Chapter 3 The Cambrian Explosion

I debated about the title for this chapter for some time. Every student of environmental science is introduced to the Cambrian Explosion, that period about 540 million years ago when a surprising variety of animals suddenly arrive on the evolutionary scene. For 3.5 billion years there were only simple celled organisms and then something happened to cause a burst of evolutionary innovation.

 Looking back over our program from a thirty-year perspective, I could easily see the inflection point where Economic Gardening changed from a primitive effort at helping small businesses to a rich intellectual understanding of entrepreneurial processes. The sophisticated ideas and tools flooded in over a short period of time and drastically altered the direction in which we were going. It was our own little Cambrian Explosion and two people were the gateways to all that information: Stephanie Neumann and Garth Johnston.

 Stephanie and her Magic Databases          

During this “lost in the wilderness period,” I happened to be in Bemis Library, Littleton’s 1960’s ode to Modern architecture. Stephanie Neumann was a reference librarian at the time and I noticed her working with two large three-ring binders filled with blue colored sheets as she searched for codes and terms and then entered them into the computer. A crude dot matrix printer crisscrossed the paper printing line by noisy, laborious line. A ream of sprocket driven paper crept out of the machine and folded itself back and forth in a box on the floor in an ever growing pile. I scanned undecipherable codes and references and occasional buried articles.

 I was curious as to what she was doing and spent the next several days and weeks peppering her with questions about where she got the information, what was the system she was using and how did she do it? She explained that each one of the several hundred blue sheets outlined a search methodology for an individual commercial database service.

As I scanned through the blue sheets I saw literally hundreds of titles: Medline, Aerospace, Aluminum Industry Abstracts, American Banker Financial Publications, Bioengineering Abstracts—more than five hundred in all—and with each title there was a list of all the publications that fed that database: New York Times, BusinessWeek, Aerospace Weekly, New England Journal of Medicine and so forth. It seemed like the entire published world was captured by her system.

 It finally occurred to me that she was tapping into a huge universe of information but delivering only highly pertinent articles. I remember one of the librarians saying that if a 7th grader had to find out the height of the statue of liberty, databases would win the race over searches in the card shelves and book stacks by a wide margin. While the speed aspect was impressive, using that kind of power for 7th grade questions seemed a little wasteful. 

 I asked Stephanie if she could research some business questions for me and she agreed. We were both pretty green with the system and the equipment. The printers at the time fed out continuous feed paper and when you finished, you tore off each page at the perforation and pinched off the edges. I remember occasions when the paper slipped the cogs and slanted off to one side, the printer head still merrily spitting out words and sentences that headed off the page and into obscurity. 

 As we both learned more about the system, the questions became more sophisticated and the answers more to the point. I asked for tables of market information and Stephanie would dive into her blue sheets like a medieval wizard concocting a magic brew and out would come the table.

 I became a constant visitor in Stephanie’s office with business questions mostly to feel out the scope and depth of what these commercial databases were.  At the time, there was no Internet and the amazing stream of business related articles was breathtaking. The hit rate was in the 60-80% range but as Stephanie gained skill it approached 90%. Stephanie on her part, became a great partner, just as engrossed by the power of the database services and extremely diligent about improving her search skills. We sat side by side bouncing ideas and watching information fold back and forth on the floor, excited by our growing sense of power.