Blommer Information Center is Dedicated

On May 10, five members of the Blommer family joined the Board of Trustees of the Library Associates, faculty, and staff for the dedication of the information center made possible by the generosity of Henry J. Blommer, Sr. (C'26) and Viola Blommer, for whom the Blommer Science Library is also named.

We are truly grateful to the Blommer family for their support. At the dedication were Henry Blommer, Sr. and Viola Blommer; Henry Blommer, Jr. and Judy Blommer; and Stephen Blommer, a student at the Medical Center. About 50 people crowded into the Blommer Science Library for refreshments and a brief ceremony featuring a blessing by Father Robert Lawton, S. J., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and remarks by Dr. Richard Blanquet, professor of biology and member of the Main Campus Library Committee; Dr. Marie-Helene Gibney, associate provost; and Dr. Susan K. Martin, university librarian.

The Blommer Information Center allows the library to use the same technology as that used to produce audio compact disks to provide library users with a host of data bases in a wide variety of fields. The "center" is actually decentralized; it consists of a computer and disk drives in the Library Systems Office, six computer work stations in the Lauinger Reference Department, four in the Blommer Science Library, two in Government Documents, and one in the Woodstock Theological Library.

Anyone doing research can go to any of these work stations and gain access to indexes and files such as Dissertation Abstracts, General Science Index, ABI/Inform (a business literature data base), Religion Index, and eleven other products that are published on CD-ROM (compact disk-read only memory) by various commercial publishers.

Since this technology became widely available in the mid-1980s, reference tools that used to be available in print form only have rapidly moved to CD-ROM format. Each CD-ROM disk can store 550 million characters of information, or the amount of information in 250 normal-sized volumes. With the Blommer Information Center, we have networked the user stations together so that two or more persons can use a data base simultaneously, and so that a person in any area of the library can have access to the data bases stored on the network.