Today has brought the very sad news that a former Florida librarian turned tech guru, John Iliff, passed away over the weekend. I do not often post in the first person in this blog, but for John, I must.
I first met John in 1990 when he was still at Embry-Riddle and we were serving together on a Florida Library Association committee planning the Connect full-day preconference. We worked together on it for approximately nine months and ultimately birthed a bouncing baby full-day, very well-attended preconference. It was after that event that John became ever more interested in the Internet and its promise and moved into technology to become the nationally know tech guru and tech advocate that he was (he was co-founder of PubLib). John was truly one of the good guys. He not only worked his hardest for the benefit of library patrons and for moving technology to the place that it was helping libraries achieve that same goal, but he also genuinely enjoyed people and had a gift for making people feel that they mattered to him. I’ve missed him since he left Florida and I know they’re going to miss him everywhere else he worked. It is a great loss to the profession. My sincerest condolences go to his family, as it’s an unimaginable personal loss for them.
PALINET (his current employer) has set up a Web site here where information will be posted when available about donations in his memory and where people can share condolences and remembrances of John.
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REMEMBERING JOHN ILIFF -
One day I was at home messing around with my "Family Life" 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 librarians 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 had 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 SAMS 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
Librarian and Internet Trainer
Suzi here again: New links that have turned up in addition to the PALINET site include entries in the following:
Free Range Librarian
Anchorage Daily News Obituraries
Librarian
Information Wants to Be Free
Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!
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