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Interview with Janet Hill
Interviewed by A. Arro Smith. Transcribed by Margaret Ann Smith.
  Transcript
 | Arro Smith: This is Arro Smith. I am here with Janet Swan Hill. We are in Washington D.C. at the 2010 American Library Annual Conference.
She has agreed to be interviewed. This interview will be part of the Capturing Our Stories Oral History Program of Retired or Retiring Librarians. It is one of Loriene Roy’s
American Library Association Presidential Initiatives. This recording will be the property of ALA and may be published and used for scholarly research. Today is June 26 th, 2010.
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| So here we are at conference and let’s start with how you know Dr. Roy and how long you have been on Council. |
| JSW: I know Loriene Roy because we served on the ALA executive board together and through the executive board on council. I am concluding my
final term on council this time. I have been on twenty three years. |
| AS: Wow. Okay, well congratulations. (Laughter) Good deal. Good deal. Tell us where you live and a brief overview of your
professional career so far. |
| JSW: Currently I am associate director of technical services at the University of Colorado Libraries in Boulder, and prior to that I was head of
cataloging at Northwestern University Libraries. Prior to that I began my professional career at the Library of Congress as a special recruit. Went to work as a map cataloger at the
geography and map division and then was head of the map cataloging unit before I left for Northwestern. |
| AS: Where did you go to library school? |
| JSW: University of Denver. Not all that long after I graduated from the University of Denver’s Library School, the library school was
closed. |
| AS: I was about to say I have never heard of it. (Laughter) |
| JSW: There’s a new program there now but it is not the one that I attended. |
| AS: Okay, okay, and so you went to school in Colorado and then you have worked elsewhere in the northeast and the northwest and now you are back in
Colorado. |
| JSW: Right. I was raised in Wyoming. I went to college in upper New York State. |
| AS: Uh, huh. |
| JSW: And then I went to graduate school in Colorado because my husband was drafted and sent to Vietnam and I had to do something with my life, so I
went to library school while living with my parents who were in Colorado at that time. And then back to Washington D.C. and then to the Chicago area and then finally got to move back to
the west in 1989. |
| AS: And have you always been interested in technical services or cataloging or… |
| JSW: Well, I am an accidental librarian really. |
| AS: Okay. |
| JSW: Because, because my husband was drafted and sent to Vietnam, I went to live with my parents. I worked for a – oh, about nine or ten months
for the Rocky Mountain Oil and Gas Association because I was a geology major, and then I just needed something else to do with myself and went to the library school which I knew about because
both of my college roommates had gone to library school. |
| AS: Ahhh. (Laughter) |
| JSW: And I played my figurative violin, and I said my husband is Vietnam. He gets a hardship pay of $116 a month. I cannot afford tuition
and they looked at my transcript and said you are in and we will wave your tuition. So there I was as a prospective librarian and I became a cataloger because that was the only opening
that the geography and math division had when I finished my internship at LC. |
| AS: I see. |
| JSW: And I knew that I wanted to work for the geography and map division. |
| AS: Okay. Wow. |
| JSW: It is all a bunch of happy accidents. (Laughter) |
| AS: So, well I am also a cataloger and tell us in your career in technical services, in your career as managing metadata . |
| JSW: Yes? |
| AS: Tell us what it was like then, how it changed and what it is like now and your feelings about it. |
| JSW: Well when I first began cataloging we were using the AACR...1. Of course we didn’t call it one at that time. |
| AS: We didn’t call it one at that time. |
| JSW: And revised chapter six had been published but it was only being used for books, and so maps were being catalogued using pre-ISBD punctuation and
I was also using obviously the Library of Congress Classification system. We would do our cataloging on a typewriter, and I tended to sit like this and do my typing because the maps are
huge and you had to very carefully arrange yourself so that you could actually do it, and MARC tagging was considered to be beneath catalogers, so we gave our worksheets to somebody else who
did the tagging who gave it to somebody else who did the input on a machine called the magnetic tape selectric typewriter or MTST. And then those tapes were then huge tapes carried
physically to the Navy Yard and brought up and turned into the database which, of course, were just catalog cards. |
| AS: Okay. |
| JSW: And, because we didn’t have anything on line at the time. And I was heavily involved in the revision of chapter six for the creation
of the cartographic materials cataloging manual and also edited a revision of the G schedule for maps. |
| And I am personally responsible for the fact that the G schedule has maps in it because (laughter) because I had made maps up for myself to help in
classification so this is my one little claim to fame in LC's publications. Of course working at LC, we did no copy cataloging. It was all original. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: And so that was my experience was of original cataloging did in manual manner that was then transferred to an electronic database that was used to
create a manual catalog. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: I went to Northwestern as the head of cataloging there and of course went into general cataloging, so leaving behind the maps specialization.
