1995 - SJSU - William Fisher

William Fisher
Professor, School of Library and Information Science
San Jose State University
San Jose CA 95192-0029

Interviewed by Doreen Cohen, February 17, 1995, at San Jose State

What would you say to the person who is entering a graduate program in library and information science; What would you say to this year's graduates?

I would indicate that I think it's a good time to get into this area of study, and I would really be interested in why they were interested in the program because we're seeing now I think for the first time a clear sort of two-prong approach of people that are coming to this program--and that is still the traditional I'm interested in this because I love books and library and children and this and that and the other kind of stuff, which has traditionally always been the focus that people have at least started with, not necessarily the focus that they may leave with. On the other hand, we are now beginning to see more people mentioning the technology and their interest in that and a recognition of knowledge of the overwhelming amount of information and wanting to participate in the group of people that want to try to get some handle that information and organize it and make it accessible. So, I think that's extremely interesting because while there's still a need for that first group of people, it's certainly I think the second group of people that probably reflects a little more where the profession as a whole seems to be headed. Certainly where the great deal of potential for the profession seems to be headed. ...I'm not ready to give up on those traditional kinds of things yet. There are places where they'll be able to go, to go through this program, get what we could still call a traditional education, and go out and still have very productive careers in the field doing predominantly those traditional things. They're going to have to come out of here with some knowledge of at least basic technology, especially communication oriented technology, and there's going to be fewer and fewer places where they can go and establish a career of any duration or of any quality without that. So there're going to have to have some basics. And actually in recognition of that to some extent, we're instituting one of our first real entrance prerequisites--to get into the program now beginning in the fall you have to demonstrate basic computer literacy. And in the past we have not taken that for granted and have offered a course which everybody had to take to give them that literacy. We no longer feel that we have the time in the program to take that time, and to take a full semester and get everybody at least at the same spot. They're going to have to do that on their own and they're going to have to do that now before they'll let them into the program. And even with that requirement, we're going to have I think it's something on the order of a six-hour workshop to get them up to speed with some of the interactive communication with e-mail, with accessing things through Web servers, gophers, things like that. And that's all going to happen within the first few weeks. The basic computer literacy is so that they can sit down in front of a terminal and do word processing, spreadsheet kind of functions and this and that and the other. And they can get that. They may not have gotten some of the other stuff because it's still just a little far out in front of some of these other applications. We're going to give them those, but it's going to be a real 6-hour kind of deal. You're either going to get it or you're not, and all that's going to happen pretty much before you really move into the program. Our official mechanism for communicating with students is the school listserv, and you've got to have access to our computer facilities, you've got to have access to the listserv. Otherwise, I mean you could do it without if you have a friend who can keep track of all this stuff for you, but you've got to have that access to know what's going on around here--to know deadlines, to know this and know that. We now have a program with 600 students throughout the state of California, and we have to have one way to try to communicate with all these people. It's not the perfect mechanism, but it's the one that's going to get the most people the most effectively.

The parting thing would be a little more difficult because we still see ourselves as a general purpose kind of library school, so we're placing everything from the school librarian that may go into a situation where it may be--and some of the school librarians we've placed have been more technologically advanced--than sending people to public or academic libraries. Dealing with that group of individuals and smaller children to people we've placed recently at real high-tech oriented firms where they're not doing anything like the more traditional library-related jobs. So, talking to them as they leave is a little more problematical. Probably the best thing I could say to them or try to reinforce, which would be the last thing they want to hear at that point in their lives, is that their education is really just beginning as opposed to ending because what we would see based on the prior scenario that we were talking about and what we've seen over the last few years with people coming in with the real traditional philosophy and getting here and realizing either things aren't as they seemed or getting into the technology that they really didn't know existed or didn't know anything about and they've heard the terms before, and they go out and that's the direction they want their careers to take. So, even in the time they're in school some of this stuff is changing so much that probably the best thing we can do is just reinforce to them that it's unfortunately just beginning for them, that the educational process is not over for them by any stretch of the imagination.

What is it that excites you about your work?

