NPR has a story today about the history of KU Info—a call-in question and answer line that's operated at my alma mater for 40 years. The basic gist: Call KU Info any time, with any question and get an answer.
Obviously, that meant a lot more in the days before ubiquitous Internet access and really helpful search engines. Imagining somebody sitting in a room trying to answer random questions about science, history, foreign language and pop culture trivia with a Rolodex and the encyclopedia, instead of just Googling it, is akin to imagining doing laundry before the washing machine, or trigonometry before the multi-function calculator. But it really wasn't all that long ago. When I arrived at KU in 1999, search engines were still just useless enough (Hi, Ask Jeeves!) that, depending on the question, KU Info could often get you an answer faster than the Internet. Plus, the service operated 24-7 back then, and since we all hadn't yet been spoiled by Wikipedia, there was still a certain thrill to middle-of-the-night games of "Stump the KU Info Staffers".
For all its frivolity, the service had serious roots—beginning as a way for students to get and share information during a period where the campus was fire-bombed multiple times, two teenagers were shot and killed by police, African American activists were fired on by snipers and nobody knew when a protest might turn deadly for the protesters or bystanders.
There was a lot of debate, by the time I left school, about whether anybody really needed KU Info anymore. But it seems like the service has found a niche, moving from trivia catch-all to answering more University-specific questions that students can't track down easily online. What that says about the navigability of the school's website … well, I wonder. But still, from a purely cultural standpoint, it's nice to see KU Info is still around. And it's interesting that it's surviving on the same kind of speaking-to-a-niche business plan that has allowed uber-local suburban and neighborhood newspapers to weather changing times better than their big-city, wanna-be national counterparts.