And Northwestern was a pioneer in library automation. It had operating at that point, and I went there in 1978, the NOTIS system, Northwestern Online Total Integrated System which
included, which had automated even at that time serials. Of course when you told people, “yes, we have a serial system,” they would say “No you don’t. Nobody does.” But we
did. And we also implemented authority control, bringing up the authority format before I think anybody else did. |
| AS: Good, good. |
| JSW: We had an online catalog beginning in 1980, even prior to day one on the AACR2 and that was pretty exciting being involved in the development of
an integrated library system. |
| AS: And was that home grown? |
| JSW: It was home grown. It was – the programmer’s name was James Aagard who is still actually active, although an emeritus professor now.
He came out of the computer science program at Northwestern. And the systems analyst was named Velma Veneziano. [She] also came from Wyoming as did I. And the two of
them developed this system. John McGowanwas the director of the library and had the foresight to say that we needed an integrated library system, although he probably did not say because that
was not a term of art at that time. (Laughter) And it was done entirely without grant funding specifically so that it would be inexpensive enough actually to run. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: As opposed to relying heavily on grant funding which libraries like University of Chicago had done and turned into a system that was really too
expensive to continue to run. And because NOTIS was an integrated system and because it did include many things that no other systems did at the time, eventually we began to sell it. |
| AS: And was NOTIS. NOTIS was acronym. Do you remember what it stood for? |
| JSW: Northwestern Online Total Integrated System. |
| AS: Okay. |
| JSW: NOTIS and it was first adopted by, let’s see, Auburn and Florida and Harvard. And then it went – it eventually became the Endeavor System.
It became a wholly owned subsidiary of Northwestern University and then it went independent. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: But that was after I left Northwestern. We were at that point not working using OCLC. Instead we purchased tapes from the Library of
Congress, mounted them, searched them locally and transferred them as we needed them. Eventually Northwestern joined the research libraries group and began to use the RLG system.
Just before I left Northwestern, I began a program to study why we should switch to OCLC and after I left they did switch to OCLC and then of course then RLG disappeared. |
| AS: And what year was that? |
| JSW: Uhhh, what year was which? |
| AS: When you, when you left Northwestern. |
| JSW: Oh, I left Northwestern in 1989. |
| AS: Okay, okay. So OCLC, you all – Northwestern was rather late. |
| JSW: Northwestern was late to join OCLC but early to do automation. |
| AS: Right, right, right. |
| JSW: Yes, and had been with RLG as a bibliographic utility for, I don’t know, maybe eight years before they switched to OCLC, because at that point it
was thought that research libraries shouldn’t be a member of RLG. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: For their automation and everything else. And OCLC was seen as a public library utility only, and at the time that the NOTIS system was
developed, OCLC was barely in its infancy and so, I mean it had barely expanded out of Ohio and so purchasing Library of Congress tapes was essentially the only way to get the data. And
it was early enough so that seemed a – it was entirely workable, and it took a long time to decide not to do that simply because it was so efficient. |
| AS: Right. (Laughter) If it’s fixed, don’t break it. |
| JSW: And while I was – when I moved from the Library of Congress where I had been a member of the Special Libraries Association, as I was about to
leave the Library of Congress, I joined ALA and my supervisor, the head of technical services at Northwestern was the president elect of the Resources and Technical Services Division at that
time. And I got my first committee appointment largely because of that which was on the newly created committee on cataloging description and access, on which I served for about –
for a total of eleven years in one capacity or another, and I’m going into this because it provides the perspective that I have on the development of cataloguing. |
| And I was secretary on CCDA for three years, member for four, served as the liaison from the geography and map division for one and then was appointed to the
joint steering committee for the revision of the Anglo American Cataloging Rules upon which I served for two terms – two three year terms, and as that was an ex-officio member of CCDA, so that
accounts for the total eleven years during which time we moved from an AACR1 to a AACR2 to the first two revisions to AACR2. |
