Tape 20, Side B
[Begin Tape 20, Side B]
The reclassification panel of 1983: so there was a guy from—who was sort of the leader and role model—classification analyst from campus personnel; there was a representative of library personnel; and there was Dorothy Gregor; and there was a representative from the branches, a librarian, head of the Biology, then, library; then there was Ruth Pfeiffer from EAL [East Asian Library]; and there was me. Ruth and I were the only non-professionals, paraprofessionals, and that was Dorothy’s idea was to get some actual paraprofessionals on the panel. So we met and we had over a hundred job descriptions to look at from all over the place.
There were a hundred people who thought that they were maybe wrongly classed.
Right, or who just, you know: what the hell, you know….
[Laughing] May as well try.
Yeah, or who thought that they would be classed differently under the new proposal, including people from, Rosenthal went out and outreached people in departments: they have Library Assistants in departments, you know, and these poor cats, you know: they’re all by themselves; they don’t have anybody to relate to; nobody knows what they do, you know, they’re departmental library people; there’s no other person, there’s no professional librarians around them, they’re all academics, and people in the affiliated libraries as well; it was a perfect opportunity for them to get into sync, for all the library assistants to get into sync. So we looked at all these things, we divided them up, and, you know, we would take them home, so at different times I had dozens of job descriptions at home: it was fascinating to see what people were doing all over the place. And when the dust cleared a lot of people were reclassified, a lot of positions were reclassified, a lot of positions weren’t reclassified, and a lot of positions were like redlined: in other words, you know: if the current occupant of this position leaves, let’s take another look at this for downward reclassification, because some people were over, it looked like they were, but generally they won’t do that, they won’t say: oh we’re gonna bust you. We’ve done a desk audit and found you should be down one. And I put mine in too, so at the point they looked at mine I had to leave the room, but I came through it okay, and there are, you know, I think five or six people in the library were the first LA Vs, dating from April the first, 1983.
Did you become a five?
Yes, as an assistant head: me and Mercedes and Julie Trujillo—bad mistake--…
What, really?
[Laughs] No, I’m just kidding. I’m justa kiddin’ [laughs].
No, because I don’t think I know her.
Yeah, me and Mercedes and Julie Trujillo, well now she’s Julie Sacco-Trujillo, she works over in Main Circ, and John Creaser in Maps, I think Randy in Bio-Sciences, but alas not Ruth Pfeiffer, who was on the panel with me: I made it and she didn’t.
Oh, really, she tried but didn’t get it.
Yeah, hers was in there too, she had to leave the room when we talked about hers. It was remarkable because we were all more or less on the same wavelength, we were real ready to do desk audits whenever there were questions of doubt, you know, which must have been kind of, could have been kind of frightening for some people to have, you know, three or four—we would split ‘em up—three or four people come and do an audit of their job. But we would change our minds, we would all argue—oh, there was another guy, it was Jack Leister from one of the affiliated libraries: there was an affiliated library representative too, or whatever they called them then: non-general libraries. So there was that. And I think from the Periodical Room there was nobody except... I can’t remember; I’m not sure if there was anybody. We encouraged people to do it but I can’t remember if there was anybody. Later on Julio [Guillermo] put one in and I had to say: I don’t agree, and he got down, but we’ll come back to that because there’s a happy ending.
That’s nice.
Aw, that is nice. So Julie [Rinaldi], you know, that just wasn’t working out, and she put Sherry in charge of claims...
Sherry Hughey?
Sherry Hughey, and she just took off; she ate that right up: she wouldn’t talk to anybody. She was burnt from this whole experience that drove her down to Periodicals, you know, from—I mean that’s a, from the Serials Cataloging viewpoint that’s an awful, awful fate, then to have to go down and do check-in.
Yeah, so give me a little… what was her story basically? Do you know where she had started?
I think she had always been up in Serials Cataloging. She may have been. I don’t know, I don’t know the whole story, but she knew all that Serials Cataloging stuff up there. Serials Cataloging at that time was composed mostly of, you know, like, five or six librarians, I mean that was a heavy-duty professional thing, and Ivan was in charge and he had a few hot library assistants that were also really good; some of them, you know, had library degrees maybe or something like that and later on went to become librarians. But yeah, she was up there in Serials Cataloging. I didn’t know a lot about those people except for Esther [Fulsaas] because I worked with her, and every now and then I’d have to go up and because I was in charge of solving all the tough problems I had to go consult Ivan, and that was okay because, you know, one-on-one he was okay.
But otherwise not?
Well I think when he gets into positions of responsibility and authority, you know, something happens. Like you put a normal person behind the wheel of a car: something happens to ‘em.
[Laughing] Was it the…
…the power.
What was your terminology?: fucking prick.
Yeah, he’s a fucking prick. He’s a flaming mother. That’s library jargon. But actually when he’s working with people who like him, you know, who like his style of banter and so on, he’s pretty cool, but if somebody stiffs him or he’s in a boss mood, boss mode, or if his boss was giving him a hard time, then it’s not so good, I think. But I think then everybody was more or less okay with Ivan; whenever I’d go up there it seemed to be happy, but later on I found it wasn’t so; people were just, people were shining it on because he seemed to be, he seemed to have that locked up. But he wasn’t, you know, he never liked Dorothy either; Dorothy didn’t like him. He didn’t get… I think he even actually brought a discrimination charge, for discriminating against Mexican-Americans or something like that, I don’t know, or something like that. He was always involved in professional library activities as well.
