[yul-naco] FW: LCCN: appreciating Barbara Tillett, part 1

Tue Feb 11 14:08:19 EST 2014

May be of interest ...

Steven Arakawa
Catalog Librarian for Training & Documentation
Catalog & Metadata Services
Sterling Memorial Library. Yale University
P.O. Box 208240 New Haven, CT 06520-8240
(203) 432-8286 steven.arakawa at yale.edu<mailto:steven.arakawa at yale.edu>

From: Library of Congress Cataloging Newsline [mailto:LCCN at LISTSERV.LOC.GOV] On Behalf Of LCCNEditor
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2014 1:52 PM
To: LCCN at LISTSERV.LOC.GOV
Subject: LCCN: appreciating Barbara Tillett, part 1

LCCN, Feb. 11, 2014
ISSN 2324-6464

LCCN: appreciating Barbara Tillett, part 1
by Melanie Polutta, with material from an interview of Barbara Tillett on November 14, 2012

On December 16, 2012, Barbara Tillett retired from the Library of Congress, after 18 years as Chief of the Policy and Standards Division. Shortly before that time, I grabbed the opportunity to interview her about her career. Since then, I've been trying to figure out how to share with you all the fascinating conversation that we enjoyed. I actually did a recording of that conversation, which enables me to share with you exactly what was said in the interview, but the actual transcript would be a trifle too long. So what I would like to do is share some snippets of the conversation to highlight the work of Barbara Tillett, both before she came here to the Library of Congress and the highly important work she did once she arrived. Even though it has been over a year since she left, she is still leaving a mark on the field of cataloging, as we can witness both from her continuing work as the Chair of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (ending in December 2013) and her receipt of the ALCTS Ross Atkinson Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2013 LITA Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, and (with co-author Ron Murray of the LC Preservation Directorate) the ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2013.

The first section of the interview that I would like to share with you discusses how Barbara ended up in librarianship. It wasn't exactly planned...

*******

MKP: Going back quite a ways...I did actually find a link that listed a lot of your career...it gave me a sense of the timing of your career... What led you to librarianship, because your undergraduate degree was in Mathematics?

BT: Yes, and I thought I was going to be a theoretical mathematician, and that just didn't happen. After I got my degree, ah, it was a weird chain of events.  There were all kinds of things going on, but mostly, the Vietnam War was happening.  The only jobs I could get with a math degree were doing missile projectiles for the US government, and I didn't want that. At that time, my to-be husband Steve was in the Coast Guard during the Vietnam War and he was stationed in Hawaii.  So as an undergraduate, I had been working in the library, that was my job - in fact, I was making more money being a babysitter than being a student helper at the library, but never mind - I decided well, why not apply for the library school? They had a library school at the University of Hawaii, and so I figured it would be a nice way for me to get closer to where he was, and so I did. Originally I had applied to be a math teacher in Hawaii, and they said, yes, come on out, and when I got there, there were no jobs.

MKP: Ah.

BT: So clearly, that path was not in the cards. I instead just went to library school there.  Not just, I really enjoyed it, and while I was doing that I was working for the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics, and I helped them with a tsunami document retrieval system, using a keyword search capability that was very new at the time, and we microfilmed all of the tsunami literature and put it into sleeves to make microfiche out of it, and then put the corresponding bibliographic data into an IBM system.  I worked with the IBM contractor at the time, and so, we developed that, and I was able to use some of my math background there, too.

MKP: Uh-huh, so sounds like you had an early interest in technology then?

BT: Yeah, yeah,

MKP: Or stumbled into it, I'm not sure which.

BT: No, I always have, I've always been very interested in it.

MKP: So, you feel it was a happy chance that led you into cataloging?

BT: Yeah, actually, I didn't start with cataloging, I started, when I was a work study student at the University of Hawaii, as I was getting my degree, I was working with the cataloging department there, using good old electric erasers, making catalog card corrections and filing. I was the fastest filer.  I was working in cataloging just peripherally there but I was also working in acquisitions and I was also working in their serials check-in operation and I helped them automate the serials check-in operation, um, moving from a Kardex file - I don't know if you're familiar with that -

MKP: I've heard of it - it's spelled K-A-R-D-E-X. (http://kohakenya.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/r-i-p-the-kardex/ & http://library.digitalnc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ncimages/id/4560)

BT: M-hm, and actually LC had them for a while early on too. And moving from that to a computer system so we could have copies of the latest holdings of each of the serials at each of the reference desks - because after library school, I was a reference librarian, science, technology, and medical reference.   I helped develop that system for generating, essentially, a printout of all the holdings of the serials titles, an alphabetical list of serials. So I was involved with lots of library technology early on, keyword indexes, that sort of thing.  I started the Ocean Science Information Center at the same time, because of the Hawaiian Institute of Geophysics connection. I always do, like, five things at once. My whole career has just been that kind of a pattern, yeah, [shakes her head]

...

BT: I didn't really get to doing cataloging.  After working there a couple of years the University of Hawaii essentially went bankrupt, and

MKP: Really!

BT: Yes, I was on the Faculty Senate and everything, but with salaries being cut, many of us decided we had to leave, which was sad because we didn't really want to, but a lot of us moved to California.  So at that time, I got a job at Scripps Institution of Oceanography as head of technical services, because I had all the background in doing serials and cataloging and acquisitions

MKP: and tsunamis.

BT: And tsunami document retrieval, very tied to Scripps, right. So, it was just a logical progression to be in charge of all of the technical services - all of the technical services was like ten or twelve staff - and I was the original cataloger, so I was doing cataloging for everything, from maps and motion pictures of all of the research vessel trips that they had to typical monographs and documents - we had a huge government documents collection - and international documents, as well as archives. So, it was a whole range, everything, serials, everything,

MKP: So it gave you a good grounding in the sheer variety...

BT: And then I also trained other people as we moved to AACR2, because that was the era where we were switching

MKP: Yeah

BT: from the old blue book to AACR2. I was training other people on that campus, and I also trained people from Ensenada, Mexico, which is where I met Ageo García, trained him in AACR2. [Ageo helped LC and worked with Melanie on RDA training in Spanish language.]

...
*******

And so we wait to find out what she did after finding her job too routine.

________________________________

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Melanie Polutta
LCCN Editor
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