According to a posting by family members on Peter’s facebook page, Peter died calmly in his sleep at St. Paul’s Hospital, Palliative Care Unit in Saskatoon on December 30.
He was an important figure in information and library science, beloved by many.
Here are some biographical bits:
Peter Scott was born February 14, 1947, in Walthamstow UK and moved to Canada in 1976. He was the Internet Projects Manager in the University of Saskatchewan Library in Saskatoon. Along with another Saskatoon librarian, Darlene Fichter he served as the editor and content developer for many online directories.
He was the creator of HYTELNET (1991), the first electronic browser for Internet resources, developed from 1990. In his 1991 video, Peter demonstrates a later version of HyTelnet, while an archive lists the resources available through the service. Peter wrote a blog, Peter Scott’s Library Blog for Credo Reference. Other web creations are: Twitter Compendium, RSS Compendium, Weblogs Compendium, allrecordlabels.com, Blogging The Blues, Peter Scott’s Library Blog, Libdex – (Sold in 2005) and Publishers’ Catalogues . This reporter (birdie) first met Peter (via internet) when I asked him to add my company to the listing thirteen years ago. In the interim, we remained good virtual friends.
He was also also a blues singer and harmonica player, and had the distinction of winning a Juno Award for having his song “TV Preacher” on the album “Saturday Night Blues” which won “Best Roots and Traditional Music Album” in 1992.
Peter the Great
I was so very saddened by this news. Peter was one of my very first mentors (whether he realized it or not) in the early 90s. If you were a systems librarian in the early 90s, you aspired to be like Peter Scott. We had such great conversations about Z39.50, HyTelnet, and Libdex. Purely by coincidence, the night before he died, I was telling some old friends about HyTelnet and this cool Brit in a library in Saskatoon who almost invented the World Wide Web…that is always how I thought of HyTelnet. Only later did I discover what a wonderful musician he was as well. He was a man ahead of his time with a brilliance in our field that was only surpassed by his humility and great sense of humor. My prayers go out to his family. Pete was one of the greats for sure.
-Andrew K. Pace