So what do you think it was between him and Dorothy? Do you think it was just chemistry?
Yeah, probably. You know Dorothy pretty much called ‘em as she saw ‘em, and if she didn’t like what she saw, you know, people didn’t move around or something like that, or maybe she said something insensitive, I don’t know. I don’t know. But he, you know, there’s not too many people that Ivan actually does like, and I think most—I mean in the library world, as far as I can tell—most of them are like him. I understand that. He always liked Joe Rosenthal because Joe, I guess they were both in New York Public together and Joe brought him out here.
That’s right, I remember reading that in his… Ivan wrote his autobiography so….
That’s right. Ah, so, I don’t know. But there was some explosive thing that happened up there and Sherry had to get out of there.
Oh really, it was more of a blowup than a…?
Yeah, yeah, it was something, she said she couldn’t work there anymore, or she was discriminated against, or she and Ivan didn’t get along for some reason and some awful things happened: I don’t know what they were; something to do with, I don’t know, Ivan’s messing around with some other woman who worked up there, and Sherry, I don’t know.
Ah, right, yeah, what did I hear? I heard something about that: he was carrying on an affair—we can seal this tape [laughs]--
Oh yeah, yeah.
--but having an affair with somebody there.
Yeah, I think it was Pat Vanderberg, I mean from what I’ve been told. It’s all just rumors, rumors and hearsay. I heard one that she slapped him on the street; she was on the street and gave him a big old smack [laughs].
Really? Just…?
Yeah. But she was reporting to him.
That Pat did?
Yeah, smacked, I have it, on the street; somebody saw that. But she was a professional librarian reporting to him; she was a member of Serials Cataloging and he was the head of Serials Cataloging, there was some hanky-panky and Sherry didn’t like some aspect of it and, you know, maybe even challenged or challenged Ivan face to face or something like that. So she was kicked out basically.
And so it was a sort of a version of being sent to Siberia kind of.
Exactly. I remember, you know, Julie and I sat down and talked to her on the first morning and, you know, we were trying to… she wouldn’t say a thing, she wouldn’t look at us. We were asking questions, you know: What do you wanna do? What are we gonna do? Julie thought she was A: doing Sherry a favor by accepting her, because nobody else wanted her—she had a rep—and B: she thought she was doing Periodicals a favor because, you know, we were losing all these positions and here’s a free one; and she was game, you know, to work with anybody. That’s the thing about Julie: she would work with anybody, she would take anybody on and give them a shot. So, but the whole Sherry thing, you know, it took her a long, long time for her to come around, but she did; I mean she did, sort of, until I made my mistake [laughs].
Uh oh, oh, let’s hear this.
We’ll get there; we’ll get there. Yeah but first she wouldn’t talk. We’d have meetings; at staff meetings she wouldn’t participate; she just didn’t… she would do whatever work she was asked to do and no more.
But now Julie, she’s getting on everybody’s nerves and she hates it there now; she’s only been there a year so she hates it there.
What, it’s really clear that Julie hated it by then?
Oh yeah, yeah, she hated all those people because, you know, all those people are running to Faye, running to Dorothy, and she wasn’t able to make any headway with her, you know, crackdown [laughs]. She wasn’t able to get anybody to work harder, to play better, you know. She was just using all the wrong methods, and she had run-ins with Norah, she had run-ins with Julio, she had run-ins with everybody.
How did you feel about that? I mean you thought she was using the wrong tactics? I’m guessing that you would have liked to see her succeed but…
Yeah, it was important to see if… well, already, you know, I could see that Faye’s methods hadn’t made that much of a difference, and so let’s see if Julie’s methods make any difference. That was about the time I think I went up to Dorothy and—I think Dorothy was just about to leave—and, you know, was whining to Dorothy, and that’s when she said: Well, Michael, you just may have to come to the conclusion that Periodicals is impossible to manage [laughter]. She had been through it all, you know, she had subbed over there a little bit herself, so she, you know, she was content to let it, you know, to let it… she was content to let the level of performance, you know, basically to get whatever performance you could out of people and, you know…
Just lower the expectations…
…ratchet it up just enough but not too much more; she was very sensitive about that, and so she just thought: Well, you know, there are all these people there and a certain amount of work is getting done. And they did have, a lot of the people there when you talked to them, they loved what they were doing, they all did. Nobody was trying to screw things up, you know: they loved to get on public service and help people out and they loved the fact that they had an assigned part of the file and they cared for them, but you couldn’t get them to do any claiming, which was very important to make sure things kept coming in a lot, because that’s the first thing that would happen, you know: when the branches didn’t get their stuff the shit hit the fan.
So the thing with claiming, it sounds like the way it was set up it was nearly impossible to sort out claims.
