Tape 18, Side B
[Begin Tape 18, Side B]
What?
Holy shit! What is this shit?!
That was Harvey?
That was a Harvey thing. Are we back?
We’re on side B of tape 18.
Okay, so I just… there was that little Biochemistry interlude.
Was it progressive, his cataracts.
I don’t think so; I think it had already happened; it had already gotten as far as it was gonna go; it happened really suddenly I think.
So you were in charge of the library.
The little Biochemistry Library.
This was even before you were actually hired.
Right, as a superannuated student library employee. [Walter Brennan voice] Started to get creaky even then.
Was this during the time that you were punching in…?
Yeah, punching in; I had a time clock.
And going to classes too?
Yeah, that was all part of it, because I was still going to school. Oh, I know where that led from: all the other student library employees were still there when they were in this ISSN unit which turned into the Conversion Support Unit, and they were the staff of the Conversion Support Unit and suddenly I was no longer buddy-buddy with them in the same way, but they were all kids anyway, except for Ed, and Ed kind of went away there: yeah, he had already gone I think by then; so there were three or four student library employees already there, and we hired a couple more as time went on. So we were just building this thing from scratch. The other thing that came into the picture besides just managing all these cards is that we started getting into database input of some of the information, I mean that was the big goal here was to get all this information that was on cards into the database in some way; so they’d funneled out some records that didn’t have lots of complicated aspects to them, you know, they didn’t have series within series, they weren’t monographic series or MVMs* or anything like that: they were just straightforward serials and with not a lot of information, I mean you could tell from the cards what the subjects were, what the added entries were, and my unit started getting these things input into the database, the old Datapoint database. Also we started getting our first RLIN terminals, so, you know, we were getting into the database world big time.
What does RLIN stand for?
Research Libraries Information Network, I think. It’s a product of RLG, the Research Libraries Group, and it started out out of Stanford as a nationwide… the goal was it was gonna be a nationwide union database of academic libraries and others, just like OCLC, which wasn’t quite fully off the drawing boards yet, but it was already there. RLIN was going to be a competitor of OCLC, and OCLC was sort of run through the Library of Congress out of the University of Ohio or someplace like that, and RLIN was run off of Stanford campus, but it was going to be a big moneymaker—it was a private corporation—Stanford got a little something out of the package. So there was all this computer activity; suddenly there’s, you know, six or seven computers installed in our little area: RLIN computers, DataPoint computers, that sort of stuff; and so, you know, I was keying records and as soon as I’d figure out how to do it I’d turn it over to the students: everything I learned how to do I’d turn it right over to the students and you know they’d sit there with their headphones on and just key merrily away. And that’s how all the records that you see—many of the records that you see—the ones that weren’t tape loaded that are in GLADIS now came from the pioneering work we did then. Serials. I don’t know what was going on with monographs, that was all probably done later on.
Do you have a take on this… what’s his name, Baker…?
Nicholson Baker on the preservation of the card catalog cards. It was interesting because some of the cards… because you could see several generations of card production technique going all the way back to handwritten, you know, in fine library hand, the kind they used to teach in library schools—teach you how to write, you know, how to keep the zeros and the Os separate and the ones and the Ls and the slashes, keep everything, you know, just the way it should be and everybody had to write just the same way—and those cards were in there, yeah, they were very interesting, you know, preservationwise I mean, pretty arcane I think, if you wanted to pay attention to all that stuff, but from that point of view, from his point of view, you know, I read that stuff, I agree, yes, there’s a wealth of rich history and knowledge there if you knew how to interpret it, but, you know, you don’t have to save ‘em all [laughs], you could save a few examples of each; but his other point was, you know, there are annotations on there, you know, he spoke with Pat Vanderberg, who was running LSL at the time, when there was an LSL: there’s Biochemistry [Library]: gone; Library School Library: gone. I’m living in the past! And Pat Vanderberg went on and on about Virginia Pratt who had been the head of the Library School Library for many many years and how she would see all these wonderful annotations on the library cards in Virginia Pratt’s hand, you know, describing things—it’s like meta-cataloging—describing things that weren’t described on the cards or extra notes about the nature of the collection or whatever, I don’t know, and I’m sure it’s all very wonderful, yeah, so there’s probably a… Well you know what they did at San Francisco Public, the new library, didn’t they make…?—they made a huge artwork out of some of these old cataloging cards. They just put ‘em in—I haven’t seen it, I just sort of remember it—whatever they did, they put ‘em behind glass or collage or something like that; but [laughs] one of the things we did once the conversion effort was over, or at least our stage of it, was we had a big party at Dorothy Gregor’s house, and I can remember Esther going, and she took a whole bunch of catalog cards with her: she’s picking them up, reading them off; she’d say: Oh, yeah, I remember that one! and throwing them into the fire [laughs]. We were happy to, you know, burn them; that was our…
You should have invited Nicholson Baker to that party.
Yeah, had we known.
