Reflections of a 'head' librarian

Reva Landy

A very short time into the profession, looking at myself from the outside, like Snoopy, playing the role: "Here's the librarian, filing catalog cards...." Somewhat distanced from my actions by the thrill (still!) of having a job in the Bay Area, and by the strange feeling of doing precisely what I went to school to learn how to do (the ex-English major's astonishment at the rewards, after all, of vocational education.)

This feeling of mild unreality is encouraged by circumstances - being the sole librarian for a small but venerable college, technology-oriented, with a name out of an Andy Hardy movie (Anonymous Polytech, for the moment.) Channelling scattered departmental collections into a central facility, modes and methods mine alone. The mail floods in - to Order Librarian, Acquisitions Department, Serials, Reference, A-V Specialist, Head Librarian - and it's all for me. So are a private office with my name on the door, a massive old oak desk, and administrative status, of sorts. Power tripping just comes naturally. I'm a double Leo.

It's a limited domain, though - faculty less than 20, students maybe 73 - and this, along with the novelty, for everyone, of having a library where a machine shop once stood (a metamorphosis that, to me at least, is an unending source of satisfaction) presents some interesting and possibly unique advantages. Disadvantages, too, of course. (Ah, Dualism! Blessed structuring device, Wellspring of expository writing!) And a few combinations of the two.

The kind of small-town intimacy that makes "patrons" people, makes me a person, too. More relevant than my being one of two women under 40 on the premises (there are 5 or 6, total) is the fact that I'm obviously hip; as much of a freak, in fact, as my responsibilities (whatever that means - read superego?) will allow me to be. This has encouraged some good conversation, as well as several free offers and commercial propositions: a handful of Alice B. Toklas cookies, a chunk of opium, a lid of decent grass ($12), promises (only that, so far) of LSD & psilocybin. (Would another course in the handling of non-print materials have helped? I doubt it. I could file everything under MIND--DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION, and maybe put the stronger psychedelics in A-V....)

The problem here, if that's what it is, tends to resolve itself, and is offset from the start, by the pleasure of finding that the students aren't all the 1950's D.A.-haircut hoods or uptight engineering types I'd imagined them to be, before we were people to each other.

In the same department - Acquisitions - and division - Unsolicited Gifts - is the subsection O.P.A., for Other People's Attics. Large quantities of 20-year old bestsellers, Reader's Digest condensed books, seed catalogs, how-to's for inspirational living, slim volumes of wretched verse. Faculty and staff are delighted, and so proud, of the New Library, with all those empty spaces on the shelves.... And they've ransacked public library used book sales, the annual Bolinas rummage event, and their own houses, for treasure which I receive, of course, with a smile. (She couldn't be grimacing; librarians like books, don't they, and the more the better, right?) Little choice but to smile, and say thank-you, when the donor is the Dean of Men or even the President. Can't quite see myself delivering to them a mini-lecture on Developing a User-Oriented Collection, or Concepts of Book Selection for a Small College Library. Smiling suffices, as long as "processing" continues to mean whatever I want it to mean - the circular file, in some cases, or storage shelves pending a course in comparative schlock fiction. Not that a ton of garage sale bargains would "lower the curve" of the collection's quality: the fiction section is almost non-existent; there are perhaps 150 books, out of several thousand, in the first five classes of Dewey; and the average copyright date on the technical volumes, the "backbone of the collection," is circa 1918.

Money is obviously a large hassle. We're hoping for a sizable grant for book purchase, but the foundation secretary won't be invited to come talk to me until the marble relief sculpture of the college founder's wife, which lives on the wall by my desk, has what the President considers a suitable frame, and things look just right. The logic of this tactic escapes me (Is it to make us look reputable? Wouldn't a shoddier mounting indicate greater need?), but I don't know much about how foundations think. I did get permission to buy a few paperbacks, and was reimbursed out of the petty cash. Lots of people are hoping the lady gets framed real soon.

I rely on other libraries, via phone, even for simple answers out of BIP, which we can't yet afford to buy. Our Britannica is 1957; our Encyclopedia of Science and Technology nearly 12 years old. My indispensible two volumes of Dewey are on extended loan from the Library School at Berkeley.