It was the fact that you had to go through card by card looking at the last time something was—you know you were supposed to do this on an ongoing basis—you had a marker that went through your file, so, you know, when your time to do some claiming came around you spun your file around and found that marker where you left off the last time and then picked up the next card, looked at the last issue received, you know, made a complicated set of internal calculations as to whether or not the next issue was late or whether, you know, you looked to see if any issues had been skipped, and then you would flip over the back side of the card, look at the claiming history, you know, trying to figure out whether it was an exchange title or gift title or purchase title, then you would decide whether or not you had to issue a claim, and it was just too much for most people, you know, that whole complicated rigmarole was just too much.
So now did you say Sherry Hughey ended up doing the claiming?
Yeah, Sherry, once we saw that, you know, Sherry Hughey got a file and she just aced the claiming work; pretty soon she had caught up her entire file for claiming, that’s, you know, three thousand to four thousand records, so we put her on another file: cleaned that up too: incredible, unheard-of. And Grace Abiko had left….
So she was just really sharp, I mean with serials.
Yeah, plus she was just very dogged, yes, right: she could hold lots of concepts in her head at the same time, ‘cause in order to do this you had to do that, you had to be aware of a whole three-dimensional matrix of yes/no procedures to figure out what you were gonna do next, plus yeah, right, she had a serials feel and intuition. So suddenly she became sort of the claims unit and she would wind up going through other people’s files tracking their claims workflow, and people didn’t like that.
‘Cause they didn’t want anyone to look over their shoulder and see what…?
Right, and they didn’t want Sherry [laughs], you know, to have…they didn’t want Sherry to be the one to tell them that they had to…
There was resentment about her?
Yeah, because she made no bones about how bad everybody else was, you know.
[Laughs] So Julie and Sherry were very popular.
Right, Sherry started rubbing people the wrong way right away, plus she would sit in her area and, you know, make comments about them [laughs].
She did?
Yeah, yeah, she would, talk about how bad they were.
So she went from not talking to saying how bad everybody was.
Right. Well, just to make a long story shorter, if not short and kill it: Julie left. A rotational position came in at Earth Sciences [Library], a long time head of Earth Sciences was leaving, so they put a rotational position out there for I think it was half-time for a year, and Dorothy pulled some, you know, understood what was what, had a meeting with Faye and Julie; they upped it to full-time for a year: boom, Julie was out; she was the acting head of Earth Sciences. And then Dorothy and Faye tell me that they want me to be the head of Periodicals, and already I’m starting to realize that I don’t want to do this too much longer, so I said: Well what about Julie, I mean isn’t she coming back? [laughs] They don’t think so. I said: Well if she’s acting head of Earth Sciences, make me acting head of Periodicals and I’ll do it for one year, and then we’ll reevaluate, see what’s happening with Julie, because I hadn’t talked to her, I didn’t know, and who knows: maybe she’d like it there and maybe she wouldn’t. So they said okay, so suddenly I was in charge of everything!
Yes! [laughter]
Did you have that attitude? I mean: Great, let’s dig in?
Yes, great. The first thing I did was tear down the cubicle walls around Julie’s desk, you know, the first morning I came in I did that.
So everyone knew that it was a new dawn, a new day.
It was at least back to the old one anyway [laughs], back to something like the old one.
The old dawn.
Yeah, but still I realized you couldn’t go too far, but I was happy to play with all these different variables just to see what would happen, and the first thing that I did was made Sherry a supervisor; I made Sherry a supervisor of claims and made her responsible for, you know, people’s performance. My idea was as time goes on we’ll find out if she can handle this level of responsibility. This might cut down, A: on all the sniping that she’s doing, if she has to be intimately involved in that way, and B: let’s see if people—because I respected her abilities—let’s see if she could do this too and let’s see if the others couldn’t respect her abilities; but my main focus was: claiming had to be done, as rotten and awful as it was: it had to be done. So I instituted claims hour, you know, people weren’t [laughter]...
Claims hour [laughs].
The Claims hour.
Is that like happy hour?
It was always unhappy hour is what it was. You know that was always the hardest thing to get people to do, not everybody but most people. If everybody had done their claiming for an hour a day, everything would have been fine. That’s all that was really necessary, but they wouldn’t even do that. They hated it so much.
So they just put it off and that’s why it got so bad.
Yeah, so I said: Everyday between four and five we’re going to put a sign up at the public service desk—and a bell—that says: If you need some service. ‘Cause normally you have a person posted up there all the time, or maybe there’d be a student in the room. But no public service from four to five, and we’re going to lock the back door and we’re gonna claim for an hour: and that’s what we did. And they started crying to Faye, you know, they went over and cried to Faye and she backed me up and that’s just the way it was. And also I decided that since I had all these supervisors now: I had Pam [Daniels] and Lea [Mascorro] and Sherry and somebody else maybe, that I needed to have supervisory meetings. Oh man they got so upset at that: they went crying to Faye, you know: He’s talking about us, they’re talking about us in the supervisor’s meeting. She backed me up on that one. We should have a representative there. No, that’s a supervisor’s meeting. In exchange for that I instituted this sort of—you know every week we’d have, or whenever needed, we’d have actual business meetings, but I instituted some other kind, I don’t even remember what it was called, it was meetings where you could come in and air other things besides just work, you know, things related directly to official business, you know, some artificial business or something; so folks kind of liked that. And let’s see, what was that other thing I did?… Oh, I had turned Julio down for a reclass request—they were all [LA] IIs at that time, except supervisors were [LA] IIIs—so I decided that I’m going to get everyone reclassified. In order to do that I had to give everybody a specialty: that’s when Alan became Mister Snag Specialist; I sort of turned everything, all the snags work I was doing, over to Alan.
