Tape 20, Side A
[Begin Tape 20, Side A]
We’re talking to Michael Conkin out here on the deck. It’s quiet, it’s nice, a sunny October day.
Yeah, the hottest day this summer is in October. Ah, where were we?
Yeah, here, let me go over the players and the scorecard [Conkin laughs]. Dorothy Gregor left Serials and became the AUL for Technical Services.
That’s correct.
Faye becomes head of the Serials Department. Julie Rinaldi becomes head of Periodicals. And then where were you in this?
I was the assistant head of Periodicals. And also, some other changes, like Terry Allison left and went to be head of Newspapers, and that’s when Pam Daniels was hired as the Check-in supervisor.
Oh really, that’s when she came in. And you said this is 1981 or 1982.
This is eighty-one, eighty-two, well I think we’re in eighty-three now. Let’s go back just a little bit just to set the scene here, it’ll make it easier to get through this work stuff real zippy; you know the Periodical Division at that time: Check-in was completely manual, claiming was manual; there was a little bit of database… claiming wasn’t exactly manual, you know, the investigation part of it was manual and keeping up with it was manual, but you did write claims on like a thick code sheet for later keying input into the DataPoint system by humans, and there were… in the Serials Department, Serials Department had control of binding as well: Binding belonged to Serials Department; Newspaper belonged to Serials Department, that’s probably the biggest… Tech Services, Serials Cataloging belonged to Serials Department. Who was head of…? Head of Payment Division at that time was Janet Garey, and… that’s all, that’s all the characters, but there were very few branches that had a receive direct component, you know, very few were getting their serials directly to them: everything was central; there were about thirty thousand records, thirty thousand serials, thirty to forty thousand manual records in the rotary files, and the people in the Periodical Division, they had split assignments between public services and check-in, and the way they got their check-in assignment was a slice of the alphabet: let’s say something like A to BAZ, or something like that, and then BB or BE something would be the next slice, and all the rotary files were set out there and they had great big signs above them so you knew what titles were covered in which file.
And the rotary files, what did they look like? like a rolodex?
They were great big engines, they each held about three thousand records, you know, you would sit in front of them and they didn’t call you a Faye Hamilton [laughter], you would sit in front of them and there would be like a ledger there and you could fit a table on each side and they were of different vintages and there were such things as double rotary files which held twice as much, and they were, I suppose, you know, four or five feet high, two and a half feet wide and maybe, you know, four feet long, so they were big, you know, they were big, rounded monsters; they had little lids on them that you could roll down too—nobody did that—you could lock them, and, you know, they were all powered electrically so you had buttons there to make them go forward and back and to stop and that sort of thing. Sometimes when the electricity failed you had to get out the crank, or when they blew up, broke down, ‘cause even then the technology, the people at Diebold, who was responsible for them: the people who knew how to fix them had all gone [laughter], so, you know, the young whippersnappers, you’d call out some of the young techs from Diebold and they wouldn’t know what to do: they’d have to send back for the manuals and… yeah, so, and they were breaking down all the time, and the branches have all these too—some of them still do.
So they were real dinosaurs then, already.
Yeah, they kind of were. And, you know, the check-in record was the central source of all kinds of information, besides just receipt information, claims information, some payment information, and, you know, a whole history of the life of this periodical: what its source was, whether it was exchange, gift or purchase, you know, what its vendor was, and all that sort of stuff, and, you know, there would be, besides however many generations of staff had written in on there: you could see all those different handwritings: now there’s something for Nicholson Baker!
[Laughing] Ship ‘em all over to him.
Everybody who was currently employed could get in there and write stuff on the check-in cards, so, you know, to the practiced eye you could access a universe of information just looking at the front and back of one of these check-in cards, and later on that was one of the real big challenges in converting them to machine-readable form: deciding whether or not some of this stuff had to be captured and whether it could be: a lot of that stuff did go by the wayside. And the branches, you know, there was a lot of double work going, but they had their own rotary files, and their own check-in cards, and their own systems.
Were students doing most of that work, or was it…?
The basic work was done by students, but everybody was responsible, you know, everybody who had a slice of the alphabet assigned to them was responsible for the basic maintenance of the file, so in… that was one of the little reorganizing things I did, because I was in charge of mail opening, and mail opening was just an all asses and elbows production effort, ‘cause that stuff came in and you just had to get it out, you know, much more than, twice as much as comes in today, you know, today there’s big backlogs they tell me: I laugh (ha ha), I sneer, I scoff.
What, because it was centralized?
Because it was centralized, because so much of it was coming in all the time, and because there were more of them: there were more exchange titles, there were more gift titles, there were more purchase titles: there were more snags and more unsolicited journals, ‘cause everything was cheaper and there was more money and everybody got whatever they wanted, you know, everybody could subscribe, you know, you could have multiple subscriptions, so that didn’t make any difference.
So a lot of titles there were…?
