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Reflections on the First Generation of GOBI
An Interview with YBP President, Gary Shirk
By Sarah Buck
Gary Shirk
President and Chief Operating Officer
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Note: Gary Shirk, President and Chief Operating Officer of YBP Library Services, gave his final farewell to YBP on the 19th of September. He leaves behind a blueprint that not only shaped the livelihoods of the hundreds who have worked under the oblong roof in Contoocook, but also shaped the world of Academic bookselling in a time when the world was moving from analog to digital.
Please tell us about the creation of GOBI
When I came to YBP in 1984, we were using the old IBM System 38 that we had at the time. It was green screen, and very awkward.
The ordering interface before GOBI was very clunky. Customers could put orders in -- but they had to key them in. It was not very attractive. I made a tour of the United States going from one college to another over a 6 month period. I saw increasingly how PCs were beginning to appear on people's desks, and next to the PCs was a mouse, and the early version of Microsoft Windows, and people were responding favorably to the graphical interface. I asked librarians "How do you like that?" and they said "Oh, we just love it!" I asked "How does it fit into the work that you do?" and they often replied "We've just established a Local Area Network, so all the PCs are interconnected with themselves; or with a server." Then the server provided access to their legacy systems; their cataloging and their union catalog and so forth. Seeing this, I asked "Well you don't have too many of them now, so what's your plan?" and they responded "We expect within a few years virtually everyone will have PCs."
That got me thinking, if Yankee Book Peddler could do something with a graphical interface, we would be the first one to do so. The vehicle to do this had just appeared on the scene; the World Wide Web. It was very new; not many people knew about it. And at the time, very few people in the universities actually used it. They used a program called "Gopher," a system that was the early version of something like "Your Favorites" on Internet Explorer - it was basically just a list of databases that were stored either on your own system or in anybody's system and it used the existing communication protocol to go all over. The Web was really rapidly becoming the system everybody used. And so I made some inquiries about using a graphical interface over the Web and was told that you had to use this language called HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
This was when HTML was just HTML, and not user friendly, as in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, -- just HTML. I had been trying to explain what I wanted this to be like and couldn't articulate it very well. So I just grabbed a book and taught myself HTML and created a series of screens that were linked together using HTML technology so I could essentially do a click through demo of what I wanted this thing to be. I named it GOBI to give it the sense of being "Global Online Bibliographic Information," originally because we had intentions of building our own business in the UK.
I then began to show it to people. Once they saw it, they understood. The IT guys were able to take it from there. And over a 6 month period we created GOBI 1.
The response was astounding. No one had believed it could be done. Immediately after we introduced GOBI in 1996 at ALA, everybody was talking about it. It was the all the talk among the book suppliers. We were the first book supplier to have a graphical interface delivered over the WWW.
We wanted to do it anyway we could. Much of it was so simple. We even used some of the graphic buttons I set up. But we had to figure out how to make GOBI do more things. Our head programmer on the PC side found a way to enable us to do reports on the fly - to go into our database, find all the data, bring it back, format it, and present it on the screen. Well, that seems ordinary today, but when we showed GOBI at ALA, there were technology people in that room who said "You can't do that."
I said "We can't? We didn't know that, I'm glad you didn't tell us: we didn't know we couldn't do it, so we just did it!"
The introduction of GOBI went over extremely well. We thought it would take 9 months to transition customers over from the old system to the new system, but in fact, within three months everybody had moved. It was a huge success and I think we counted it as being responsible for bringing a significant volume of new sales that first year, just on the basis of the GOBI interface.
Librarians later told me that with that one innovation we had leapfrogged the competition in terms of our technology, which is one of the reasons that we continued to call it GOBI. John Secor and I were a bit concerned as it really looked advanced, "space age" if you will. This thing just leaped over everything at the time -- now librarians might think we were all about technology and might forget about the basic business of delivering books and customer service.
So we actually downplayed the technology. Our GOBI ads at the time always had people in front of the machines, because it was more about people. We had fun with the GOBI name. I wrote up a mythical story about the origin of the GOBI, where I described the GOBI as a prehistoric bird, that was rarely sighted any more, but that had been recently sighted along the coast of Maine. I described its plumage and shape and the kind of call that it made, and so on. There were individuals who read this piece, some who'd originally thought GOBI was named for the desert, but after the piece appeared they thought GOBI really was a bird, and for years people would tell me they'd been trying to find reference to the GOBI bird and they couldn't find one anywhere - they didn't realize it was a joke!
We also thought of making little GOBI dolls, and John used to wander around and say "Hey. Have you hugged your GOBI today?" That was back when the beanie babies were such a big hit, and we thought of making GOBI beanie babies. In the earliest renditions of GOBI, the screen, the GOBI icon looked very much like a bird. Over the years we've changed it to look less like a bird and more like an abstract shape. And now with GOBI 3 we just have the swirl. This gradual transformation was what we had in mind from the very beginning. Because the technology was no longer a big story, it was to gradually direct attention away from the technology and allow the technology to speak for itself.
The first version went through many changes. Eventually we needed to come out with edition 2 to make the architecture better suited to our customer's needs. We invested significant funding into it, and rebuilt it from the ground up. Through this evolution GOBI has become the standard of our industry.
(Editor's note: My only hope is that someday, mythical or not, Gary will find that bird. I know he will leave no stone unturned!)
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