And he still is.
Yeah, and Julio was doing something, I don’t know what it was…. I forget some of the… but everybody had a specialty; I got all their job cards all rewritten [snaps fingers]: they all got reclassified.
Did they bitch a little bit less after that?
No, I think, you know, I think they’ve done studies, you know: a raise has about a one month motivating factor, after that it’s back to normal. Environment has a bigger ongoing role in motivation. No, but on paper they were supposed to do these things: so I had ‘em! [laughter] So I was using that and, you know, just lots of talking and also performance devaluations, and it was getting… it was okay; things were improving; we were getting good messages back from the branches; then Dorothy left; then Faye left. Dorothy went off to—
Just one, two: one two punch.
Just about like that—then Dorothy went to LC; Faye went to Faxon* .
LC?
Library of Congress: she went to head up their cataloging department or something like that; that’s where she was before she went to San Diego before she came back here again as University Librarian. But Faye I guess went to Faxon at that point; that’s what Ivan was telling us: Oh she always should have been working for the corporation.
Did she stay for very long?
Yeah, she worked at Faxon for a long time, then she went to some Silicon Valley firm as a corporate librarian, then she went to Innovative, which I guess is where she is now. There might have been something else in there too; got married again I think. But suddenly my… I’m all alone, you know: my network of people above me is gone, and so it wasn’t any fun anymore, you know: I didn’t have anybody to talk to; I didn’t care about any of this stuff that much; I wanted to do something else; and then Sue Rhee came.
So you were starting to get kind of annoyed with the work?
Yeah, and, you know, by then when I was fully in charge there was nobody else I could blame, there was nobody else I could shunt things off to. I was responsible, and, you know, people would come to me and things I was doing was actually affecting them in their life. Alan, something happened with Alan and he gave me frank talk about how he’d never felt like this about work before and he felt really bad, and Julio felt bad about something.
Oh dear.
For some reason... You know Nadia? Christoph* ’s wife—this was before Christoph though—Nadia worked in the Periodical division: she was excellent; she was great; something happened: she cried.
Really?
Yeah.
So you started feeling bad.
Yeah, I said: Jeez, I don’t want to have this kind of impact. My philosophy has always been: Let them cats goof off any way they want to, you know: it doesn’t have anything to do with me. But now here it was, my actions were actually affecting people’s lives, and, you know, it was all in a good cause and it was all for making things work better and so on but, you know, I was having to put the squeeze on people and that was uncomfortable because the squeeze was coming back around and being on me [chuckles], so I wanted to lower my profile and I didn’t want to lose any money but I wanted out. And Sue Rhee had just come in by then and so I go and talk to her—she’s the only one I can talk to now.
Sue Rhee was…?
Sue Rosenblatt, yeah: Sue Rosenblatt, earlier Sue Rhee: she was the AUL for Tech Services. I don’t know what they did for Serials Department head.
She took Dorothy’s…?
Oh I think Faye was still there for a while, and then Faye took off and I think they had some acting, Liz Myers maybe was head of Documents came down and was acting Serials Department head or something like that. But Sue Rhee just didn’t know the lie of the land: she said: Can you stay on for six more months. And I said: Okay, I will. Stayed on for six more months. And there were some plans to get me to go over to Systems but they wanted to take my line position away from Periodicals too. Now I had operated for a year and a half with no assistant head, so I don’t see how they could have done that: didn’t want to leave like that, just thought it wouldn’t be fair. But there was an activity going on there called PerLine, which was a Blackwell sponsored automated check-in package, and I was testing that out—this was pre-INNOVAC, pre-Innovative—testing that out and I thought that would be interesting to go that way, but that didn’t work out. I worked six more months. (Are we losing tape here? Okay.) I worked six more months and I said: Hi Sue, I’m back again, can you arrange something else for me now? I’m ready to move. She said [pleading]: Three more months? I said: Okay, I’ll do three more months but after that I’ll feel free to apply for open positions—because, you know, in those days there were job positions all the time—or, you know, I’ll feel free to find some other deal; she said: Okay. So three more months came around: Hi Sue. [whimpering] Oh three more months, we just can’t…? No, so I wasn’t gonna do it. I said: That’s it; I lay my head down. And it just so happens that the operations manager of Earth Sciences—by then it was clear that Julie Rinaldi was staying at Earth Sciences [laughs], she wasn’t coming back.
[Laughing] She was happy to be out of it.
Yeah. The operations manager was an LA IV position in Earth Sciences, that guy, Tim De Wolf actually, he was my very first boss as a student in the library in the Main Circulation on that targeting project; he never made it more than LA IV, but he’d gotten a library degree, so he was going off to be a librarian, a special librarian; so they had an open position at Earth Sciences with Julie Rinaldi, who I knew, the devil I knew. I applied for it; got it.
And it was an LA IV position.
LA IV, yep; lost about two hundred dollars a month from that.
Ouch.
But I was free!
Free at last.