| And I would say that the largest, the most distinctive change in cataloging that I have experienced since I first started at the Library of Congress is not
so much the changes in the rules, although we certainly have had those, it’s been the degree to which we are no longer – no one is autonomous any longer. |
| Previously you could do almost everything all by – could – had to do almost everything by yourself and it didn’t really matter very much whether you adhered
to some standard or another, because it was only your catalog and you weren’t really sharing it with anybody. |
| Even when you started to share things if you were in a research library, especially a very large one, there was the mental attitude I think that well my
cataloging is wonderful, so I will do it the way I want to do my cataloging and other people are lucky to have it. (Laughter) |
| Then I went to the University of Colorado where they were using the CARL system which stands for the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries which the
alliance members had actually paid to create. It was created – the CARL system was created for the alliance and they were using that system which, speaking quite frankly, which was not at
all suited to academic – to a large academic library. It worked pretty well for small ones, but eventually it focused more on public libraries which is why we switched out of it, but so I
went from one home grown system to another and the home grown system at CARL was strangely configured in that they would create records field by field. |
| If you owned – the University of Colorado had such and such a book, it would be identified field by field as yours. Denver Public Library might also
own that same book and it might have not all the same fields because they would have put in something special or we would have put in something special or they would – they were not a Library
of Congress classification and we were, so that when you called up the record the system would pull out the fields that were yours and display it to you. |
| AS: Okay. |
| JSW: But the documentation for the system was the program itself and when they made changes there were surprises. You would go in one morning and
you would search your catalog and you would find yourself calling up all the records that belonged to Regis University instead of your own. Or you would discover a record was half of your
fields and half of the fields that belonged to Colorado State University, and that was because the documentation was the program, because they never knew really all of the threads that had to
be connected or disconnected when they made a revision, which is what taught me something that I had taken for granted at Northwestern, that being that any deviation that you make from standard
practice you will suffer for later. (Laughter) |
| AS: The unintended consequences. |
| JSW: Yes. Arnold Wagenberg was the principle cataloger of the University of Illinois Libraries and once gave a talk – no, he was doing the conference
summary for a preconference on classification practice and made a statement that I have put on a little poster for myself which is “If you follow some nonstandard practice, some day, someone,
somewhere will curse your name.” (Laughter) And it is all true. So I – so that I think is the loss of independence, the loss of autonomy is one of the largest themes
that I have seen. |
| Another huge theme that I have seen in that period of time is we are still undergoing a period of grieving, I think, for the fact that we are learning that
we have to put up with good enough. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: We are learning that we must – we are still in the process of learning this and we probably always will – that a record that is good enough for
the University of Northern Colorado is just fine for us. A record that serves the purposes for a public library in Missouri may be just fine for us, because we can’t afford to do anything
else. |
| And the other thing, of course, is that increasing we have identified things in the process of cataloging that we have devolved onto support staff that used
to always be done by professional catalogers. |
| And it’s not that it’s not professional work, it’s that we don’t have the right amount of staff to deal with anything else, which is odd when you think that
now so much of what we access – so much of what we give service with, our users are no longer going to librarians if they ever did. They are instead doing searching on their own at home
or sitting at a computer in the library or at Starbucks or someplace else. They are doing their searching. They don’t have an intermediary so the metedata is even more important
than it used to be. |
| AS: It is more important than it used to be, yet – |