Well I used them for scratch paper; when I first started working in Gifts and Exchange we had boxes and boxes of them to use for scratch paper; they’re real good paper.
They are, they’re real good paper. They could have been preserved for that alone. And I’m sure, you know, that a slice of lore and knowledge and history and richness was lost or is lost when those catalog cards are thrown away, but, you know, on the other hand they ain’t the Tebtunis papyri, you know; they’re just catalog cards really; they just point to the books. Go to the books if you can find the books, you know, if they’re still around: that’s where the real stuff is; so it’s kind of precious in a way I think.
To fuss over the cards when really you’re talking about books anyway.
Right, exactly. I mean from the point of view of librarianship and, you know, information custodianship, yeah, I suppose, it would be nice to have saved some of them at least, you know, find some good ones; but even archivists, as I learned when I started processing archival stuff, even archivists don’t save everything, you know, and they’re always concerned with retaining and saving scraps of paper—whatever—even them, they don’t save everything. They have a rationale and they go through a thought process: you just can’t save everything. Do you hear me? You can’t save everything! It’s just like this, what I’m doing now; I mean I might never catch up [laughter] to the real life, you know.
[Laughing] Poor Michael: it’s Zeno’s paradox all over.
Right, exactly. If you’re reading the ongoing biography of somebody who’s alive you’ll never, you might never catch up.
It’s still 1979! [laughter]
Ah, yeah, so I mean that was a good introduction to the library, you know, it was a kind of strange prism to view it through, or kind of backwards in a way, but it was really interesting to me to see where all this stuff came from, because we were dealing with branch collections, main collections, stuff that wasn’t true anymore. But I discovered real quickly that, you know, we needed some more help; I needed an assistant, because even though I was turning all this stuff over to the students as fast as I could there was other new stuff happening all the time and then there were, you know, problems to solve because problems started arising, and plus I started getting more into what the conversion unit proper was doing; I started doing a little bit of cataloging, sort of—what do they call it?—before you can catalog you have to code, MARC coding, do some coding; so I was taking home the MARC coding manuals.
It’s just like learning the routes at the Post Office it sounds like: you were taking it home and studying it.
Yeah, except they didn’t… you know, I was generating it myself, yeah, I was kind of like: this is… you know, I was getting interested in it: this is pretty good. Plus it’s all like solving puzzles or something like that. So for some odd reason I was starting to pick up on this stuff, the serials stuff, and really dig it, and I mean, you know, for the first time in many years I had a real job, a real full-time job, so that’s when I decided: Hey, you know, I’m gonna start paying the universe back for letting me coast for so many years: and so I started working hard and learning all this stuff, because it was all new and it was cutting edge for the time, so I got a kick out of it, you know.
Did you have regrets about having coasted for a while or…
No.
… was it just something new to be busy and useful, a useful member of society?
Yeah, yeah, that’s right, plus I had, you know, I had kind of a home life [laughs], you know, I kind of looked around and said: Well, you know, I’ve been kicking around all this time: let’s see what this is like, you know.
To have the stability, you mean, of the home life and then…?
Mister and Mrs. America [laughs] and all the ships… yeah, right, so a certain amount of, maybe a certain amount of… I don’t know… I don’t even know how to say it: a certain amount of high and low dropped; I didn’t have that anymore, you know; I didn’t have a lot of ups and downs but I had a nice peaceful, rich, mysterious, complex kind of existence, at the same time it was very simple, you know: I was at home and then I was at work and then I was back home again. And so…
And you were taking BART back and forth?
Taking BART, yeah, taking BART back and forth, yeah. And so I started, you know, studying this stuff. I figured: well, they are paying me; so I’m not copping out entirely. It’s not like I’m going to school, to library school or anything like that. But, you know, also I wanted to find out more… I thought what those other catalogers, you know, they were professionals, they were librarians… I think they were. Did they have…? They were librarians but they were working as Library Assistants. Yeah, that’s what it was. They’d all been out of library school. These were all…
They all had their degrees?
Yeah, Linda just had her degree; Mitch had his degree; Joyce MacLean… yeah, all these people had their degrees, yeah. I don’t think Hester Seiple had a degree: she was running that whole show though; she knew all that stuff.
So you didn’t want to get a degree?
No, because I knew what I’d have to do to get it. If I could just do it, if I could just go to library school, I would have done it, I probably would have done it, but I would [laughs], I would have had to finish out my Slavic major or something like that, or pick a new major: it was just too expensive, it always has been ever since then. I wish they would have something like, you know, in the Army, in the services, you can have a battlefield commission, so if you’re a sergeant, you know, and your platoon officer gets blown away and you commit a few acts of heroism: they’ll make you an officer! [laughs]
You could have gotten an honorary library degree.