Yeah, free at last; I didn’t have to work so hard all the time, you know, I could sleep at night and…
[End Tape 20, Side B]
The reclassification panel of 1983: so there was a guy from—who was sort of the leader and role model—classification analyst from campus personnel; there was a representative of library personnel; and there was Dorothy Gregor; and there was a representative from the branches, a librarian, head of the Biology, then, library; then there was Ruth Pfeiffer from EAL [East Asian Library]; and there was me. Ruth and I were the only non-professionals, paraprofessionals, and that was Dorothy’s idea was to get some actual paraprofessionals on the panel. So we met and we had over a hundred job descriptions to look at from all over the place.
There were a hundred people who thought that they were maybe wrongly classed.
Right, or who just, you know: what the hell, you know….
[Laughing] May as well try.
Yeah, or who thought that they would be classed differently under the new proposal, including people from, Rosenthal went out and outreached people in departments: they have Library Assistants in departments, you know, and these poor cats, you know: they’re all by themselves; they don’t have anybody to relate to; nobody knows what they do, you know, they’re departmental library people; there’s no other person, there’s no professional librarians around them, they’re all academics, and people in the affiliated libraries as well; it was a perfect opportunity for them to get into sync, for all the library assistants to get into sync. So we looked at all these things, we divided them up, and, you know, we would take them home, so at different times I had dozens of job descriptions at home: it was fascinating to see what people were doing all over the place. And when the dust cleared a lot of people were reclassified, a lot of positions were reclassified, a lot of positions weren’t reclassified, and a lot of positions were like redlined: in other words, you know: if the current occupant of this position leaves, let’s take another look at this for downward reclassification, because some people were over, it looked like they were, but generally they won’t do that, they won’t say: oh we’re gonna bust you. We’ve done a desk audit and found you should be down one. And I put mine in too, so at the point they looked at mine I had to leave the room, but I came through it okay, and there are, you know, I think five or six people in the library were the first LA Vs, dating from April the first, 1983.
Did you become a five?
Yes, as an assistant head: me and Mercedes and Julie Trujillo—bad mistake--…
What, really?
[Laughs] No, I’m just kidding. I’m justa kiddin’ [laughs].
No, because I don’t think I know her.
Yeah, me and Mercedes and Julie Trujillo, well now she’s Julie Sacco-Trujillo, she works over in Main Circ, and John Creaser in Maps, I think Randy in Bio-Sciences, but alas not Ruth Pfeiffer, who was on the panel with me: I made it and she didn’t.
Oh, really, she tried but didn’t get it.
Yeah, hers was in there too, she had to leave the room when we talked about hers. It was remarkable because we were all more or less on the same wavelength, we were real ready to do desk audits whenever there were questions of doubt, you know, which must have been kind of, could have been kind of frightening for some people to have, you know, three or four—we would split ‘em up—three or four people come and do an audit of their job. But we would change our minds, we would all argue—oh, there was another guy, it was Jack Leister from one of the affiliated libraries: there was an affiliated library representative too, or whatever they called them then: non-general libraries. So there was that. And I think from the Periodical Room there was nobody except... I can’t remember; I’m not sure if there was anybody. We encouraged people to do it but I can’t remember if there was anybody. Later on Julio [Guillermo] put one in and I had to say: I don’t agree, and he got down, but we’ll come back to that because there’s a happy ending.
That’s nice.
Aw, that is nice. So Julie [Rinaldi], you know, that just wasn’t working out, and she put Sherry in charge of claims...
Sherry Hughey?
Sherry Hughey, and she just took off; she ate that right up: she wouldn’t talk to anybody. She was burnt from this whole experience that drove her down to Periodicals, you know, from—I mean that’s a, from the Serials Cataloging viewpoint that’s an awful, awful fate, then to have to go down and do check-in.
Yeah, so give me a little… what was her story basically? Do you know where she had started?
I think she had always been up in Serials Cataloging. She may have been. I don’t know, I don’t know the whole story, but she knew all that Serials Cataloging stuff up there. Serials Cataloging at that time was composed mostly of, you know, like, five or six librarians, I mean that was a heavy-duty professional thing, and Ivan was in charge and he had a few hot library assistants that were also really good; some of them, you know, had library degrees maybe or something like that and later on went to become librarians. But yeah, she was up there in Serials Cataloging. I didn’t know a lot about those people except for Esther [Fulsaas] because I worked with her, and every now and then I’d have to go up and because I was in charge of solving all the tough problems I had to go consult Ivan, and that was okay because, you know, one-on-one he was okay.
But otherwise not?
Well I think when he gets into positions of responsibility and authority, you know, something happens. Like you put a normal person behind the wheel of a car: something happens to ‘em.
[Laughing] Was it the…
…the power.
What was your terminology?: fucking prick.
Yeah, he’s a fucking prick. He’s a flaming mother. That’s library jargon. But actually when he’s working with people who like him, you know, who like his style of banter and so on, he’s pretty cool, but if somebody stiffs him or he’s in a boss mood, boss mode, or if his boss was giving him a hard time, then it’s not so good, I think. But I think then everybody was more or less okay with Ivan; whenever I’d go up there it seemed to be happy, but later on I found it wasn’t so; people were just, people were shining it on because he seemed to be, he seemed to have that locked up. But he wasn’t, you know, he never liked Dorothy either; Dorothy didn’t like him. He didn’t get… I think he even actually brought a discrimination charge, for discriminating against Mexican-Americans or something like that, I don’t know, or something like that. He was always involved in professional library activities as well.
