People are leaving their farewells for John Iliff at his memorial page. I posted something there, and another message at PUBLIB–where the body of the email announcing his death was “scrubbed” from the server, to my great irritation; I can imagine John rolling his eyes over that–and this post is somewhere between a prayer and a good-bye.
John was a really wonderful librarian. His skill lay not only in what he could do, or his knack for new technologies, or his ability to teach others; his great gift lay in his faith in the solution around the corner, in the his unwavering belief in the ability of librarians to learn new things, in his unerring hunch about the hidden value of something as dubiously valuable as email in 1991. As co-founder of PUBLIB, he probably faced any number of questions about setting up an email list for public librarians worldwide, but if he was ever annoyed by a nay-sayer or a complainer, we on the list never knew about it.
I wish John had not departed us so soon. I didn’t have enough opportunities to run into him at conferences, or exchange ideas by email, or wave to him across a crowded room. None of us got enough time with John. Maybe we never get enough time with anyone. In any event, I’m going to try a little harder to make time for the people I know and care about, even if it’s never enough, and sometimes when I see my friends I’ll think of John and his infectious smile.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Hope is a first-class stamp - 2007
- SEFLIN Talk: get your hot links here - 2007
- IM and 2.0 Culture - 2007
- Book reviewers ask: do reviews determine what you read? - 2007
- The New York Times on Ethics and Blogging - 2005
Thank you, John; I’d come into Pinellas Park library to pick up older Nat Geos and Smiths-(pack rat collector) and one evening you snagged me to play w/PC; helped me set up hotmail acct, and showed me all the good things (and some bad) on the I-net; I’m still addicted; farewell friend. Thank you, steve
One day I was at home messing around with my FidoNet BBS when I got a call from John Iliff. That was in the summer of 1992, and the beginning of the friendship that taught me more about the internet than I ever imagined. John had seen a post of mine about librarians joining together in group email on a BBS conference that had been forwarded to The Well from High Tech Tools for Librarians out of the northwest somewhere, maybe Washington State or Oregon. He was happy to hear someone in his home town was also interested in librarians telecommunicating and exchanging information, and he added me to a distribution list of librairans on his home computer that eventually became PUBLIB. He invited me, just a library student at the time, to the first meeting of the Suncoast Freenet Organizing committee, and the rest is history. We worked together helping to publicize the Freenet and get it online with some wonderful folks from the Tampa Public Library. John taught me all kinds of information, and often invited me to the library to see the LAN he was building for Pinellas Park Public Library.
When the Tampa Bay Computer Society had an first had an Internet SIG, we met around my kitchen table. I asked John and he agreed to teach us about the internet. I will never forget the day we told him 8 or 10 folks would be showing up at the Pinellas Park Public Library to learn from his expertise. Sixty-five people showed up! John talked the library into giving us a large “quiet room” to hold an impromtu meeting where he could speak to all who attended. After that we always met in public libraries. John was our speaker in March 1994 when he introduced us to “gopher”. The following month, he brought in the Oldsmar Public Library and an internet service provider named Intnet. We saw our first look at the World Wide Web in Mosaic browser. John has showed me the text based web in the previous months.
John spent several years working with Jean Armour Polly, of NYSERNET, whose 1992 article in a professional library magazine coined the term “surfing the internet”. Their project to spread the internet to rural public libraries helped many small libraries go online in the early days, when rural folks has less than average access to information. I watched for several years as he built the internet access system at the Pinellas Park Public Library from a curiosity on one computer to a lab that had folks waiting for their turn to use the many online computers.
John wrote a couple chapters for the book “The Internet Unleashed” in about 1993. We were all amazed at how the book, a SAM publication, was put together online, with authors submitting their chapters in an early form of online collaborative knowledge building. John was always at the forefront of technological change, and always wanting to help every day folks get information. I remember him saying often his now famous saying “information wants to be free.” Thanks to the pioneering efforts of John Iliff, people from all over can use the internet in public libraries. John, I will miss you!
Sharon Centanne
I am so sad to hear this, even now almost three years after the fact. John was definitely one of the good ones, and I am compelled to say something about him now.
I feel fortunate that our paths would cross many times over the years. I remember the first time he and I met, sometime around 1994 – 1995 at an FLA conference, or something to do w/ library automation. We were both relatively fresh out of our master’s programs and very interested in libraries, computing, and the Internet, and I was a network manager for a local library consortium. I remember mostly *not* how refreshing it was to talk to somebody in the library profession who actually understood what I was talking about, but rather what a great guy he was. Naturally, I was thrilled a few years later, after moving to Tampa for a new job, to spot him across the room at a meeting of the local library minds. We renewed our fellowship at that time and stayed in touch as professionals in the same field often do. He certainly had much to offer, and I kept his card in my desk drawer for quick reference. In fact, the Suncoast Freenet, which owes its existence in part to John’s tireless efforts, was one of my charges upon moving to Tampa. Our paths crossed once more when we both coincidentally left our library jobs at the same time and went to USF – he to teach at the library school and me to work on a Ph.D. in MIS, literally right across the hall from one another. We spent many afternoons catching up on things, eating lunch and drinking coffee, and all the usual campus stuff. We said our farewells when he moved to Alaska, but I never wanted to say them again so soon. In all the time I knew him, I was always the richer for it. He certainly deserves to have a technology innovation award named after him, but it could just as appropriately have been a “quality person” award – his quality being the very highest.
Godspeed, John.
What a nice coda to remembering John. We did establish an award for him and it is the first award in ALA to specifically recognize technology excellence in public libraries–something he would have loved.