| JSW: Yet, library directors and management are still saying that we shouldn’t move all of our – we should move personnel from technical services to
front line service to users, but the users aren’t coming there. |
| AS: Right, right. |
| JSW: Which is a very long answer to your question. |
| AS: And you touched on kind of a recurring interest in my examining these interviews is when librarians in the – in the array of librarianship – tell
me, do you think catalogers in particular have specific characteristics or - |
| JSW: Definitely. (Laughter) I have hired – |
| AS: I don’t want to lead the answer because I – |
| JSW: I have hired a lot of catalogers over time and back when I was first hiring catalogers at Northwestern, we used to have pools of a hundred,
hundred and twenty five, a hundred and fifty applicants and so it was a little hard to make your way through all of them and what I began, I began to develop a secret set, but not so secret
because I communicated it to others of things that I looked for. |
| People who do puzzles for fun, double acrostics are useful. People who if they sew, buy Vogue patterns and buy less material than the pattern calls
for. People who took Latin or Greek for fun. And the other curious thing was that if you had taken a career preference test and had been told to be a forest ranger you were probably
going to be a good cataloger. |
| I was told to be a forest ranger. My principle cataloger was told to be a forest ranger. The head of technical services was told to she should be
a forest ranger and let’s see, my predecessor who left Northwestern and went to the Library of Congress as principle subject cataloger had also been told she should be a forest ranger.
(Laughter) |
| AS: That’s interesting. I always have been told that I should be a mortician, but anyway. (Laughter) |
| JSW: Really? What an interesting career choice. And one hopes that career preference tests have changed since – since that group of people
were all told they should be forest rangers. Umm, you may remember somebody tried to assassinate President Reagan, and that person was determined to have mental problems, and I remember
hearing a report on the radio that said he has the characteristics that are common to forest rangers and to librarians. (Laughter) |
| AS: So someone did make a connection, oh no. |
| JSW: Which I have no idea what they have in common, but I noticed it at the time. But, yes, catalogers to say that they are detail oriented
sounds so dismissive, but catalogers, I think, are the ones who can which details – that details do actually matter. That communication matters and what you write is what people convey,
not what you mean, which is another reason I enjoy council so much I think. |
| One of the things that I have also developed a private theory, which once again I communicate to other people so it is not exactly private, catalogers are
very often accused of not seeing the forest for the trees. In my experience catalogers see the forest. |
| AS: It is the other way around. |
| JSW: It is the other around. Public services people see only each individual tree. They deal with this tree as a one-off, and then
there is another tree and they deal with it. Catalogers look at a problem and say what are – what is the class of things to which this belongs, what precedents will I set by making this
decision. What forest does it grow in? If I plant this tree here, how will that influence everything else, and so I think that it is a character trait that may not be terribly
common among people to look at things in terms of patterns and catalogers are pattern seekers. |
| AS: Going back to the “good enough” cataloging record, uh as an administrator how do you communicate this to your – to your staff, because I mean
– |
| JSW: With sorrow and pragmatism. |
| AS: You know it’s – when I am in the middle of series authority work and I realize that it has been three hours… |
| JSW: And you still haven’t figured it out. (Laughter) |
| AS: This was good enough to begin with, what is my.. |
| JSW: Why am I still here? Well in some senses, there are some things that you don’t have to communicate because if you make an economic decision
that says shelf ready is the way you have got to go with materials and the catalogers never see it, well they learn pretty – I mean it’s implicit in that decision that you have said these
records that we get from this vendor are good enough to serve our purposes. |
| As problems are noticed we will fix them but only as they are noticed and then you tell them, especially the original cataloguers, this will free you to do
the more interesting stuff. That there are –- and I think this softens the blow enormously -- there are in most libraries huge supplies of things that have never been cataloged or have
been cataloged badly or incompletely. There are your archives. There are your special collections. There are government publications. There are maps.