Yeah, there were eight check-in cards for [laughs], so you had to know: another level of complexity, you know; if you had the latest issue of Time you had to know there was an order that you had checked them in on on the card, so you had to know: Oh, you know, okay, so Main is first, or we’re, Periodicals is first, they get one, and Humanities Graduate Services gets number two and SOCS gets number three and Bio-Sciences gets number four and REFE gets number five or something like that, so you had to watch little boxes to make sure that, you know, volume 214: number 37 had been checked in on the card that you were passing by and not on the cards to follow.
And if somebody made a mistake or if you got shorted then whoever was at the end of the line wouldn’t get theirs.
Yeah, Philosophy [laughs], the Philosophy Library.
They were always last?
Yeah, they were always last…
Standing behind the door.
…‘cause they weren’t a real library, you know, just a quasi-departmental library. Yeah, and that made claiming even more incredibly difficult than it was [laughs], because how can you possibly… I mean here’s eight titles, you know: two of them come on gifts, some of them come through this vendor and some of them come through that vendor, some of them you go pick up over at Dave’s [Smoke Shop], so it was really a mess, really a madhouse: no wonder them people are crazy. So that was the background, and in Periodicals there was also, you know, there was a claiming unit headed by Grace Abiko, and then there was a, it was kind of a records management database setup unit run by Judith Walker I think at that time; and across the hall there was like a database management unit, and everything had to be in sync, you know, and in fact it got to the point where the people in, the serials cards were actually set up, or the format was set up when a new serial came to life or when a card had been filled up, that work had to be done by these people in this special database management input and editing unit, ‘cause you had to set the cards up just right: sometimes you had to write the names of the months in in different languages, so all that stuff had to be done just so to make it go.
And there was a special unit to do that?
Right, set up over across the hall. Linda [Turitz] was involved in that a little bit, although I think she was in Serials Cataloging at that time.
Did that unit evolve into… did they sort of…?
I think it kind of got absorbed into everything else. It’s sort of where, you know, sort of what Judy [Walker] was doing when, remember Periodicals was on one side of the room and then Judy’s unit, whatever that was—you know, five years ago, whatever that was called—I think they changed the name of it by then when [Joe] Barker took over: that was the evolution of that unit, you know, they sort of were the caretaker unit or the control unit between Periodicals and Serials Cataloging because, you know, those two people they didn’t like to speak to one another, those two groups, and also between the branches and Periodicals certain times: just on database functions and sort of control functions, that sort of thing, but the actual, you know: ‘did some issue come in and was it sent to us’ kind of query from the branches, that was still directed to Periodicals. And so… well before Faye left we set up this deal where, you know, we split up the duties, and so I made sure I had—she gave me complete control, so I took it—and so I worked in each of these units: I sat down in Binding, learned everything there was to know about binding.
Just because you wanted to be able to have a handle on all the jobs.
Yeah, because I wanted to make sure; plus I just liked the work, you know, I liked all the different kinds of work: sat down in Claims, learned about claims, you know, spent my time on the public service desk, made sure I had a file assigned to me so I knew what everybody was up to and faced with and getting away with [laughter]. So I was going along pretty well there, making lots of changes and setting things up so that, you know, there was a little bit more accountability and a little bit more free flow and a little bit more communication between the central units and the branches, because that was a big, big hole: there wasn’t hardly any. So I made field trips to all the branches and got to know all the serials folks and saw how they were treated, you know: like scum! like dirt!
Is that right?
A lot of ‘em, yeah, because, you know, serials, there’s a big flinch factor there with serials, especially among librarians who think they ought to know everything but, you know, really are just playing along, don’t understand serials: there’re a lot of serials people who don’t understand serials, you know, serials managers who don’t understand serials: it’s a complex kind of—you know—it’s a complex kind of affair. I mean I remember when Joe Barker took over Serials. Somebody told me that he made the remark that: Oh, serials are just books that refuse to die or something like that, you know, some smart-ass remark. Yeah, you don’t know. Later on he recanted I understand. So I was, everything was doing okay there. We got rid of some of the problem people: some stayed, some…
How did you manage, how did you do that?
Well some of ‘em just left and some of ‘em just got shunted various places and some of ‘em were on like a short leash, like Mister [Alan] Silverman, I mean he was [laughter], he was a short leash. There was a time where, you know, one time Faye looked up and said: Where’s Alan? ‘cause he was supposed to be on the desk or something like that, usually he was never late for the desk, and she found out that he was in the Morrison Room, down in the old Morrison Room, you know, so she went down there [laughs], she got him and sort of carried him, she got him back, you know, pulling him by the earlobe.
So he usually wouldn’t blow off his desk duties.
No, he was, you know my feeling was, when I saw what was happening was: Okay, yeah, you know, he doesn’t do certain things but we need somebody like him on the desk, he’s an excellent presence on the desk because not only did he know a lot about serials and not only was he comfortable with the DataPoint database, which then was a big feature, there was a terminal at the public service desk for the first time, he [laughs], because of his intimate familiarity with many of the issues of the journals that came in…
Because he read them.