So what do you think it was between him and Dorothy? Do you think it was just chemistry?
Yeah, probably. You know Dorothy pretty much called ‘em as she saw ‘em, and if she didn’t like what she saw, you know, people didn’t move around or something like that, or maybe she said something insensitive, I don’t know. I don’t know. But he, you know, there’s not too many people that Ivan actually does like, and I think most—I mean in the library world, as far as I can tell—most of them are like him. I understand that. He always liked Joe Rosenthal because Joe, I guess they were both in New York Public together and Joe brought him out here.
That’s right, I remember reading that in his… Ivan wrote his autobiography so….
That’s right. Ah, so, I don’t know. But there was some explosive thing that happened up there and Sherry had to get out of there.
Oh really, it was more of a blowup than a…?
Yeah, yeah, it was something, she said she couldn’t work there anymore, or she was discriminated against, or she and Ivan didn’t get along for some reason and some awful things happened: I don’t know what they were; something to do with, I don’t know, Ivan’s messing around with some other woman who worked up there, and Sherry, I don’t know.
Ah, right, yeah, what did I hear? I heard something about that: he was carrying on an affair—we can seal this tape [laughs]--
Oh yeah, yeah.
--but having an affair with somebody there.
Yeah, I think it was Pat Vanderberg, I mean from what I’ve been told. It’s all just rumors, rumors and hearsay. I heard one that she slapped him on the street; she was on the street and gave him a big old smack [laughs].
Really? Just…?
Yeah. But she was reporting to him.
That Pat did?
Yeah, smacked, I have it, on the street; somebody saw that. But she was a professional librarian reporting to him; she was a member of Serials Cataloging and he was the head of Serials Cataloging, there was some hanky-panky and Sherry didn’t like some aspect of it and, you know, maybe even challenged or challenged Ivan face to face or something like that. So she was kicked out basically.
And so it was a sort of a version of being sent to Siberia kind of.
Exactly. I remember, you know, Julie and I sat down and talked to her on the first morning and, you know, we were trying to… she wouldn’t say a thing, she wouldn’t look at us. We were asking questions, you know: What do you wanna do? What are we gonna do? Julie thought she was A: doing Sherry a favor by accepting her, because nobody else wanted her—she had a rep—and B: she thought she was doing Periodicals a favor because, you know, we were losing all these positions and here’s a free one; and she was game, you know, to work with anybody. That’s the thing about Julie: she would work with anybody, she would take anybody on and give them a shot. So, but the whole Sherry thing, you know, it took her a long, long time for her to come around, but she did; I mean she did, sort of, until I made my mistake [laughs].
Uh oh, oh, let’s hear this.
We’ll get there; we’ll get there. Yeah but first she wouldn’t talk. We’d have meetings; at staff meetings she wouldn’t participate; she just didn’t… she would do whatever work she was asked to do and no more.
But now Julie, she’s getting on everybody’s nerves and she hates it there now; she’s only been there a year so she hates it there.
What, it’s really clear that Julie hated it by then?
Oh yeah, yeah, she hated all those people because, you know, all those people are running to Faye, running to Dorothy, and she wasn’t able to make any headway with her, you know, crackdown [laughs]. She wasn’t able to get anybody to work harder, to play better, you know. She was just using all the wrong methods, and she had run-ins with Norah, she had run-ins with Julio, she had run-ins with everybody.
How did you feel about that? I mean you thought she was using the wrong tactics? I’m guessing that you would have liked to see her succeed but…
Yeah, it was important to see if… well, already, you know, I could see that Faye’s methods hadn’t made that much of a difference, and so let’s see if Julie’s methods make any difference. That was about the time I think I went up to Dorothy and—I think Dorothy was just about to leave—and, you know, was whining to Dorothy, and that’s when she said: Well, Michael, you just may have to come to the conclusion that Periodicals is impossible to manage [laughter]. She had been through it all, you know, she had subbed over there a little bit herself, so she, you know, she was content to let it, you know, to let it… she was content to let the level of performance, you know, basically to get whatever performance you could out of people and, you know…
Just lower the expectations…
…ratchet it up just enough but not too much more; she was very sensitive about that, and so she just thought: Well, you know, there are all these people there and a certain amount of work is getting done. And they did have, a lot of the people there when you talked to them, they loved what they were doing, they all did. Nobody was trying to screw things up, you know: they loved to get on public service and help people out and they loved the fact that they had an assigned part of the file and they cared for them, but you couldn’t get them to do any claiming, which was very important to make sure things kept coming in a lot, because that’s the first thing that would happen, you know: when the branches didn’t get their stuff the shit hit the fan.
So the thing with claiming, it sounds like the way it was set up it was nearly impossible to sort out claims.
It was the fact that you had to go through card by card looking at the last time something was—you know you were supposed to do this on an ongoing basis—you had a marker that went through your file, so, you know, when your time to do some claiming came around you spun your file around and found that marker where you left off the last time and then picked up the next card, looked at the last issue received, you know, made a complicated set of internal calculations as to whether or not the next issue was late or whether, you know, you looked to see if any issues had been skipped, and then you would flip over the back side of the card, look at the claiming history, you know, trying to figure out whether it was an exchange title or gift title or purchase title, then you would decide whether or not you had to issue a claim, and it was just too much for most people, you know, that whole complicated rigmarole was just too much.