There are prints, photographs, sound records, scores. There are all kinds of things that you have done or not done. They were either done badly or not done at all. There
are the gifts waiting to be processed that - we have gifts squirreled away in very many places that we are finally making our way back through. |
| We are finally making enormous strides in special collections. And then, of course, there’s theIinternet. There are the things. There are
the born digital, the purchased digital, the leased digital. There are free Internet sites. There are paid Internet sites. All of those things could well be catalogued.
There is the institutional repository. There are slides. All kinds of things that need metadata . That need somehow to be integrated into your discovery tools, and so
goodness knows we have job security in that sense since we will never catch up with it. |
| Recently we did a full collection condition examination. Very robust study of all of our collections in terms of their physical condition and their
environment, and we labored under the delusion that because we were a relatively young library – you know, not much more than a hundred years old – and because we were in an arid climate that
we were protected from those things that beset books and paper products in more humid climates, and discovered that in fact – yeah, we don’t have a whole lot of mold and we probably have less
vermin than we might otherwise have. I mean that cockroaches come to the state and keel over dead because it is not moist enough for them, but based, but that based on those studies we
probably had a twelve hundred year backlog in routine mending. (Laughter) So cataloging is kind of like that as well, we probably have a, at least a hundred year backlog of
cataloging that needs to be done. |
| AS: There’s plenty to do. |
| JSW: There is a lot to do, so long as you recognize the worth of all the things you have taken the trouble to acquire and to store all those years.
You have to realize that without cataloging, without metadata of some kind attached to them, they might as well never have been purchased because they are lost. |
| AS: Lost completely, yeah. Tell me your thoughts on the future of cataloging and RDA. |
| JSW: Oh, my thoughts about RDA are not kind. (Laughter) I am a member of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of
Bibliographic Control and it was I who uttered the heresy that said that our first set of recommendations should be suspension of work on RDA until such time as it had been, as a persuasive
argument had been made regarding its worth as compared to the cost. |
| I suspect that we will go ahead and implement RDA, uh, after I retire. (Laughter) I suspect that many libraries will not implement it
because one of the things that proponents of RDA are most eager to say is “Oh, it won’t make that much difference. Your old records will be compatible with the new ones.” So a lot
of libraries are going to listen to that and say so why should I implement the thing. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: And they won’t. |
| AS: Right. (Laughter) |
| JSW: RDA was probably a noble attempt. The Joint Steering Committee was never created or appointed to do that kind of work. It is a very
small number of people who were appointed for a variety of reasons by their national associations or their national libraries, and it was created to maintain an existing set of rules, not to
create a new set of rules. |
| So the fact that it has taken absolutely forever, been delayed multiple times, the fact that there has not still been I believe a persuasive argument in
favor of the cost it will take to implement -- has a lot to do I think with, with that fact, with how JSC is appointed and what it was created to do and the fact that six people – is it still
six? I think so – two from – seven people; two from Canada, two from Great Britain and two from the United States and one from Australia, although it may just be one from Canada. I
think it is just one from Canada who represents both their library association and their national archives, and it is too much to do. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: In addition, one of the things that the Library of Congress Working Group concluded was that things are moving too fast to engage in whole scale
revisions or rewritings; that we need to deal with one aspect at a time because by the time you revise the entire code, seven-eighths of it needs to be revised again. And so you might as
well divide it into eighths or twelfths or, you know, different facets. Deal with this facet and move on to the next facet later while we are implementing the facet you have just managed
to finish. |
| AS: Did, do you think that there will ultimately be a mutiny and people will say “let’s just have AACR-3 and work on one chapter at a time?”