… because he read them [laughter], he could deal on an article level with queries [laughter]. Nobody else, very few people could do that, you know: somebody asked he could say: Yeah, that was in the September issue of Saturday Review, or whatever, you know, Times Literary Supplement or something like that. So that was good.
For our readers I suppose we should say that Alan Silverman tends to read everything that at all interests him, and a lot does interest him…
That’s right.
…that comes through Periodicals, so…
And it’s always been that way, yeah. Now he’s hurtin’.
Yeah?
They took him off his public service assignment.
Really?
He’s hurtin’, after twenty-seven years. He’s going around saying: Can you believe it, after twenty-seven years? Yeah.
Wow.
But then it was just natural that everybody would do a little bit of each: a little bit of tech services, a little bit of public services, and not only was it good just to vary the pitches up that way but it really helped Public Service to have people who were familiar with check-in at the desk, as opposed to, you know, students or… as opposed to it being turned over to Main Circulation or something, which was always something that we had to fight off.
Because they would propose that every once in a while?
Because they knew how to read, yeah, right; because they would know how to read check-in cards: a peculiar little skill in itself. Plus they were the ones who did what was called file marking. The stacks in Periodicals, you know, they were… I guess it was about as big as it is today except it was all periodicals and not newspapers and other things, but it was shelved in title order instead of call number order, which meant there had to be a way for the shelvers to actually get the item into the right place, and some of them, you know, they could be in any number of languages, so they evolved for it a system called file marking which allowed people who were doing shelving to read the little symbols and to travel from the first part of the title on into the second part of the title and all the way down to the middle, sometimes, you know, you’d see five, six, seven or eight marks, so you’d proceed from a left angle bracket, which was where the title started, so you knew that would get you directly into that area of the alphabet, and then you would look for a first slash under a letter, and then you would go a little further, and if there were more you’d look for two slashes, then three and so on. That’s how you were able to zero in, vector right in on that area where the thing, so even if there weren’t some issues there that looked like the issue you had in hand, there was just a blank space or you had to make a space, you could do it. So, you know, patrons coming in from the stacks often couldn’t find the stuff, well you’d go into the stacks and help them because you had that particular weird little bit of lore at your, little coding or encryption at your disposal, you know, if it was done right and if the shelvers were paying attention. But all the shelving, all that work was done by students, and a lot of the low level check-in, if it could be packaged, was given to students, which is what I did when I was a student there, you know: they would manage to… they would get their little bundles and their little areas and go through them and sort out things that they thought students should be able to check in.
Uh huh, so they weren’t given the really difficult ones.
Right, and my improvement on that—I tweaked it a little—was that that was actually done at the mailing table: you could do it at the mailing table so it wouldn’t have to be done by the LAs, so they could, you know, spend more time on work [laughter]. So, yeah, Faye and I were going great guns, and she was great; everybody respected Faye, for some reason, because, you know, she’d come down hard on people sometimes but she’d always do it with a sunny disposition and a big beautiful smile, and, you know, just charmed everybody out of their shoes, plus she was so fair, she was so incredibly fair.
Really?
Yeah.
So was Ivan the only holdout?
So everybody felt, well, you know, he was in a different world but I didn’t hear some of this stuff until later about it. Well, no, there were holdouts; there were people who thought she was too fair maybe. Some people thought she, you know, wasn’t quite tough enough or wasn’t quite able enough or didn’t give them enough direction, but as far as I was concerned she was tops, you know, because I was in that chain of relationships with Dorothy Gregor and Faye and me, and, you know, we were more or less on the same wavelength. Faye and Dorothy got along well; they never had to… you know, they got along telegraphically, so as far as I was concerned everything was just right, just the way it should be, you know. And I had them snowed, or at least I thought I did. They thought I was okay; they thought I was hot, and, you know, that’s all I cared about.
Did you really feel though like it was kind of, that you were conning them?
No. No. I was working hard; I was working real hard, I was…
Suppressing all your…, or were you not having to? It sounds like you were really into the work.
Oh I was really into it; I was tearin’ it up, and I had evolved this idea that it’s pay-back time, you know: thank you Mister Universe Man for letting me have ten, twelve years off; now [rubs hands together] let’s see what can I do, and I worked real hard, and I was getting a lot more money, you know: I was an LA II one day and was an LA IV the next day: I was rolling in it. I remember when I got my first paycheck ever in which I cleared over a thousand dollars—whoa! heavy duty! So… and they worked hard: Dorothy and Faye worked incredibly hard. Dorothy was always here on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays.
Really?
Yeah, working real late, yeah, she worked real hard; and Faye took work home and worked real hard, so it was the least I could do was to work real hard too; plus, you know, there were people looking at me, you know, all these other dozen or so LAs in the Periodical Division, so I didn’t want to… first I didn’t want to, you know, I didn’t want to be like them [laughs] because a lot of them were just timeservers, just skaters, and I thought the work was important and noble enough to, you know, to devote some energy to, but also I wanted, you know, I was conscious that I had a role to play as well in terms of, you know: I couldn’t say anything to them if I was screwing around, and I wanted to get some of ‘em [laughter]. But then everything changed a little, well things changed quite a lot when Julie [Rinaldi] came in because although Faye was still the head of Serials and people could still go to her, Julie was the head of Periodicals and Julie had a completely different style.
