These days, borrowing books from a library is simply a matter of scanning your plastic reader’s card, and then scanning each item, and making sure the titles you borrow correspond to those listed on the terminal screen before you walk out.

Once upon a time, it was all done with cardboard tickets and date stamps: each borrower had a card pocket to hold tickets equivalent to the number of books you were allowed to borrow at any one time; and each book had a pocket to hold a unique title card, alongside a pasted-in sheet showing the date by when the book was to be returned.

To borrow a book, you took it to the counter where a librarian would take the card from the book and place it along with your borrower’s ticket into a filing system organised by return dates, and each book would be stamped with the corresponding date. The whole process was run in reverse when you took the book back.

In the early 1970s, when I used to borrow books from the Adelaide City library, there was an interim technology, that at the time seemed very futuristic. It still used paper borrower’s tickets, but from memory, instead of each book having a title card, the system used an encoded magnetic strip or microchip. The book was scanned, alongside an image of the borrower’s ticket, and out came a photostat strip of paper with the borrower’s number and the list of books being taken out. I don’t recall seeing this library technology in use any where else, and I may have got some of the details wrong – but in essence, it was an early form of the scanning system in use today.

Next week #10: Portable music