(Laughter) |
| JSW: No, I don’t think so. I think there is too much invested in RDA by too many people who have an interest in its publication. That
is A - the AACR2 and AACR1 were the biggest money makers ALA had in its publications department, and so it is putting a lot of hope, I think, in RDA and its implementation. And if the
tests that the national libraries and other cooperating libraries are remotely successful, my best guess is that they will go ahead and implement RDA. It’s very badly written. It –
though if you read RDA now, it makes you so grateful for all those years of using Michael Gorman's very clear prose. |
| AS: Right. (Laughter) |
| JSW: You could understand what the rules said because it said what it meant to say and if you paid attention to grammar, to syntax, to sentence
structure and those other things that catalogers really ought to be good at paying attention to, you knew what it was telling you to do. And RDA just is not written that clearly.
|
| It is full of ambiguous language and of course hugely redundant language because it was built for – not for print. It was built to be searched and
hyperlinked and so there is an awful lot of redundancy built into it which, if it works as it is supposed to work, you probably won’t be seeing or you probably won’t be slapped in the face with
all that often. But even in its redundancy, there is some disharmony where something that ought to be exactly the same isn’t. |
| I was also engaged in the process to harmonize all of the ISBDs and we went through rule by rule and made sure that the language was exactly the same where
it needed to be exactly the same. And RDA mostly is. The language is mostly exactly the same where it needs to be, but not always so – well, it is a tremendous editing process, so I
– the fact that there may be some things that were missed is no surprise. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: I think that the other thing that I am not a particular fan of is FRBR, not because I am not a fan of its concept but because it is also written
opaquely. And that surely should be one of the things that we strive for in creating standards is making them very clearly written and not inventing new language just for the purpose of
inventing new language. |
| You should be able to actually, if there is a term of art being in general use for that concept, use it. (Laughter) Don’t create some new term
that you have to say “what did that mean? Is that different from…,” so if RDA grows out of FRBR , and FRBR is opaquely written, is it any surprise that RDA may not be terribly
transparent. |
| AS: In your – can you touch on challenges you have had as library administrator specifically in technical services. You have talked about what
you look for in - in hiring. |
| JSW: There are so many. One of the challenges which turned into a significant line of publication is the supply of catalogers. I said when
I went to Northwestern and we posted for cataloging positions, this was in 1978 through about '80, we had maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty applicants for every professional position that we
posted and then it began dwindling. |
| And by the early '80s, by about 1983, we were getting pools of twenty-five and twelve, and in one instance, two. Now that was for Hebrew so it required
a specific language skill but I was in Metropolitan Chicago where there were three library schools and we still had those.. |
| AS: And many seminaries. |
| JSW: And many seminaries. (Laughter) One even on our campus, and yet we could - and yet the pool of catalogers was that small so I
went on a tear essentially. And founded a task force in ALCTS on education training and recruitment for catalogers. We wrote a report, discovered how little cataloging was being
taught in the accredited library schools, how little it was being required, how little of it was actual cataloging, the cataloging appreciation courses, the introduction to the organization of
information – that’s not cataloging. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: And then that turned into a permanent committee which is now called CETRC, the Committee on the Education, Training and Improvement for
Cataloging, but – and also published a whole bunch of things about it, but that is still true. We still have a dearth of people coming through library school as cataloguers. We have
an incredible under supply, a paucity of people getting PhDs in organization and information and why not? Because there is nobody at the library schools to act as a thesis advisor.
Why would you go into that field for your thesis and for your specialization, so the numbers dwindle. We are a minority within the field. |
| When you are a minority, it is easy to be overlooked and to have the rest of the faculty in the library school – in the LIS programs – not quite understand
why it is important to what you are doing and emphasizing other things and giving – of course, those people advise students and they say “There’s no future in cataloging. Why would you
want to do that?” With that kind of a – or they sneer at it, anecdotally they sneer at it or make jokes at the expense of the information organization, well of course people aren’t
going to come into the field. |
| Also we don’t tend to attract into the field from many of the subject disciplines that would have a special affinity for cataloging – like music or
philosophy or mathematics. If all you get is English and history majors, you are going to get English and history majors and they are not as likely to be interested in cataloging as
somebody who took Latin. |
| AS: Right, right. (Laughter) |
| JSW: So you start with – you have self selected out most of the people who might be drawn to cataloguing, and then you subject them to a LIS program in
which cataloging and other related activities are not stressed and may even be made a joke of. |
| AS: Right. It is the stepchild. |
| JSW: Yes. And yet, it is the foundation of the profession. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: We don’t have a profession if we don’t have information organization. There is no point in our existing as a separate discipline without it.