Really?
Yeah. She was hotheaded, you know, she expressed herself directly; she was temperamental; she wanted to… she didn’t like the fact that our desks were out in the open—she wanted a little cubicle around herself: she actually put one up.
And you said that was before cubicalization took hold, so that would have been an innovation.
Uh huh, that’s right, yeah, everybody was in sight of everybody at all times, except for Althea had a little cubbyhole for binding back in the back, and then there was a break room, big break room.
So why do you think she…? It was just her style, huh?
Well she needed, she felt she needed more confidentiality because she saw right away there were problems and she was gonna crack down.
So she wanted to be able to talk to people, like to grab ‘em and pull ‘em into her cubicle and give ‘em what for.
Right, without anybody actually knowing what was going on or actually—of course, you know, you couldn’t help seeing people go in there, but still…
…and come out reduced to tears [laughter].
Actually it had kind of a different effect: people became belligerent.
Really?
Yes, and people became, people didn’t like the way she was doing things at all; and I was watching and I was just watching her and I liked Julie. As we know, as we’ll see, I’d go back to work for her again after a period. But, you know, she’s another person whose heart was deep deep into the work and she just couldn’t stand it that other people weren’t pulling their weight, so she was gonna get ‘em; she was gonna get Alan [Silverman]. We set Alan up in this—Alan, we decided, Julie decided that we should make a time log of Alan’s comings and goings for a couple weeks, so we did; and then she called him in—I was over there—: she presented it to him; he just blew up: he said: You’ve been doing this?! and he went right up to Dorothy and then Dorothy called Faye and me and Julie up and said: You can’t do this—that’s how good Dorothy was—she said: You can’t do this, you have to, you know…she said some, she had no particular love for Alan, but this is not the way to do that sort of...
She just thought it was done wrong.
It was done wrong, yeah. I mean if you want to do this—first of all, she said, I wouldn’t recommend that you do do this, but if you want to do this you’re going to have to tell him that you’re going to do it [laughter]: you can’t trap somebody like this. And, you know, part of this I’m just [under his breath]: That’s right; and I’m just observing Julie, I’m observing the reaction. But, let’s see, what else did she do. Well she was just, she was just very outspoken and temperamental; flew off the handle a lot, you know; gave people a real hard time, you know, when it came to written performance evaluations, you know: read ‘em the riot act; wouldn’t give ‘em satisfactories, and she just rubbed everybody the wrong way.
Who had actually hired her? Who had done the interview?
Well it was one of those—Faye hired her—but it was one of those where you go through lots of, you know, for professional positions you troop through lots of, lots of different groups, you know, to get a day’s worth of interview, but it started out real good, she was gonna, it looked good.
Do you think that in a way Faye wanted somebody whose style was different from hers, was…?
No, no, I don’t think that that wasn’t the, I mean this didn’t come out until later; I mean they ask questions like: what’s your worst personnel problem? but, you know, they can’t really get to how it will be, and Julie changed, you know Julie… she’ll say that however it was with her was a reaction to what she saw, to what she was presented with, and so, you know, it just… and there were other things going on too, but everybody was just uptight all the time, and that was the time when Sherry Hughey was assigned also to Periodicals. So, let’s see, and some of these other people who had left, like Grace Abiko had left and we didn’t, I guess Sherry Hughey took over that position, but there was a public service, a circulation supervisor left, and we didn’t get anybody, we didn’t get another line, so things were starting to get tight too and the work didn’t change. I think Lea Mascorro became the Circulation Supervisor at that time. And also at that time a really interesting thing happened: the campus system-wide … in the LA series there were four grades: LA I, II, III, IV, four classes, and system-wide had been working, unbeknownst to a lot of people, on reorganizing the Library Assistant series, and in eighty-three or so, they did: they presented a new Library Assistant series that had five classes in it.
So it had gone, four was the top then, so you were at the top.
Yeah, I was at the top, and I was almost topped out by then too, ‘cause, you know, I’d gone through two or three promotions, yeah, so I was pretty much topped out at four. So they presented this, sort of just sprung it on everybody, and at first everybody thought: Well, you know, they just added one on top, but as they looked into it they saw that everything had been rejiggered: the language was different, you know, the language between the old series and the new series was different; there was a lot more detail about the difference between Library Assistants and librarians and that sort of thing, and the demarcations between twos, threes, fours and fives and so on were very clear, clearer than they ever had been.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so [Joe] Rosenthal, to his credit, said: We want everybody to look at these and if you think your job would be in a different classification: send in a new job card with a request for a reclassification. And then he asked for people to be on a reclassification panel to look at all these things, so I volunteered: Get me. So a panel was set up composed of a classification analyst from campus personnel…
We’re gonna have to turn over.
Yeah.
