecting over 6000 core-service OHSU workstations had been completed. The next phase was started: conversion of Novell NetWare 3.x to NetWare 4.x and the introduction of the Windows 95 OHSU workstation.

In 1994 the Library received a Murdock grant through PORTALS for $11,393 in order to retrospectively convert the PNW Archives collection catalog records into computer MARC records in the catalog. The project ran from August 1994 well into 1995. This project made the PNW Archives collection, then shelved in Room 440 and now shelved in the History of Medicine Room, accessible through the catalog. In the next few years, the History of Medicine collection itself would finally be barcoded and thus indicate in the catalog where those books were. The HOM collection had been retrospectively converted into the online catalog in 1991 but had not been barcoded then. CD-ROMs began to be purchased in 1995, some for use on the public access computers in the Library and some for circulation out of the Reserve collection in the Main Library and Dental Library.

In summer 1996 the Library's integrated library system was migrated from a proprietary operating system-based Hewlett Packard central computer to a UNIX-based server.

-Taken from Dan Knieser's History of the OHSU Library, 1893-1991 (long version)