No point in going on about finances, which are everybody's problem right now. Something less familiar to all, and less immediate in its consequences, is the solitude - which, on a day-to-day basis, I enjoy, and probably even prefer to being ninth assistant reference librarian at some Super-University. It's a question of information-gathering, really, not isolation per se. Hard to keep current just by reading Library Journal (and can't afford, naturally, their brand-new hot-line service, but thanks, guys, for the thought), and professional contacts are few. When library school buddies get together, they may talk about their jobs, but they don't, for some reason, enumerate and describe all the significant new developments in the World of Librarianship. Conventions might help, but who has time and money and besides, they might not.

One direct consequence of going, alone, into a starting-from-scratch situation: where do you get things like cards & pockets & date stamps & book repair tape? Nobody in library school mentioned Demco to me, and if you don't happen to stumble across it in conversation or the Whole Earth Catalog, checking out stationery stores can get to be expensive, and a drag.

I feel good about the services I'm providing, limited as they are by finances. But there's no microform, A-V, computers, no plug-in to regional networks. Thus, half the library literature just doesn't pertain, and I have a schizophrenic sensation that a) it should (despite my own Luddite tendencies), while b) the size and specialization of the collection, and the limited interest of its users, and, again, the moeny thing, would seem to make all that technology irrelevant for old Anon Poly. Would like to rest secure in the belief that the more aware, etc., I am as a person, the better I'll be as a librarian. But those ads for hardware just keep comin'....

Finances are always a hassle; perhaps the extremely limited collection and clientele, and the Brand-new-library-let's-stuff-it-full-of-books syndrome, aren't so universal. There's a more subtle problem, based not so much in books or budget, but in me, the student body, and the American educational system (for a start.) Some genuine statistics: about one-third of the students use the library, the majority for study rather than use of reserve materials or checkout. (There are 18 books presently in circulation. I told you it was small.) Another third have a violent indifference, or worse, toward libraries in general and toward this one in particular because it's here. The remaining third don't know the library is even happening, and wonder who the hell I am. (No curiosity about finding out, either.) I may be paranoid, but I think most public and academic libraries are held in slightly less ambiguous regard by the communities that surround them. That negative attitude toward libraries was here before I was, and involves a lot of issues I couldn't begin to deal with here. I'm not going to accomplish any radical changing of heads through messages in the student newspaper, signs on bulletin boards, bring-in-your-old-paperbacks-and-share-them-with-others campaigns, tho I'm trying them all. Turning non-readers around is a fulltime job for someone. But, just perhaps, I can get through the first layer - the preconceptions about libraries as places of death - by being hip and friendly and helpful and non-authoritarian, and hoping word gets around.

Something I've noticed in the course of thinking about and writing this. I cast it, first, as parody; it's a natural: sensitive, earth-loving lit. major confronts Technology, as played by an institution with the postage-meter slogan "Silent partner of industry." Beauty and the Beast; either that or a serious, self-searching examination of the hypocrisy possibly inherent in working for "them" - the machine people. But the drama of confrontation - Art vs. Industry, Organic Gardener vs. the Polluting Technocrat - isn't really happening, except on the most intellectual level. "An engineering school; oh wow! How could you?" Stereotypes fade when the old oil industry man is a fine, gentle fellow and a Sierra Clubber, too; the Evils of Technology, reduced to books and the academic game, are almost unreal. I saw much more clearly the absurdities of the job before I got into doing them; mechanisms like that help us all to keep our sanity, cop out, work for money when we'd rather be doing something else.

My original purpose was to blow the cover that library school pulled over the image of Librarianship - the clearcut choice between academic and public, reference and cataloging; the community of colleagues everpresent to advise you, a collection of books this side of seedy, paperwork and administrative responsibility somebody else's concern, at least at the beginning. I don't know how well I've done that, if at all. Did I mention that I like my job? Strange mixture of resignation and enthusiasm; part of my pleasure is in the perversity of my being here, the clash of consciousnesses (even if it's only ringing in my head.) Hope to change some minds; that seems to override guilt for helping them build their bridges and electronic surveillance devices and waterfront highrises, however tenuous my connection with all that. Better that I'm here, a humanizing influence, rather than some technician with two M.A.'s who'd only reinforce their values. Rationalizations to sustain me in argument or introspection; they seem to work, and are probably valid. That I could learn more about librarianship elsewhere is obvious. That I could learn more about me, I'm not so certain. And that I could be of more use to Humanity .... I think we'd all better look around.