[End Tape 20, Side A]
We’re talking to Michael Conkin out here on the deck. It’s quiet, it’s nice, a sunny October day.
Yeah, the hottest day this summer is in October. Ah, where were we?
Yeah, here, let me go over the players and the scorecard [Conkin laughs]. Dorothy Gregor left Serials and became the AUL for Technical Services.
That’s correct.
Faye becomes head of the Serials Department. Julie Rinaldi becomes head of Periodicals. And then where were you in this?
I was the assistant head of Periodicals. And also, some other changes, like Terry Allison left and went to be head of Newspapers, and that’s when Pam Daniels was hired as the Check-in supervisor.
Oh really, that’s when she came in. And you said this is 1981 or 1982.
This is eighty-one, eighty-two, well I think we’re in eighty-three now. Let’s go back just a little bit just to set the scene here, it’ll make it easier to get through this work stuff real zippy; you know the Periodical Division at that time: Check-in was completely manual, claiming was manual; there was a little bit of database… claiming wasn’t exactly manual, you know, the investigation part of it was manual and keeping up with it was manual, but you did write claims on like a thick code sheet for later keying input into the DataPoint system by humans, and there were… in the Serials Department, Serials Department had control of binding as well: Binding belonged to Serials Department; Newspaper belonged to Serials Department, that’s probably the biggest… Tech Services, Serials Cataloging belonged to Serials Department. Who was head of…? Head of Payment Division at that time was Janet Garey, and… that’s all, that’s all the characters, but there were very few branches that had a receive direct component, you know, very few were getting their serials directly to them: everything was central; there were about thirty thousand records, thirty thousand serials, thirty to forty thousand manual records in the rotary files, and the people in the Periodical Division, they had split assignments between public services and check-in, and the way they got their check-in assignment was a slice of the alphabet: let’s say something like A to BAZ, or something like that, and then BB or BE something would be the next slice, and all the rotary files were set out there and they had great big signs above them so you knew what titles were covered in which file.
And the rotary files, what did they look like? like a rolodex?
They were great big engines, they each held about three thousand records, you know, you would sit in front of them and they didn’t call you a Faye Hamilton [laughter], you would sit in front of them and there would be like a ledger there and you could fit a table on each side and they were of different vintages and there were such things as double rotary files which held twice as much, and they were, I suppose, you know, four or five feet high, two and a half feet wide and maybe, you know, four feet long, so they were big, you know, they were big, rounded monsters; they had little lids on them that you could roll down too—nobody did that—you could lock them, and, you know, they were all powered electrically so you had buttons there to make them go forward and back and to stop and that sort of thing. Sometimes when the electricity failed you had to get out the crank, or when they blew up, broke down, ‘cause even then the technology, the people at Diebold, who was responsible for them: the people who knew how to fix them had all gone [laughter], so, you know, the young whippersnappers, you’d call out some of the young techs from Diebold and they wouldn’t know what to do: they’d have to send back for the manuals and… yeah, so, and they were breaking down all the time, and the branches have all these too—some of them still do.
So they were real dinosaurs then, already.
Yeah, they kind of were. And, you know, the check-in record was the central source of all kinds of information, besides just receipt information, claims information, some payment information, and, you know, a whole history of the life of this periodical: what its source was, whether it was exchange, gift or purchase, you know, what its vendor was, and all that sort of stuff, and, you know, there would be, besides however many generations of staff had written in on there: you could see all those different handwritings: now there’s something for Nicholson Baker!
[Laughing] Ship ‘em all over to him.
Everybody who was currently employed could get in there and write stuff on the check-in cards, so, you know, to the practiced eye you could access a universe of information just looking at the front and back of one of these check-in cards, and later on that was one of the real big challenges in converting them to machine-readable form: deciding whether or not some of this stuff had to be captured and whether it could be: a lot of that stuff did go by the wayside. And the branches, you know, there was a lot of double work going, but they had their own rotary files, and their own check-in cards, and their own systems.
Were students doing most of that work, or was it…?
The basic work was done by students, but everybody was responsible, you know, everybody who had a slice of the alphabet assigned to them was responsible for the basic maintenance of the file, so in… that was one of the little reorganizing things I did, because I was in charge of mail opening, and mail opening was just an all asses and elbows production effort, ‘cause that stuff came in and you just had to get it out, you know, much more than, twice as much as comes in today, you know, today there’s big backlogs they tell me: I laugh (ha ha), I sneer, I scoff.
What, because it was centralized?
Because it was centralized, because so much of it was coming in all the time, and because there were more of them: there were more exchange titles, there were more gift titles, there were more purchase titles: there were more snags and more unsolicited journals, ‘cause everything was cheaper and there was more money and everybody got whatever they wanted, you know, everybody could subscribe, you know, you could have multiple subscriptions, so that didn’t make any difference.
So a lot of titles there were…?
