Add to ORKGI believe it was Adlai Stevenson who said: "Man does not live by words alone, but he sometimes has to eat them." No one wants to be reminded of anything but his successes! So, I sense that in putting together their papers for these proceedings, my colleagues have squirmed at least as uncomfortably as I. Librarians know that the inventory of failures in library automation is long and dismal. However, this is not intended to be a series of obituaries; rather, my purpose is to review the period of transition from completely manual to nearly fully automated systems, to try to see what can be learned from analyzing the failures, and to extract some general observations in answer to the question: what hath technology wrought?published o...