|
| AS: I’m – in my work as a doctoral student, the – many sessions are held around a conference table tearing hair out, trying to figure out what the very
basis of our discipline is since we are a meta- discipline. |
| JSW: Yes. Or as we say in our faculty standards, librarianship is all disciplines. |
| AS: And – but and every time I bring this up, many, many people bang their hands on the table and disagree with me. And it’s like every time this
conversation comes up, I say “No, it’s meta data. |
| JSW: Yes. |
| AS: Everything about our discipline is about meta data. |
| JSW: Everything. |
| AS: And then they look at me and they say “Oh, you are just saying that because you are a cataloger.” It’s like “No, no, I am saying
it because I am right.” (Laughter) But, yeah, I – I – I have made no headway. |
| JSW: No, and I continue to deliver this speech in one form or another, or to write it into a paper or to write a paper about it, or to be invited to
speak about it, and I continue to say these same things and people go “Umm, umm. It’s just Janet. There she goes again.” |
| AS: It’s key word. It is all about key word now. “Noooo.” (Laughter) |
| JSW: No. The Library of Congress is working through on the future of bibliographic control and members from Google, Microsoft and - Yahoo, maybe.
|
| AS: Oh, really. |
| JSW: And the guy from Google actually and the – the – two of them fell by the wayside but the guy from Google actually continued to be active and at
one point said, “Yeah, we have these sophisticated search tools but, you know, we would be able to locate far less information if you guys were not putting in that meta data, because that is
what we search first.” |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: “And if you stop doing cataloging, our product is much less good.” “Thank you very much. Can you tell that to somebody who funds us?
And speak to my budget office.” (Laughter) |
| AS: Well in your career, and this question may not have – this question is really more for people in public services, but have you had any ethical
dilemmas in your career as a professional librarian? Were there things you wish you – looking back you wish you had done differently? |
| JSW: Ethical dilemmas, yes, but most of those are in personnel management. |
| AS: Yeah. |
| JSW: And in many of those instances, you don’t have a choice so wishing – you can wish you had been able to do it differently but you probably couldn’t
of. Not really. I tend to be a fairly hard-nosed person anyway in the sense of recognizing the ethical choices and I see ethical choices in places that other people don’t which is
another one of the things that I have written several papers about. Ethics in bibliographic control. |
| AS: Ah, okay. |
| JSW: As a matter of fact I gave one of the key notes to the conference – was it just last year – maybe a year and a half ago – on ethics of information
organization that was given at the university of – sponsored by the LIS school at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. |
| And I believe that there are ethical issues surrounded with things like “shall we hire entry level librarians?” That’s an ethical issue. If
we don’t hire the entry level librarians, we who have a large institution with many people who can provide good background and training, who will hire them? |
| Authority control is an ethical issue. Do you go ahead and do that work to save others the work? Cooperative cataloging is an ethical issue.