Make me an honorary librarian. I’ve seen them do that sort of thing but only to people who were like almost ready to get out of library school or had just got their degree, you know: they were working here as a Library Assistant and they got their degree and boom, suddenly the next day… I mean this is all… They can do anything they want, so all this stuff about ‘position must be posted’ and da da da… not necessarily true: they just appointed this person a librarian; so it can happen, but not in my case because I was so far away; didn’t have the paper. [sings] We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall…* So I was having fun with this, and since I saw that I couldn’t have enough time to supervise all these students and do all this other stuff too, and Dorothy was willing to let me go as far as I wanted with it, I said: Let me hire an assistant, you know, a full-time LA I. And she said: Okay. So I learned how to, you know, draw up a, make up a job description, get the position posted. Dorothy, she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I was reporting to her but she said: You do it. You can do it. So that was really cool; that was a really cool way to handle it. She had more confidence in my ability to maneuver through the bureaucratic maze than I did: she said: Ah, you can just go ahead and do it.
So Dorothy, it sounds like she just had faith in you; she liked you and…
Exactly, you know, as far as I can tell for no basis, no apparent reason; no apparent reason. I found out later that she had studied a little bit, actually studied with D. T. Suzuki in Japan [laughs].
Really?
Yeah. So she just may have had some clarity. Well I trust her judgement more than my own, so [laughs]… then I did.
If she said you were okay then you felt okay.
Yeah, sure. I probably felt: Jeez, I’ve got these people snowed; I can do anything; and at that stage I could. So she let me hire a… I said, you know: Do you want to interview them with me, the candidates? No, you do it. Just go ahead and do it. You can do it. Just go ahead. Bye. [laughs] So I did it, I did it all myself. I just figured out how to do it. I read some books on, you know, interviewing; and I read the university stuff on what not to do, you know: Don’t ask people if they’re married or pregnant or that sort of thing; stay away from all those questions, the forbidden questions you shouldn't ask. So I got about thirty applications—later on I discovered this is not unusual—but, you know, it’s amazing: I got PhDs from Romania looking for LA I positions, probably still would happen today; librarians who had retired and, you know, they were like sixty-five, who wanted to get back in the library.
Really?
Yeah. And then I had to figure out how not to interview thirty people. I only wanted to interview, you know, five or six people—actually I didn’t want to interview anybody [laughter]. But you know you have to follow the…
You just wanted to pick somebody.
Yeah, right.
Did you have some favorite candidates?
Actually I did have one favorite candidate because just from the application I thought: well this person’s handwriting is really neat. It was just interesting handwriting, and that person got the job.
Really?
Yeah, and that was just coincidental.
You don’t think you weighted the…?
Well who knows? Who can tell? Maybe, yeah: I’m gonna hire that person with the good handwriting; it’s just possible. But you know LA I, you know, I had to keep going back to the job description and saying, you know: I didn’t ask for somebody with a PhD in nuclear physics, and I didn’t ask for somebody who was a librarian, so I don’t have to interview them [laughter]. So that’s the way you do it. That’s the way you do it, I mean…
You eliminated the overqualified?
Well not overqualified: you can’t do that, you know; that would be illegal; that would be wrong [directly and close into the microphone]: It would be wrong to do that.
[Laughing] Let’s erase the next eighteen minutes of this tape.
[Nixon voice] Rosemary, can you come in here, not come in here for a minute? If they have experience that meets the job requirements that you’re looking for you probably have to interview them, but your out is you can find some people that do and then those that are on the fringes you can deny them an interview by saying, you know: does not have a total scope of experience as much as those in the candidate pool. So you can do a little bit of comparison once you’ve selected, you know... So what you do is you try to find four or five candidates that have equivalent experience close enough to one another so that you can not interview anybody else; but if there’s somebody, if there’s somebody that you want to interview you have to interview those who have equivalent experience; so if there’s nobody that you want to interview and your goal is just to try to have a manageable candidate interview pool you have to interview everybody who’s more or less equal, so if somebody has five years of experience doing… if you ask for four things and somebody has five years experience of qualification number one and none in the other, you can ace ‘em out if your candidate pool has equivalent experience in all four, let’s say. So, there’s ways you can do it.
But if you like the look of some particular candidate then anyone who’s even close to their qualifications you have to…
Yeah, you have to, or Personnel will get you. And I don’t know if it’s so tight now but then it was very tight and, you know, if you have a favorite candidate, many people do, like a student that you’re gonna hire; if you know you’re gonna hire that student: you can cook it [laughter]; you can make it happen; you just have to do it right, and chances are that’s not… if you feel that way it’s probably not a bad thing, because, you know, you’re intimate, you’re familiar with their performance and so on.
You’re getting the person that you want.
Right, yes, I mean ideally what you do in that case is you write the job for that person; you write the job directly for that person so that no one else in the world can possibly: Must have middle initial X [laughter]; must have worked in my unit for three years [laughter]. Yeah.
So how did your interviews go?
Pretty good. I can still remember… let’s see… Did you know Ben Yañez?
Yes!
He was one who applied.
Really?
And… god, who else applied…?
Is he the one you hired?
No.
Or did he get a job…?
He got a job later, yeah, in ACQ.
Was he a student at the time?