Yeah, there were eight check-in cards for [laughs], so you had to know: another level of complexity, you know; if you had the latest issue of Time you had to know there was an order that you had checked them in on on the card, so you had to know: Oh, you know, okay, so Main is first, or we’re, Periodicals is first, they get one, and Humanities Graduate Services gets number two and SOCS gets number three and Bio-Sciences gets number four and REFE gets number five or something like that, so you had to watch little boxes to make sure that, you know, volume 214: number 37 had been checked in on the card that you were passing by and not on the cards to follow.
And if somebody made a mistake or if you got shorted then whoever was at the end of the line wouldn’t get theirs.
Yeah, Philosophy [laughs], the Philosophy Library.
They were always last?
Yeah, they were always last…
Standing behind the door.
…‘cause they weren’t a real library, you know, just a quasi-departmental library. Yeah, and that made claiming even more incredibly difficult than it was [laughs], because how can you possibly… I mean here’s eight titles, you know: two of them come on gifts, some of them come through this vendor and some of them come through that vendor, some of them you go pick up over at Dave’s [Smoke Shop], so it was really a mess, really a madhouse: no wonder them people are crazy. So that was the background, and in Periodicals there was also, you know, there was a claiming unit headed by Grace Abiko, and then there was a, it was kind of a records management database setup unit run by Judith Walker I think at that time; and across the hall there was like a database management unit, and everything had to be in sync, you know, and in fact it got to the point where the people in, the serials cards were actually set up, or the format was set up when a new serial came to life or when a card had been filled up, that work had to be done by these people in this special database management input and editing unit, ‘cause you had to set the cards up just right: sometimes you had to write the names of the months in in different languages, so all that stuff had to be done just so to make it go.
And there was a special unit to do that?
Right, set up over across the hall. Linda [Turitz] was involved in that a little bit, although I think she was in Serials Cataloging at that time.
Did that unit evolve into… did they sort of…?
I think it kind of got absorbed into everything else. It’s sort of where, you know, sort of what Judy [Walker] was doing when, remember Periodicals was on one side of the room and then Judy’s unit, whatever that was—you know, five years ago, whatever that was called—I think they changed the name of it by then when [Joe] Barker took over: that was the evolution of that unit, you know, they sort of were the caretaker unit or the control unit between Periodicals and Serials Cataloging because, you know, those two people they didn’t like to speak to one another, those two groups, and also between the branches and Periodicals certain times: just on database functions and sort of control functions, that sort of thing, but the actual, you know: ‘did some issue come in and was it sent to us’ kind of query from the branches, that was still directed to Periodicals. And so… well before Faye left we set up this deal where, you know, we split up the duties, and so I made sure I had—she gave me complete control, so I took it—and so I worked in each of these units: I sat down in Binding, learned everything there was to know about binding.
Just because you wanted to be able to have a handle on all the jobs.
Yeah, because I wanted to make sure; plus I just liked the work, you know, I liked all the different kinds of work: sat down in Claims, learned about claims, you know, spent my time on the public service desk, made sure I had a file assigned to me so I knew what everybody was up to and faced with and getting away with [laughter]. So I was going along pretty well there, making lots of changes and setting things up so that, you know, there was a little bit more accountability and a little bit more free flow and a little bit more communication between the central units and the branches, because that was a big, big hole: there wasn’t hardly any. So I made field trips to all the branches and got to know all the serials folks and saw how they were treated, you know: like scum! like dirt!
Is that right?
A lot of ‘em, yeah, because, you know, serials, there’s a big flinch factor there with serials, especially among librarians who think they ought to know everything but, you know, really are just playing along, don’t understand serials: there’re a lot of serials people who don’t understand serials, you know, serials managers who don’t understand serials: it’s a complex kind of—you know—it’s a complex kind of affair. I mean I remember when Joe Barker took over Serials. Somebody told me that he made the remark that: Oh, serials are just books that refuse to die or something like that, you know, some smart-ass remark. Yeah, you don’t know. Later on he recanted I understand. So I was, everything was doing okay there. We got rid of some of the problem people: some stayed, some…
How did you manage, how did you do that?
Well some of ‘em just left and some of ‘em just got shunted various places and some of ‘em were on like a short leash, like Mister [Alan] Silverman, I mean he was [laughter], he was a short leash. There was a time where, you know, one time Faye looked up and said: Where’s Alan? ‘cause he was supposed to be on the desk or something like that, usually he was never late for the desk, and she found out that he was in the Morrison Room, down in the old Morrison Room, you know, so she went down there [laughs], she got him and sort of carried him, she got him back, you know, pulling him by the earlobe.
So he usually wouldn’t blow off his desk duties.
No, he was, you know my feeling was, when I saw what was happening was: Okay, yeah, you know, he doesn’t do certain things but we need somebody like him on the desk, he’s an excellent presence on the desk because not only did he know a lot about serials and not only was he comfortable with the DataPoint database, which then was a big feature, there was a terminal at the public service desk for the first time, he [laughs], because of his intimate familiarity with many of the issues of the journals that came in…
Because he read them.
… because he read them [laughter], he could deal on an article level with queries [laughter]. Nobody else, very few people could do that, you know: somebody asked he could say: Yeah, that was in the September issue of Saturday Review, or whatever, you know, Times Literary Supplement or something like that. So that was good.