Do you sponge on others or do you contribute? |
| So, once many years ago, I was on AutoCat back in its early days and some library school student posted a message that said “I have to do a paper on ethical
issues in librarianship and I can’t think of any ethical issues in cataloguing except for non-biased subject headings.” And I was aghast and immediately sent off an answer that said these
things are ethical issues and if you don’t recognize them as ethical issues then you will make wrong decisions or you won’t make a decision at all. |
| And ended up giving that paper to the American Association of Law Libraries not all that long after that and I continue to try to tell people when we try to
make decisions to say that this decision has an ethical component that you simply can’t ignore. |
| One of the things that we are doing at the University of Colorado Libraries also arises from not an – not an – from an ethical issue not specific to
cataloging and that is, we are doing our best to host interns. We have gotten funding for several years from the Provost to have Fellows because we believe that it is the obligation of a
research library to assist in the development of new entrants into the profession and that’s – we believe that’s an ethical obligation and we have had great success with that. We have
sent a lot of people to library school. |
| AS: Good deal. Back to just general cataloguers coming into the profession, how many accidental catalogers as a percentage do you think you have
worked with and cultivated? When I say accidental, I mean they started out as reference librarians, or maybe even children’s librarians and they got tired of the no-neck monsters and
wanted to work in the backroom. |
| JSW: Not many. |
| AS: Really. Okay. |
| JSW: And I – and casting my mind back, there are some that I can recall who thought they wanted to leave the children’s librarianship behind or leave
the school librarianship behind or leave public services behind and they tried cataloging and it was a mistake. |
| AS: Cataloging was also a mistake. |
| JSW: Yeah, yeah – that it wasn’t what they thought it was. That it’s not a matter of sitting there all by yourself transcribing things like a
monk and that they are not all that well suited to it and some people who fall into cataloging are ideally suited for it, but mostly – but that’s the people that fall into it as opposed to
those who tried it out as a retreat, because it is no retreat. |
| AS: Right. (Laughter) Good deal. Well, we are coming up to end of our tape. Do you have any final words, something that
additionally you would like to impart to our legacy of the profession? |
| JSW: Let’s see. |
| AS: I hate to put you on the spot with that. (Laughter) |
| JSW: Well, it goes back to one of – one of the – it is sort of connected to ethics, and that is that I believe that we are all obligated to give
service to our profession and service to our discipline, and so I would encourage – I encourage as many people as I possibly can to get involved in a substantive way in ALA, not just absorbing
but contributing, and to catalogers and others I try to encourage people to get involved beyond their own division, to get involved at the association level or in some other division.
|
| I adore Council. I have met people that I would never have otherwise encountered. I have been exposed to aspects of the profession that I might
never have understood by service on the Council and service with two hundred other people who are involved in other areas of libraries. And knowing more about the profession as a whole
helps you be better at whatever it is you are doing within your own specialization. |
| Within ALA a lot of people get impatient at the resolutions that come to Council about political subjects but the association has to have a place where
librarians who are concerned about things because they believe they impinge on our profession can bring these issues and we can discuss them seriously. And if we don’t pass them,
well we don’t pass them but at least we considered them. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: We gave people a voice and we gave a forum to those ideas and I don’t regard that as a waste of time. It is sometimes aggravating.
(Laughter) But it’s valuable – it’s essential to our profession for being what it is, which is about information and the exchange of ideas and open access to ideas and
information, so we just have to provide those people and those ideas a place and a way to be heard. |
| So the association as a whole, it’s a miracle it works. And I would – I keep hoping that people will get involved in it and discover the enormous
satisfaction of working very hard with colleagues toward what eventually works into a common goal, even if it didn’t start out as one. |
| And to realize that the association contributes to us as a discipline and as a profession in so many ways that it’s wrong to say “I am not going to join the
ALA because I don’t get anything out of it or I don’t – not going to join ALA because you guys passed this resolution that I disagree with.” Nobody’s job would be secure without ALA. |
| AS: Right. |
| JSW: Nobody would be educated without ALA. Nobody would get their continuing education in the same way without ALA. I mean we run the
accreditation process. We – which is – has certainly a vital impact on every single one of us who is a librarian and on many others as well. |
| And we are active in the area of legislation that has impact on all us and intellectual freedom, and all of those things may not have a direct monetary value
to us but it’s like canceling your subscription to Sports Illustrated because of the swimsuit issue. If you are really interested in sports, the whole rest of it (Laughter) Okay, throw
that one issue… |
| AS: Give it to someone else to… (Laughter) |
| JSW: Give it to somebody – give it to someone who really cares about it and enjoys the coverage of hockey and figure skating and whatever else it is
that interests you throughout the year. |
| AS: Good deal. Well, thank you so much for agreeing to be a part of our project. |
| JSW: You are quite welcome. |
| AS: Thank you for coming in on such short notice. |
| JSW: Yes, well, I’m glad we did this because now this frees up the rest of my schedule for today. |
| AS: Good deal. |
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