Celebrating 30 Years of Lane Library on the Web

Picture it: Palo Alto, California 1994. The Web is only 5 years old, dial-up internet is the norm, and the information superhighway is still under construction. One of the earliest web browsers, Mosaic, is just hitting the mainstream. A little start-up called Yahoo! was launched by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo as a simple directory of websites they liked. Google founders (and Stanford alums) Sergey Brin and Larry Page had yet to meet – it would be another 4 years before they would publish their seminal paper on The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. It’s also the year that the Lane Medical Library launched its very first website! Back then, our digital presence was similar to Yahoo! – a modest directory of links to a handful of databases, trusted resources, and digital versions of some of Lane’s informational handouts.

Fast forward to 2024, and the internet landscape has shifted dramatically. Today, our website, https://lane.stanford.edu/, is a dynamic hub for researchers, students, and medical professionals across Stanford Medicine and Stanford University. It offers a wealth of resources, from our extensive online search on our homepage to expertly curated specialty and research guides to links to a calendar of our upcoming online and in-person classes.

Over the past 30 years, the Lane Medical Library website has constantly evolved to meet the ever-changing needs of our users. We’ve embraced new technologies, streamlined user experience, and expanded our digital offerings to stay at the forefront of academic medical research. Although technology has changed and the number of online resources has increased, one thing has remained constant – our desire to meet the needs of the Stanford Medicine community. From day one, our website was designed with you in mind. Even in its earliest form, Lane Library’s website introduced a feedback mechanism to allow the Stanford Medicine community to tell us how our website could better serve you, and 30 years later, we still love hearing your feedback!

We regularly conduct user research on our website to improve the user experience. Please sign up if you are interested in helping us with short surveys and brief interviews over Zoom. We are always testing our website, not you! Thanks for considering.

Thank you for helping Lane Medical Library’s home on the Web change and grow with the Stanford Medicine community these last 30 years! We can’t wait to see where our next 30 years lead us!

Reference

Goh, J., & Tinsley, M. (1997). Creating a World Wide Web Site for Lane Medical Library, Stanford University. In J. M. Still (Ed.), The Library Web: Case Studies in Web Site Creation and Implementation (pp. 53–62). Information Today, Inc.