No, no, he wasn’t. I don’t think I interviewed anybody… well, I might have interviewed some students from NRLF*, there’s always, you know, there’s always, there always was NRLF students. They wanted to get out of there [laughs]; they’ll do anything.
So NRLF was always Siberia?
Well it wasn’t NRLF then. In my day it was ICLF, but it was even worse, yeah, an abandoned tank factory down there by the bay in Richmond.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
An abandoned tank factory.
That’s what they used to say. Or, you know, not abandoned, a former tank factory. The bindery and ICLF was down there in this huge building. And gosh, who else did I interview?
And was Ben…? Do you remember your interview with Ben?
No, I just remember when I saw his name later as being hired. I just remember he was good, yeah, he was good. I probably would have hired him if somebody else wasn’t better. I thought he didn’t have a lot of library experience, but I thought he was sharp. God, who else was it? I don’t remember, but one of them was Janet L. Carter; Jan Carter?
Yeah.
Yeah, so she’s the one I hired; she had that great handwriting.
Really.
Yeah. So, you know, she took to it right away.
Was she a kid?
Yep.
She’s pretty young.
Yeah, she’s pretty young, but she had some experience, I mean, in various places; so she’d been kicked around, she’d been kicking around for a while. I can’t remember exactly what. Oh, but you know, aside from everything else, meeting the written requirements, there’s the job interview itself: you can bring that into… that’s when you start bringing that into play; so when your final selection is made you can cite not only experience but what happened in the job interview, you know, so see...
And that’s pretty subjective [laughs].
Yeah. So there’s where your real, you know, loopholes come in. Pretty good interview, you know, as far as I knew [laughs]. What the hell did I know? But she got in there and just took right over and started dealing, you know, started working with the students and learned all the stuff real quick. And speaking of ICLF, one of the things, yep, we started branching out even more. One of the things that we were aware of, the people who were putting serials records in the library, of course was the—I mean there were two facets of it: one was the bibliographic record, with all the MARC codes and all that sort of stuff, all the abstract information that pertained to this serial, wherever it was; and then there was the holding structure: all the information about our holdings and so on. And they made up this huge document called the Serials Holdings Format for describing the holdings statement, you know: the library has one, parentheses, 1947, dash, three, 1951, comma, five, you know, every possible combination of, you know, how to deal with cumulative indexes…
Just like the army, sounds like.
Yeah, right, it was kind of a little by the numbers, although it was more…
Olive green…
Yeah, there are many many more combinations and permutations and… But a lot of the library’s holdings was in storage, and so somebody realized that we’d have to have a storage statement too, because in many cases the entire extent of the library’s holdings was not in storage or was not in Main or wherever: some here, some there; so there had to be a separate extra statement describing what was stored that would follow along more or less the guidelines of the holdings statement but it would describe what was out in storage in the way that that needed to be described. And some of this information was on the back of these catalog cards, but it was all messed up; so we found… Plus the whole ICLF (Inter-Campus Library Facility), the whole ICLF process was messed up.
Messed up in what sense? In what way were the cards messed up?
Well, the cards were messed up because… well there was a time when every single bound volume passed through the hands of a serials cataloger on its way to the shelf, and when that happened the serials catalogers would then go out and pull the shelf list card and make the annotations that needed to be made: every single volume.
They went through a cataloger here. It wasn’t…
Yes.
Okay…
That meant that the accession record was entered on the card, which is, you know, they had these Bates stamps that would stamp this little multi-digit number on the title page of the book, and then they would transfer that number and the particular volume onto the catalog card, so if volume seven dash eight was the physical volume, you know, you open it up and you’d see down at the bottom of page one or two a Bates stamp number, and you’d look on the shelf list card—on the back probably—and you’d see this running accession record of Bates stamp number and physical volume spine labeling, so, you know: 6324: volume one; 6325: volume two dash four; 6326: volume five, and so on. So every single volume came through the hands of a serials cataloger on its way to the shelf, but volumes did not necessarily go through serials catalogers on their way to storage. So everything got messed up; the recording system got messed up, and nobody could tell…
For the things that were in storage.
Right, for the things that were in storage. And ICLF itself was messed up because when it first started, when it first became apparent that the library needed off-campus storage, they just sent everything, you know, they rounded things up and they sent it out to this storage facility they carved out, and so everything was out there in call number order, from A to Z. Well a few years went by and they realized that they were gonna have to send some more stuff out to storage, and they didn’t want to inter-file it with the stuff that was out there, so what they did was invented something called block storage, and they called the stuff that was already out there something like ICLF One, then they sent all this new stuff out there and called it ICLF Two. Then they have to go back to the cards and annotate all this stuff: trouble.
Yeah. We’re just about at the end.
The trouble has just started! [laughs]
Golly, Porge!
Big trouble in little Berkeley. You sure I should keep talking about this stuff? [laughs] Who could possibly be interested in this crap?! [laughter]
Me! [laughs]
[Laughing] Oh, you’re mad!
