The History of The Riley Guide

Editor's Note: Below is a history of how The Riley Guide got its start way back in '94, right at the beginning of the World Wide Web explosion. Written by the site's founder, Margaret Dikel (formerly Margaret Riley), the narrative goes through the first years of the site.

In September, 1993, I was working as the Circulation Librarian at the George C. Gordon Library, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I was doing the usual circulation librarian kinds of things (fixing paper jams in the photocopiers, supervising the students, finding lost and hidden books, collecting fines and making everyone share the books fairly) when the director of the library asked for a volunteer to begin working with the Internet. She felt (and I agreed) that enough information was becoming available which could be important to the students and faculty at WPI, and that it was important to have a librarian examining this area.

I wasn't very good at using the Internet. I could email people and read news (in a Unix environment, so I was using mail and rn) and I liked to explore the gopher system, but I took on the challenge. Over the fall break, I went home with all of the Internet books I could find in the library, most notably Ed Krol's The Whole Internet, and I began to read and try things. By the end of the week, I had figured most of it out. So, like a fool, I agreed to try to teach others on campus how to do this.

Meanwhile, I began searching for things on gopher and in the Usenet newsgroups. I even poked around FTP sites and into telnet things. I began to find resources which had great information, others which pointed to great information, and mailing lists and Usenet newsgroup which exchanged great information. All of this was used, passed on to others through private email to individuals, postings on WPI's newsgroups, or even printed pages sent through the campus mail. I eventually began searching for things at the request of individuals, offering occasional training seminars, and I had a whole series of handouts on using the Internet through WPI's campus system. Ah, those were the days....

One day in late 1993, I happened over an announcement for a recruiting site on the Internet, career.com, which you could telnet into at that time. I thought this looked pretty good, it didn't charge the job seeker, and it was the first site of it's kind I had seen. Now, I had seen a lot of job resources out there, mostly colleges posting their own jobs and the Usenet groups, but this was a third-party recruiter. I posted it on one of the WPI Usenet groups for the students to see, and in the next week I had over 300 messages from the students (and a few faculty) wanting to know if I could find anything else like this. Hmm, well, yes, as a matter of fact, I could...

During the winter break, I searched and made notes, and in January of 1994 I had a ten-page handout (I know you are all really impressed) which I titled Employment Opportunities and Job Resources on the Internet.

This was back before we thought of saving bandwidth by using fewer words, hence the incredibly convoluted titles you see in some places. But I digress...

You could pick up a copy of the guide in the library whenever you were in there, and it had sites you could telnet into, mailing lists with jobs, FTP information, Usenet newsgroups, and Gopher resources.

I know, you are all utterly amazed. Remember that the web as we know it was a squalling newborn babe at this time, and there wasn't the rate of growth we see now. No graphics either unless you had a Unix workstation and NCSA Mosaic. Not much fun at all, but boy was it fast!

So, how did a 10-page paper handout become a 10-year old website? In January 1994, I contacted Lou Rosenfeld, a doctoral candidate in the library school at the University of Michigan about adding my handout to the gopher site his class had created, namely The Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides. (Remember what I said about convoluted titles? They changed the name to The Clearinghouse, and now it is part of the Internet Public Library.) They didn't have anything like this. (In fact, no one did that I knew about). Lou liked it and he included it, and the guide became a real live electronic, publicly-accessible Internet document in February 1994.

I announced the guide's availability on a few mailing lists, and it soon became the most popular guide on the Clearinghouse gopher according to Lou's statistics. But I wasn't sure it was really that good until the day I was searching Veronica (anyone remember her?) looking for more things to add, and I found a pointer to my guide from The Library of Congress!

Wow! I was somebody! :-)

Things move forward pretty quickly from here. I was updating the guide about once a month, and each time it would grow substantially. Spring 1994 was the first time I really found web sites with any real information, but gopher was still the king of the hill (or is that the burrow?). Summer 1994 was the beginning of the big recruiters, with the Online Career Center (consumed by Monster.com in 1999) the first of these to be really visible on gopher, but by the fall we were seeing the beginning of the move to the web. I was still creating paper handouts until November 1994 when the guide first approached 100K of data. At that point, I said good-bye to paper, hello online publishing. It was now completely electronic.

Meanwhile, my work training of others at WPI was still growing, my search skills were improving, and in Fall 1994 I was promoted to the position of Circulation and Computer Resources Librarian for the Gordon Library. I was beginning to attend Internet conferences and was already making a scene about librarians who felt that the Internet would mean the end of our profession.

If anything, we are needed more than ever!

People would call me up at the library asking for help finding information, finding employment, finding employees, and other kinds of questions since I was considered the person who knew the most about what was going on. I mean, folks from other colleges all over the place, like the dean from Howard University who called to get some advice on posting online to find a new faculty member and the researcher from Loyola who called for help finding funding resources. (I don't remember going over any of this in library school.) People started referring to my guide as The Riley Guide, and I started to realize that there was a real role for it online, and a place for me providing this kind of service.

I have to admit that the first time someone mentioned "The Riley Guide" in a mailing list message, I had to ask what it was. Duh!

In January 1995, the Riley Guide moved to the web where it has been ever since. No more paper, no more gopher, and no more FTP. (Well, that's not quite true. I maintained copies of the files in a public FTP site for a long time after this, but not any longer.) In mid-1995, I officially changed the title to The Riley Guide since everyone else called it that and it made for better bookmarks. At this point, I was also appointed Coordinator of Networked Resources for WPI, which is a fancy way of saying webmaster responsible for the information content and development on the university's webserver. Lots of fun, lots of headaches, but a great experience for me. However, things were slowing down on the job guide because I couldn't give it the time it needed (and still needs) for maintenance and updates.

I decided in January 1996 that the work on the job guide and the consulting/conferencing I was doing was conflicting too much with my work for the university, and I submitted my resignation effective February 29, 1996. I realized that the job guide would have to move, and so I contacted some friends who I knew would be willing to help me out without trying to take over my work. With that, the Riley Guide moved to its popular home at JobTrak on March 1, 1996. Ken, Dave, and Connie were great hosts.

I moved from Massachusetts down to Kensington, MD, at the end of March 1996, and have been living down here near Washington DC since then. But The Riley Guide kept growing, rather out of control, and I decided it was time to make another move. I was doing consulting work for Drake Beam Morin, so I spoke with them about hosting and worked out an agreement with them for sponsoring this work. I had been contacted by many of the online recruiters about sponsorship, but the decision to go with DBM was based more on who they aren't than anything else -- they weren't recruiters.

The Riley Guide was hosted by DBM from July 1997 until September 2001. They were a great host, allowing me full editorial control and not pushing me to add or delete anything. They continued to sponsor the site until 2002 when I moved it to my own URL, www.rileyguide.com and hired my own host service.

Margaret

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