So now did you say Sherry Hughey ended up doing the claiming?
Yeah, Sherry, once we saw that, you know, Sherry Hughey got a file and she just aced the claiming work; pretty soon she had caught up her entire file for claiming, that’s, you know, three thousand to four thousand records, so we put her on another file: cleaned that up too: incredible, unheard-of. And Grace Abiko had left….
So she was just really sharp, I mean with serials.
Yeah, plus she was just very dogged, yes, right: she could hold lots of concepts in her head at the same time, ‘cause in order to do this you had to do that, you had to be aware of a whole three-dimensional matrix of yes/no procedures to figure out what you were gonna do next, plus yeah, right, she had a serials feel and intuition. So suddenly she became sort of the claims unit and she would wind up going through other people’s files tracking their claims workflow, and people didn’t like that.
‘Cause they didn’t want anyone to look over their shoulder and see what…?
Right, and they didn’t want Sherry [laughs], you know, to have…they didn’t want Sherry to be the one to tell them that they had to…
There was resentment about her?
Yeah, because she made no bones about how bad everybody else was, you know.
[Laughs] So Julie and Sherry were very popular.
Right, Sherry started rubbing people the wrong way right away, plus she would sit in her area and, you know, make comments about them [laughs].
She did?
Yeah, yeah, she would, talk about how bad they were.
So she went from not talking to saying how bad everybody was.
Right. Well, just to make a long story shorter, if not short and kill it: Julie left. A rotational position came in at Earth Sciences [Library], a long time head of Earth Sciences was leaving, so they put a rotational position out there for I think it was half-time for a year, and Dorothy pulled some, you know, understood what was what, had a meeting with Faye and Julie; they upped it to full-time for a year: boom, Julie was out; she was the acting head of Earth Sciences. And then Dorothy and Faye tell me that they want me to be the head of Periodicals, and already I’m starting to realize that I don’t want to do this too much longer, so I said: Well what about Julie, I mean isn’t she coming back? [laughs] They don’t think so. I said: Well if she’s acting head of Earth Sciences, make me acting head of Periodicals and I’ll do it for one year, and then we’ll reevaluate, see what’s happening with Julie, because I hadn’t talked to her, I didn’t know, and who knows: maybe she’d like it there and maybe she wouldn’t. So they said okay, so suddenly I was in charge of everything!
Yes! [laughter]
Did you have that attitude? I mean: Great, let’s dig in?
Yes, great. The first thing I did was tear down the cubicle walls around Julie’s desk, you know, the first morning I came in I did that.
So everyone knew that it was a new dawn, a new day.
It was at least back to the old one anyway [laughs], back to something like the old one.
The old dawn.
Yeah, but still I realized you couldn’t go too far, but I was happy to play with all these different variables just to see what would happen, and the first thing that I did was made Sherry a supervisor; I made Sherry a supervisor of claims and made her responsible for, you know, people’s performance. My idea was as time goes on we’ll find out if she can handle this level of responsibility. This might cut down, A: on all the sniping that she’s doing, if she has to be intimately involved in that way, and B: let’s see if people—because I respected her abilities—let’s see if she could do this too and let’s see if the others couldn’t respect her abilities; but my main focus was: claiming had to be done, as rotten and awful as it was: it had to be done. So I instituted claims hour, you know, people weren’t [laughter]...
Claims hour [laughs].
The Claims hour.
Is that like happy hour?
It was always unhappy hour is what it was. You know that was always the hardest thing to get people to do, not everybody but most people. If everybody had done their claiming for an hour a day, everything would have been fine. That’s all that was really necessary, but they wouldn’t even do that. They hated it so much.
So they just put it off and that’s why it got so bad.
Yeah, so I said: Everyday between four and five we’re going to put a sign up at the public service desk—and a bell—that says: If you need some service. ‘Cause normally you have a person posted up there all the time, or maybe there’d be a student in the room. But no public service from four to five, and we’re going to lock the back door and we’re gonna claim for an hour: and that’s what we did. And they started crying to Faye, you know, they went over and cried to Faye and she backed me up and that’s just the way it was. And also I decided that since I had all these supervisors now: I had Pam [Daniels] and Lea [Mascorro] and Sherry and somebody else maybe, that I needed to have supervisory meetings. Oh man they got so upset at that: they went crying to Faye, you know: He’s talking about us, they’re talking about us in the supervisor’s meeting. She backed me up on that one. We should have a representative there. No, that’s a supervisor’s meeting. In exchange for that I instituted this sort of—you know every week we’d have, or whenever needed, we’d have actual business meetings, but I instituted some other kind, I don’t even remember what it was called, it was meetings where you could come in and air other things besides just work, you know, things related directly to official business, you know, some artificial business or something; so folks kind of liked that. And let’s see, what was that other thing I did?… Oh, I had turned Julio down for a reclass request—they were all [LA] IIs at that time, except supervisors were [LA] IIIs—so I decided that I’m going to get everyone reclassified. In order to do that I had to give everybody a specialty: that’s when Alan became Mister Snag Specialist; I sort of turned everything, all the snags work I was doing, over to Alan.