For our readers I suppose we should say that Alan Silverman tends to read everything that at all interests him, and a lot does interest him…
That’s right.
…that comes through Periodicals, so…
And it’s always been that way, yeah. Now he’s hurtin’.
Yeah?
They took him off his public service assignment.
Really?
He’s hurtin’, after twenty-seven years. He’s going around saying: Can you believe it, after twenty-seven years? Yeah.
Wow.
But then it was just natural that everybody would do a little bit of each: a little bit of tech services, a little bit of public services, and not only was it good just to vary the pitches up that way but it really helped Public Service to have people who were familiar with check-in at the desk, as opposed to, you know, students or… as opposed to it being turned over to Main Circulation or something, which was always something that we had to fight off.
Because they would propose that every once in a while?
Because they knew how to read, yeah, right; because they would know how to read check-in cards: a peculiar little skill in itself. Plus they were the ones who did what was called file marking. The stacks in Periodicals, you know, they were… I guess it was about as big as it is today except it was all periodicals and not newspapers and other things, but it was shelved in title order instead of call number order, which meant there had to be a way for the shelvers to actually get the item into the right place, and some of them, you know, they could be in any number of languages, so they evolved for it a system called file marking which allowed people who were doing shelving to read the little symbols and to travel from the first part of the title on into the second part of the title and all the way down to the middle, sometimes, you know, you’d see five, six, seven or eight marks, so you’d proceed from a left angle bracket, which was where the title started, so you knew that would get you directly into that area of the alphabet, and then you would look for a first slash under a letter, and then you would go a little further, and if there were more you’d look for two slashes, then three and so on. That’s how you were able to zero in, vector right in on that area where the thing, so even if there weren’t some issues there that looked like the issue you had in hand, there was just a blank space or you had to make a space, you could do it. So, you know, patrons coming in from the stacks often couldn’t find the stuff, well you’d go into the stacks and help them because you had that particular weird little bit of lore at your, little coding or encryption at your disposal, you know, if it was done right and if the shelvers were paying attention. But all the shelving, all that work was done by students, and a lot of the low level check-in, if it could be packaged, was given to students, which is what I did when I was a student there, you know: they would manage to… they would get their little bundles and their little areas and go through them and sort out things that they thought students should be able to check in.
Uh huh, so they weren’t given the really difficult ones.
Right, and my improvement on that—I tweaked it a little—was that that was actually done at the mailing table: you could do it at the mailing table so it wouldn’t have to be done by the LAs, so they could, you know, spend more time on work [laughter]. So, yeah, Faye and I were going great guns, and she was great; everybody respected Faye, for some reason, because, you know, she’d come down hard on people sometimes but she’d always do it with a sunny disposition and a big beautiful smile, and, you know, just charmed everybody out of their shoes, plus she was so fair, she was so incredibly fair.
Really?
Yeah.
So was Ivan the only holdout?
So everybody felt, well, you know, he was in a different world but I didn’t hear some of this stuff until later about it. Well, no, there were holdouts; there were people who thought she was too fair maybe. Some people thought she, you know, wasn’t quite tough enough or wasn’t quite able enough or didn’t give them enough direction, but as far as I was concerned she was tops, you know, because I was in that chain of relationships with Dorothy Gregor and Faye and me, and, you know, we were more or less on the same wavelength. Faye and Dorothy got along well; they never had to… you know, they got along telegraphically, so as far as I was concerned everything was just right, just the way it should be, you know. And I had them snowed, or at least I thought I did. They thought I was okay; they thought I was hot, and, you know, that’s all I cared about.
Did you really feel though like it was kind of, that you were conning them?
No. No. I was working hard; I was working real hard, I was…
Suppressing all your…, or were you not having to? It sounds like you were really into the work.
Oh I was really into it; I was tearin’ it up, and I had evolved this idea that it’s pay-back time, you know: thank you Mister Universe Man for letting me have ten, twelve years off; now [rubs hands together] let’s see what can I do, and I worked real hard, and I was getting a lot more money, you know: I was an LA II one day and was an LA IV the next day: I was rolling in it. I remember when I got my first paycheck ever in which I cleared over a thousand dollars—whoa! heavy duty! So… and they worked hard: Dorothy and Faye worked incredibly hard. Dorothy was always here on Saturdays, sometimes Sundays.
Really?
Yeah, working real late, yeah, she worked real hard; and Faye took work home and worked real hard, so it was the least I could do was to work real hard too; plus, you know, there were people looking at me, you know, all these other dozen or so LAs in the Periodical Division, so I didn’t want to… first I didn’t want to, you know, I didn’t want to be like them [laughs] because a lot of them were just timeservers, just skaters, and I thought the work was important and noble enough to, you know, to devote some energy to, but also I wanted, you know, I was conscious that I had a role to play as well in terms of, you know: I couldn’t say anything to them if I was screwing around, and I wanted to get some of ‘em [laughter]. But then everything changed a little, well things changed quite a lot when Julie [Rinaldi] came in because although Faye was still the head of Serials and people could still go to her, Julie was the head of Periodicals and Julie had a completely different style.