[End Tape 18, Side B]
What?
Holy shit! What is this shit?!
That was Harvey?
That was a Harvey thing. Are we back?
We’re on side B of tape 18.
Okay, so I just… there was that little Biochemistry interlude.
Was it progressive, his cataracts.
I don’t think so; I think it had already happened; it had already gotten as far as it was gonna go; it happened really suddenly I think.
So you were in charge of the library.
The little Biochemistry Library.
This was even before you were actually hired.
Right, as a superannuated student library employee. [Walter Brennan voice] Started to get creaky even then.
Was this during the time that you were punching in…?
Yeah, punching in; I had a time clock.
And going to classes too?
Yeah, that was all part of it, because I was still going to school. Oh, I know where that led from: all the other student library employees were still there when they were in this ISSN unit which turned into the Conversion Support Unit, and they were the staff of the Conversion Support Unit and suddenly I was no longer buddy-buddy with them in the same way, but they were all kids anyway, except for Ed, and Ed kind of went away there: yeah, he had already gone I think by then; so there were three or four student library employees already there, and we hired a couple more as time went on. So we were just building this thing from scratch. The other thing that came into the picture besides just managing all these cards is that we started getting into database input of some of the information, I mean that was the big goal here was to get all this information that was on cards into the database in some way; so they’d funneled out some records that didn’t have lots of complicated aspects to them, you know, they didn’t have series within series, they weren’t monographic series or MVMs* or anything like that: they were just straightforward serials and with not a lot of information, I mean you could tell from the cards what the subjects were, what the added entries were, and my unit started getting these things input into the database, the old Datapoint database. Also we started getting our first RLIN terminals, so, you know, we were getting into the database world big time.
What does RLIN stand for?
Research Libraries Information Network, I think. It’s a product of RLG, the Research Libraries Group, and it started out out of Stanford as a nationwide… the goal was it was gonna be a nationwide union database of academic libraries and others, just like OCLC, which wasn’t quite fully off the drawing boards yet, but it was already there. RLIN was going to be a competitor of OCLC, and OCLC was sort of run through the Library of Congress out of the University of Ohio or someplace like that, and RLIN was run off of Stanford campus, but it was going to be a big moneymaker—it was a private corporation—Stanford got a little something out of the package. So there was all this computer activity; suddenly there’s, you know, six or seven computers installed in our little area: RLIN computers, DataPoint computers, that sort of stuff; and so, you know, I was keying records and as soon as I’d figure out how to do it I’d turn it over to the students: everything I learned how to do I’d turn it right over to the students and you know they’d sit there with their headphones on and just key merrily away. And that’s how all the records that you see—many of the records that you see—the ones that weren’t tape loaded that are in GLADIS now came from the pioneering work we did then. Serials. I don’t know what was going on with monographs, that was all probably done later on.
Do you have a take on this… what’s his name, Baker…?
Nicholson Baker on the preservation of the card catalog cards. It was interesting because some of the cards… because you could see several generations of card production technique going all the way back to handwritten, you know, in fine library hand, the kind they used to teach in library schools—teach you how to write, you know, how to keep the zeros and the Os separate and the ones and the Ls and the slashes, keep everything, you know, just the way it should be and everybody had to write just the same way—and those cards were in there, yeah, they were very interesting, you know, preservationwise I mean, pretty arcane I think, if you wanted to pay attention to all that stuff, but from that point of view, from his point of view, you know, I read that stuff, I agree, yes, there’s a wealth of rich history and knowledge there if you knew how to interpret it, but, you know, you don’t have to save ‘em all [laughs], you could save a few examples of each; but his other point was, you know, there are annotations on there, you know, he spoke with Pat Vanderberg, who was running LSL at the time, when there was an LSL: there’s Biochemistry [Library]: gone; Library School Library: gone. I’m living in the past! And Pat Vanderberg went on and on about Virginia Pratt who had been the head of the Library School Library for many many years and how she would see all these wonderful annotations on the library cards in Virginia Pratt’s hand, you know, describing things—it’s like meta-cataloging—describing things that weren’t described on the cards or extra notes about the nature of the collection or whatever, I don’t know, and I’m sure it’s all very wonderful, yeah, so there’s probably a… Well you know what they did at San Francisco Public, the new library, didn’t they make…?—they made a huge artwork out of some of these old cataloging cards. They just put ‘em in—I haven’t seen it, I just sort of remember it—whatever they did, they put ‘em behind glass or collage or something like that; but [laughs] one of the things we did once the conversion effort was over, or at least our stage of it, was we had a big party at Dorothy Gregor’s house, and I can remember Esther going, and she took a whole bunch of catalog cards with her: she’s picking them up, reading them off; she’d say: Oh, yeah, I remember that one! and throwing them into the fire [laughs]. We were happy to, you know, burn them; that was our…
You should have invited Nicholson Baker to that party.
Yeah, had we known.
Well I used them for scratch paper; when I first started working in Gifts and Exchange we had boxes and boxes of them to use for scratch paper; they’re real good paper.