And he still is.
Yeah, and Julio was doing something, I don’t know what it was…. I forget some of the… but everybody had a specialty; I got all their job cards all rewritten [snaps fingers]: they all got reclassified.
Did they bitch a little bit less after that?
No, I think, you know, I think they’ve done studies, you know: a raise has about a one month motivating factor, after that it’s back to normal. Environment has a bigger ongoing role in motivation. No, but on paper they were supposed to do these things: so I had ‘em! [laughter] So I was using that and, you know, just lots of talking and also performance devaluations, and it was getting… it was okay; things were improving; we were getting good messages back from the branches; then Dorothy left; then Faye left. Dorothy went off to—
Just one, two: one two punch.
Just about like that—then Dorothy went to LC; Faye went to Faxon* .
LC?
Library of Congress: she went to head up their cataloging department or something like that; that’s where she was before she went to San Diego before she came back here again as University Librarian. But Faye I guess went to Faxon at that point; that’s what Ivan was telling us: Oh she always should have been working for the corporation.
Did she stay for very long?
Yeah, she worked at Faxon for a long time, then she went to some Silicon Valley firm as a corporate librarian, then she went to Innovative, which I guess is where she is now. There might have been something else in there too; got married again I think. But suddenly my… I’m all alone, you know: my network of people above me is gone, and so it wasn’t any fun anymore, you know: I didn’t have anybody to talk to; I didn’t care about any of this stuff that much; I wanted to do something else; and then Sue Rhee came.
So you were starting to get kind of annoyed with the work?
Yeah, and, you know, by then when I was fully in charge there was nobody else I could blame, there was nobody else I could shunt things off to. I was responsible, and, you know, people would come to me and things I was doing was actually affecting them in their life. Alan, something happened with Alan and he gave me frank talk about how he’d never felt like this about work before and he felt really bad, and Julio felt bad about something.
Oh dear.
For some reason... You know Nadia? Christoph* ’s wife—this was before Christoph though—Nadia worked in the Periodical division: she was excellent; she was great; something happened: she cried.
Really?
Yeah.
So you started feeling bad.
Yeah, I said: Jeez, I don’t want to have this kind of impact. My philosophy has always been: Let them cats goof off any way they want to, you know: it doesn’t have anything to do with me. But now here it was, my actions were actually affecting people’s lives, and, you know, it was all in a good cause and it was all for making things work better and so on but, you know, I was having to put the squeeze on people and that was uncomfortable because the squeeze was coming back around and being on me [chuckles], so I wanted to lower my profile and I didn’t want to lose any money but I wanted out. And Sue Rhee had just come in by then and so I go and talk to her—she’s the only one I can talk to now.
Sue Rhee was…?
Sue Rosenblatt, yeah: Sue Rosenblatt, earlier Sue Rhee: she was the AUL for Tech Services. I don’t know what they did for Serials Department head.
She took Dorothy’s…?
Oh I think Faye was still there for a while, and then Faye took off and I think they had some acting, Liz Myers maybe was head of Documents came down and was acting Serials Department head or something like that. But Sue Rhee just didn’t know the lie of the land: she said: Can you stay on for six more months. And I said: Okay, I will. Stayed on for six more months. And there were some plans to get me to go over to Systems but they wanted to take my line position away from Periodicals too. Now I had operated for a year and a half with no assistant head, so I don’t see how they could have done that: didn’t want to leave like that, just thought it wouldn’t be fair. But there was an activity going on there called PerLine, which was a Blackwell sponsored automated check-in package, and I was testing that out—this was pre-INNOVAC, pre-Innovative—testing that out and I thought that would be interesting to go that way, but that didn’t work out. I worked six more months. (Are we losing tape here? Okay.) I worked six more months and I said: Hi Sue, I’m back again, can you arrange something else for me now? I’m ready to move. She said [pleading]: Three more months? I said: Okay, I’ll do three more months but after that I’ll feel free to apply for open positions—because, you know, in those days there were job positions all the time—or, you know, I’ll feel free to find some other deal; she said: Okay. So three more months came around: Hi Sue. [whimpering] Oh three more months, we just can’t…? No, so I wasn’t gonna do it. I said: That’s it; I lay my head down. And it just so happens that the operations manager of Earth Sciences—by then it was clear that Julie Rinaldi was staying at Earth Sciences [laughs], she wasn’t coming back.
[Laughing] She was happy to be out of it.
Yeah. The operations manager was an LA IV position in Earth Sciences, that guy, Tim De Wolf actually, he was my very first boss as a student in the library in the Main Circulation on that targeting project; he never made it more than LA IV, but he’d gotten a library degree, so he was going off to be a librarian, a special librarian; so they had an open position at Earth Sciences with Julie Rinaldi, who I knew, the devil I knew. I applied for it; got it.
And it was an LA IV position.
LA IV, yep; lost about two hundred dollars a month from that.
Ouch.
But I was free!
Free at last.
Yeah, free at last; I didn’t have to work so hard all the time, you know, I could sleep at night and…
[End Tape 20, Side B]
posted by epikles at 4:02 PM
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