Really?
Yeah. She was hotheaded, you know, she expressed herself directly; she was temperamental; she wanted to… she didn’t like the fact that our desks were out in the open—she wanted a little cubicle around herself: she actually put one up.
And you said that was before cubicalization took hold, so that would have been an innovation.
Uh huh, that’s right, yeah, everybody was in sight of everybody at all times, except for Althea had a little cubbyhole for binding back in the back, and then there was a break room, big break room.
So why do you think she…? It was just her style, huh?
Well she needed, she felt she needed more confidentiality because she saw right away there were problems and she was gonna crack down.
So she wanted to be able to talk to people, like to grab ‘em and pull ‘em into her cubicle and give ‘em what for.
Right, without anybody actually knowing what was going on or actually—of course, you know, you couldn’t help seeing people go in there, but still…
…and come out reduced to tears [laughter].
Actually it had kind of a different effect: people became belligerent.
Really?
Yes, and people became, people didn’t like the way she was doing things at all; and I was watching and I was just watching her and I liked Julie. As we know, as we’ll see, I’d go back to work for her again after a period. But, you know, she’s another person whose heart was deep deep into the work and she just couldn’t stand it that other people weren’t pulling their weight, so she was gonna get ‘em; she was gonna get Alan [Silverman]. We set Alan up in this—Alan, we decided, Julie decided that we should make a time log of Alan’s comings and goings for a couple weeks, so we did; and then she called him in—I was over there—: she presented it to him; he just blew up: he said: You’ve been doing this?! and he went right up to Dorothy and then Dorothy called Faye and me and Julie up and said: You can’t do this—that’s how good Dorothy was—she said: You can’t do this, you have to, you know…she said some, she had no particular love for Alan, but this is not the way to do that sort of...
She just thought it was done wrong.
It was done wrong, yeah. I mean if you want to do this—first of all, she said, I wouldn’t recommend that you do do this, but if you want to do this you’re going to have to tell him that you’re going to do it [laughter]: you can’t trap somebody like this. And, you know, part of this I’m just [under his breath]: That’s right; and I’m just observing Julie, I’m observing the reaction. But, let’s see, what else did she do. Well she was just, she was just very outspoken and temperamental; flew off the handle a lot, you know; gave people a real hard time, you know, when it came to written performance evaluations, you know: read ‘em the riot act; wouldn’t give ‘em satisfactories, and she just rubbed everybody the wrong way.
Who had actually hired her? Who had done the interview?
Well it was one of those—Faye hired her—but it was one of those where you go through lots of, you know, for professional positions you troop through lots of, lots of different groups, you know, to get a day’s worth of interview, but it started out real good, she was gonna, it looked good.
Do you think that in a way Faye wanted somebody whose style was different from hers, was…?
No, no, I don’t think that that wasn’t the, I mean this didn’t come out until later; I mean they ask questions like: what’s your worst personnel problem? but, you know, they can’t really get to how it will be, and Julie changed, you know Julie… she’ll say that however it was with her was a reaction to what she saw, to what she was presented with, and so, you know, it just… and there were other things going on too, but everybody was just uptight all the time, and that was the time when Sherry Hughey was assigned also to Periodicals. So, let’s see, and some of these other people who had left, like Grace Abiko had left and we didn’t, I guess Sherry Hughey took over that position, but there was a public service, a circulation supervisor left, and we didn’t get anybody, we didn’t get another line, so things were starting to get tight too and the work didn’t change. I think Lea Mascorro became the Circulation Supervisor at that time. And also at that time a really interesting thing happened: the campus system-wide … in the LA series there were four grades: LA I, II, III, IV, four classes, and system-wide had been working, unbeknownst to a lot of people, on reorganizing the Library Assistant series, and in eighty-three or so, they did: they presented a new Library Assistant series that had five classes in it.
So it had gone, four was the top then, so you were at the top.
Yeah, I was at the top, and I was almost topped out by then too, ‘cause, you know, I’d gone through two or three promotions, yeah, so I was pretty much topped out at four. So they presented this, sort of just sprung it on everybody, and at first everybody thought: Well, you know, they just added one on top, but as they looked into it they saw that everything had been rejiggered: the language was different, you know, the language between the old series and the new series was different; there was a lot more detail about the difference between Library Assistants and librarians and that sort of thing, and the demarcations between twos, threes, fours and fives and so on were very clear, clearer than they ever had been.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so [Joe] Rosenthal, to his credit, said: We want everybody to look at these and if you think your job would be in a different classification: send in a new job card with a request for a reclassification. And then he asked for people to be on a reclassification panel to look at all these things, so I volunteered: Get me. So a panel was set up composed of a classification analyst from campus personnel…
We’re gonna have to turn over.
Yeah.
[End Tape 20, Side A]
posted by epikles at 4:04 PM
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