They are, they’re real good paper. They could have been preserved for that alone. And I’m sure, you know, that a slice of lore and knowledge and history and richness was lost or is lost when those catalog cards are thrown away, but, you know, on the other hand they ain’t the Tebtunis papyri, you know; they’re just catalog cards really; they just point to the books. Go to the books if you can find the books, you know, if they’re still around: that’s where the real stuff is; so it’s kind of precious in a way I think.
To fuss over the cards when really you’re talking about books anyway.
Right, exactly. I mean from the point of view of librarianship and, you know, information custodianship, yeah, I suppose, it would be nice to have saved some of them at least, you know, find some good ones; but even archivists, as I learned when I started processing archival stuff, even archivists don’t save everything, you know, and they’re always concerned with retaining and saving scraps of paper—whatever—even them, they don’t save everything. They have a rationale and they go through a thought process: you just can’t save everything. Do you hear me? You can’t save everything! It’s just like this, what I’m doing now; I mean I might never catch up [laughter] to the real life, you know.
[Laughing] Poor Michael: it’s Zeno’s paradox all over.
Right, exactly. If you’re reading the ongoing biography of somebody who’s alive you’ll never, you might never catch up.
It’s still 1979! [laughter]
Ah, yeah, so I mean that was a good introduction to the library, you know, it was a kind of strange prism to view it through, or kind of backwards in a way, but it was really interesting to me to see where all this stuff came from, because we were dealing with branch collections, main collections, stuff that wasn’t true anymore. But I discovered real quickly that, you know, we needed some more help; I needed an assistant, because even though I was turning all this stuff over to the students as fast as I could there was other new stuff happening all the time and then there were, you know, problems to solve because problems started arising, and plus I started getting more into what the conversion unit proper was doing; I started doing a little bit of cataloging, sort of—what do they call it?—before you can catalog you have to code, MARC coding, do some coding; so I was taking home the MARC coding manuals.
It’s just like learning the routes at the Post Office it sounds like: you were taking it home and studying it.
Yeah, except they didn’t… you know, I was generating it myself, yeah, I was kind of like: this is… you know, I was getting interested in it: this is pretty good. Plus it’s all like solving puzzles or something like that. So for some odd reason I was starting to pick up on this stuff, the serials stuff, and really dig it, and I mean, you know, for the first time in many years I had a real job, a real full-time job, so that’s when I decided: Hey, you know, I’m gonna start paying the universe back for letting me coast for so many years: and so I started working hard and learning all this stuff, because it was all new and it was cutting edge for the time, so I got a kick out of it, you know.
Did you have regrets about having coasted for a while or…
No.
… was it just something new to be busy and useful, a useful member of society?
Yeah, yeah, that’s right, plus I had, you know, I had kind of a home life [laughs], you know, I kind of looked around and said: Well, you know, I’ve been kicking around all this time: let’s see what this is like, you know.
To have the stability, you mean, of the home life and then…?
Mister and Mrs. America [laughs] and all the ships… yeah, right, so a certain amount of, maybe a certain amount of… I don’t know… I don’t even know how to say it: a certain amount of high and low dropped; I didn’t have that anymore, you know; I didn’t have a lot of ups and downs but I had a nice peaceful, rich, mysterious, complex kind of existence, at the same time it was very simple, you know: I was at home and then I was at work and then I was back home again. And so…
And you were taking BART back and forth?
Taking BART, yeah, taking BART back and forth, yeah. And so I started, you know, studying this stuff. I figured: well, they are paying me; so I’m not copping out entirely. It’s not like I’m going to school, to library school or anything like that. But, you know, also I wanted to find out more… I thought what those other catalogers, you know, they were professionals, they were librarians… I think they were. Did they have…? They were librarians but they were working as Library Assistants. Yeah, that’s what it was. They’d all been out of library school. These were all…
They all had their degrees?
Yeah, Linda just had her degree; Mitch had his degree; Joyce MacLean… yeah, all these people had their degrees, yeah. I don’t think Hester Seiple had a degree: she was running that whole show though; she knew all that stuff.
So you didn’t want to get a degree?
No, because I knew what I’d have to do to get it. If I could just do it, if I could just go to library school, I would have done it, I probably would have done it, but I would [laughs], I would have had to finish out my Slavic major or something like that, or pick a new major: it was just too expensive, it always has been ever since then. I wish they would have something like, you know, in the Army, in the services, you can have a battlefield commission, so if you’re a sergeant, you know, and your platoon officer gets blown away and you commit a few acts of heroism: they’ll make you an officer! [laughs]
You could have gotten an honorary library degree.
