It's Party Time! GALILEO is Georgia's Smartest 5 Year Old

For five years the students of Georgia Highlands College have grown used to GALILEO. It is now customary to direct students to GALILEO when they begin any sort of research. Those of us in the Library are so used to teaching new students to take their first steps into computerized research that we could do it in our sleep, except for the fact that GALILEO keeps changing, growing, becoming more and making more better. What is on our laptops today looks nothing like what we saw when all of this was new. And new was only five years ago.

At the dawn of Fall Quarter 1995, the Library staff awaited GALILEO with the anticipation associated with both Christmas morning and a visit to the dentist. We hoped for great things, but was it going to hurt? The then-Governor Zell Miller and the state legislature had given the Regents a whopping good sum of money for the University System to create an online research library of databases for all state university students. Several national schools, groups of libraries and other state systems were trying to put together similar online tools, but Georgia took the lead, got it up and running and named it GALILEO - Georgia Library Learning Online, THE national and, one can say, world model (why be modest when modesty is not needed?), and it was only five years ago.

Can we conceive of doing without GALILEO today? We could do it, but who would want to? The Library learned how to use GALILEO and to teach others how to use it. Faculty, staff and, most importantly, the students have all learned that GALILEO is where to begin computerized research. And we started only five years ago.

Let's celebrate! GALILEO is having a birthday party and we want you all here to join in the fun. There will be cake, balloons and all sorts of good things to celebrate a good thing's five years of service to the University System and the public libraries, the technical colleges, the public school systems and private colleges of Georgia. Please come to the Library on Wednesday September, 20th from 1:30 to 3:30 for the festivities. See you there.