Make me an honorary librarian. I’ve seen them do that sort of thing but only to people who were like almost ready to get out of library school or had just got their degree, you know: they were working here as a Library Assistant and they got their degree and boom, suddenly the next day… I mean this is all… They can do anything they want, so all this stuff about ‘position must be posted’ and da da da… not necessarily true: they just appointed this person a librarian; so it can happen, but not in my case because I was so far away; didn’t have the paper. [sings] We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall…* So I was having fun with this, and since I saw that I couldn’t have enough time to supervise all these students and do all this other stuff too, and Dorothy was willing to let me go as far as I wanted with it, I said: Let me hire an assistant, you know, a full-time LA I. And she said: Okay. So I learned how to, you know, draw up a, make up a job description, get the position posted. Dorothy, she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I was reporting to her but she said: You do it. You can do it. So that was really cool; that was a really cool way to handle it. She had more confidence in my ability to maneuver through the bureaucratic maze than I did: she said: Ah, you can just go ahead and do it.
So Dorothy, it sounds like she just had faith in you; she liked you and…
Exactly, you know, as far as I can tell for no basis, no apparent reason; no apparent reason. I found out later that she had studied a little bit, actually studied with D. T. Suzuki in Japan [laughs].
Really?
Yeah. So she just may have had some clarity. Well I trust her judgement more than my own, so [laughs]… then I did.
If she said you were okay then you felt okay.
Yeah, sure. I probably felt: Jeez, I’ve got these people snowed; I can do anything; and at that stage I could. So she let me hire a… I said, you know: Do you want to interview them with me, the candidates? No, you do it. Just go ahead and do it. You can do it. Just go ahead. Bye. [laughs] So I did it, I did it all myself. I just figured out how to do it. I read some books on, you know, interviewing; and I read the university stuff on what not to do, you know: Don’t ask people if they’re married or pregnant or that sort of thing; stay away from all those questions, the forbidden questions you shouldn't ask. So I got about thirty applications—later on I discovered this is not unusual—but, you know, it’s amazing: I got PhDs from Romania looking for LA I positions, probably still would happen today; librarians who had retired and, you know, they were like sixty-five, who wanted to get back in the library.
Really?
Yeah. And then I had to figure out how not to interview thirty people. I only wanted to interview, you know, five or six people—actually I didn’t want to interview anybody [laughter]. But you know you have to follow the…
You just wanted to pick somebody.
Yeah, right.
Did you have some favorite candidates?
Actually I did have one favorite candidate because just from the application I thought: well this person’s handwriting is really neat. It was just interesting handwriting, and that person got the job.
Really?
Yeah, and that was just coincidental.
You don’t think you weighted the…?
Well who knows? Who can tell? Maybe, yeah: I’m gonna hire that person with the good handwriting; it’s just possible. But you know LA I, you know, I had to keep going back to the job description and saying, you know: I didn’t ask for somebody with a PhD in nuclear physics, and I didn’t ask for somebody who was a librarian, so I don’t have to interview them [laughter]. So that’s the way you do it. That’s the way you do it, I mean…
You eliminated the overqualified?
Well not overqualified: you can’t do that, you know; that would be illegal; that would be wrong [directly and close into the microphone]: It would be wrong to do that.
[Laughing] Let’s erase the next eighteen minutes of this tape.
[Nixon voice] Rosemary, can you come in here, not come in here for a minute? If they have experience that meets the job requirements that you’re looking for you probably have to interview them, but your out is you can find some people that do and then those that are on the fringes you can deny them an interview by saying, you know: does not have a total scope of experience as much as those in the candidate pool. So you can do a little bit of comparison once you’ve selected, you know... So what you do is you try to find four or five candidates that have equivalent experience close enough to one another so that you can not interview anybody else; but if there’s somebody, if there’s somebody that you want to interview you have to interview those who have equivalent experience; so if there’s nobody that you want to interview and your goal is just to try to have a manageable candidate interview pool you have to interview everybody who’s more or less equal, so if somebody has five years of experience doing… if you ask for four things and somebody has five years experience of qualification number one and none in the other, you can ace ‘em out if your candidate pool has equivalent experience in all four, let’s say. So, there’s ways you can do it.
But if you like the look of some particular candidate then anyone who’s even close to their qualifications you have to…
Yeah, you have to, or Personnel will get you. And I don’t know if it’s so tight now but then it was very tight and, you know, if you have a favorite candidate, many people do, like a student that you’re gonna hire; if you know you’re gonna hire that student: you can cook it [laughter]; you can make it happen; you just have to do it right, and chances are that’s not… if you feel that way it’s probably not a bad thing, because, you know, you’re intimate, you’re familiar with their performance and so on.
You’re getting the person that you want.
Right, yes, I mean ideally what you do in that case is you write the job for that person; you write the job directly for that person so that no one else in the world can possibly: Must have middle initial X [laughter]; must have worked in my unit for three years [laughter]. Yeah.
So how did your interviews go?
Pretty good. I can still remember… let’s see… Did you know Ben Yañez?
Yes!
He was one who applied.
Really?
And… god, who else applied…?
Is he the one you hired?
No.
Or did he get a job…?
He got a job later, yeah, in ACQ.
Was he a student at the time?
No, no, he wasn’t. I don’t think I interviewed anybody… well, I might have interviewed some students from NRLF*, there’s always, you know, there’s always, there always was NRLF students. They wanted to get out of there [laughs]; they’ll do anything.
So NRLF was always Siberia?
Well it wasn’t NRLF then. In my day it was ICLF, but it was even worse, yeah, an abandoned tank factory down there by the bay in Richmond.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
An abandoned tank factory.
That’s what they used to say. Or, you know, not abandoned, a former tank factory. The bindery and ICLF was down there in this huge building. And gosh, who else did I interview?
And was Ben…? Do you remember your interview with Ben?
No, I just remember when I saw his name later as being hired. I just remember he was good, yeah, he was good. I probably would have hired him if somebody else wasn’t better. I thought he didn’t have a lot of library experience, but I thought he was sharp. God, who else was it? I don’t remember, but one of them was Janet L. Carter; Jan Carter?
Yeah.
Yeah, so she’s the one I hired; she had that great handwriting.
Really.
Yeah. So, you know, she took to it right away.
Was she a kid?
Yep.
She’s pretty young.
Yeah, she’s pretty young, but she had some experience, I mean, in various places; so she’d been kicked around, she’d been kicking around for a while. I can’t remember exactly what. Oh, but you know, aside from everything else, meeting the written requirements, there’s the job interview itself: you can bring that into… that’s when you start bringing that into play; so when your final selection is made you can cite not only experience but what happened in the job interview, you know, so see...
And that’s pretty subjective [laughs].
Yeah. So there’s where your real, you know, loopholes come in. Pretty good interview, you know, as far as I knew [laughs]. What the hell did I know? But she got in there and just took right over and started dealing, you know, started working with the students and learned all the stuff real quick. And speaking of ICLF, one of the things, yep, we started branching out even more. One of the things that we were aware of, the people who were putting serials records in the library, of course was the—I mean there were two facets of it: one was the bibliographic record, with all the MARC codes and all that sort of stuff, all the abstract information that pertained to this serial, wherever it was; and then there was the holding structure: all the information about our holdings and so on. And they made up this huge document called the Serials Holdings Format for describing the holdings statement, you know: the library has one, parentheses, 1947, dash, three, 1951, comma, five, you know, every possible combination of, you know, how to deal with cumulative indexes…
Just like the army, sounds like.
Yeah, right, it was kind of a little by the numbers, although it was more…
Olive green…
Yeah, there are many many more combinations and permutations and… But a lot of the library’s holdings was in storage, and so somebody realized that we’d have to have a storage statement too, because in many cases the entire extent of the library’s holdings was not in storage or was not in Main or wherever: some here, some there; so there had to be a separate extra statement describing what was stored that would follow along more or less the guidelines of the holdings statement but it would describe what was out in storage in the way that that needed to be described. And some of this information was on the back of these catalog cards, but it was all messed up; so we found… Plus the whole ICLF (Inter-Campus Library Facility), the whole ICLF process was messed up.
Messed up in what sense? In what way were the cards messed up?
Well, the cards were messed up because… well there was a time when every single bound volume passed through the hands of a serials cataloger on its way to the shelf, and when that happened the serials catalogers would then go out and pull the shelf list card and make the annotations that needed to be made: every single volume.
They went through a cataloger here. It wasn’t…
Yes.
Okay…
That meant that the accession record was entered on the card, which is, you know, they had these Bates stamps that would stamp this little multi-digit number on the title page of the book, and then they would transfer that number and the particular volume onto the catalog card, so if volume seven dash eight was the physical volume, you know, you open it up and you’d see down at the bottom of page one or two a Bates stamp number, and you’d look on the shelf list card—on the back probably—and you’d see this running accession record of Bates stamp number and physical volume spine labeling, so, you know: 6324: volume one; 6325: volume two dash four; 6326: volume five, and so on. So every single volume came through the hands of a serials cataloger on its way to the shelf, but volumes did not necessarily go through serials catalogers on their way to storage. So everything got messed up; the recording system got messed up, and nobody could tell…
For the things that were in storage.
Right, for the things that were in storage. And ICLF itself was messed up because when it first started, when it first became apparent that the library needed off-campus storage, they just sent everything, you know, they rounded things up and they sent it out to this storage facility they carved out, and so everything was out there in call number order, from A to Z. Well a few years went by and they realized that they were gonna have to send some more stuff out to storage, and they didn’t want to inter-file it with the stuff that was out there, so what they did was invented something called block storage, and they called the stuff that was already out there something like ICLF One, then they sent all this new stuff out there and called it ICLF Two. Then they have to go back to the cards and annotate all this stuff: trouble.
Yeah. We’re just about at the end.
The trouble has just started! [laughs]
Golly, Porge!
Big trouble in little Berkeley. You sure I should keep talking about this stuff? [laughs] Who could possibly be interested in this crap?! [laughter]
Me! [laughs]
[Laughing] Oh, you’re mad!
[End Tape 18, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:07 PM
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