Well, it's the challenge of working with all these different people. It's the challenge of trying to stay at least one step and hopefully a couple of steps ahead of what's going on in the field so that we can going in the classroom and get people ready to be headed in the right direction. That's exciting. It's also a big challenge because in trying to stay a couple of steps ahead of the field and lead the program in that direction and with the time leads that we need to make for example curricular kinds of changes and things like that--and then there's the challenge of trying to assure people in the profession that we're not for example abandoning these traditional-oriented people at all because we seem to be putting a great deal of emphasis on the technology which is, I think, an issue for virtually every library school that exists now that are doing anything in regards to trying to keep their students technologically even with the status quo let alone trying to get ahead of the field. It's extremely difficult. To some extent, it's almost impossible to do because the field's changing so quickly. We're part of a very large bureaucracy here and it takes a year if not more to get any real curriculum revisions out. So even if...and we have to survey the field to see what people are just beginning to talk about, try to assess for ourselves the kind of impact we think something might have, begin to either integrate it into courses that currently exist--and of course this, then, becomes sort of a game--create course that are almost modular, we can take this 3 or 4-week chunk out of because it's now out of date, and we can take this now 3 or 4-week chunk and put it in, almost like computer components--a great analogy because it's usually the technology oriented kinds of courses where this happens but even in some of the others--and make courses that are flexible enough to change without having to go through the process of complete curricular revisions. It's really through SLA and other organizations I belong to now and all this lovely networking that we hear about because it's the only way I can even get a handle on it any more because I'm only about 3 years behind in my reading and that's because I'm having a good year and I'm making myself read some of this stuff every week and you just can't keep up with everything, especially trying to keep up with everything that's being written. And so that's where my contacts with people in the field become very, very important. And to some extent it's also the way I fudge it a little bit is in the way I make some assignments to some of my students with regard to what they have to read and bring back in to the classroom. And it's not assigned readings--I want everybody to go out and find--ideally--everybody find something different and everybody find something very current. Then they sort of write in effect what amounts to reviews of this stuff, and then after reading reviews if it really looks like something that I should read, it moves to the top of the stack and I'm only a year behind in reading that stuff as opposed to the other stuff, which is three years behind. It's the old scenario of I'm using the students is what it amounts to. I know instructors do that all the time. Some use them I think in a lot worse ways than I do because they're reading this stuff and they're getting something out of it I hope as well, but yeah they're out there in effect, whether they know it or not, reading the literature and screening it for me. And I'm only reading the stuff that I think is particularly germane or looking at an issue in a way that I haven't already seen it been looked at two or three or four times already.

Who would you say has influenced you in your professional life and how?

I knew you were going to ask me that. I would point to a couple of people. Two people in particular, and then a couple of people less so only because I haven't had quite so much direct contact with them. I've been very fortunate in my career, certainly in my career as a professor in working with two deans or directors that were both very good, very different individuals but very good as examples. The first is Bob Hayes, who was the dean at UCLA when I taught down there, from whom I learned a tremendous amount, and then the second person would be Jim Healy, who was here when I came up here to San Jose State. Jim stepped down now, but is still on the faculty, so he's still around and will be retiring at the end of the summer officially. To a lesser extent, Stuart Sutton, but Stuart hasn't really been here that long for me to have the time to build up the relationship I built up over a good number of years both with Hayes and Healy. And they both taught me a great deal about being an educator, concern for students, dealing with the profession, being able to be productive as a researcher, things like that. So, both of them, and to some extent it was luck of the draw, but I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with both of those individuals. To a lesser extent, Herb White and Jim Anaruzzo [?]. Herb in Indiana who I met early in my teaching career, and Jim to some extent Jim as well, and they were both not so much for personal contact, although I've had much more personal contact with them recently, but from some of this stuff they were writing, the fact that both of them were teaching in areas in which I taught, I sort of used them to some extent as models. And beyond those four that I would really sort of key in on, I have been I think fortunate just to have good working relationships with a lot of people. Just take the list of the last dozen or so presidents of SLA at the international level and being able to just talk with these people. Certainly in the last couple of years to be on the Board of Directors and have some interaction not only with the president but with everybody else on the Board. There's another individual by the name of Ed Evans who was at UCLA, was leaving when I got there, and I sort of took over some of the classes he was teaching and even though he was gone (he went to Denver, and after he went to Denver he went to Harvard, and is now back in southern California), he stayed in contact with me, asking me about course kinds of things like that. When I would see him at conferences, he would go out of his way and I know on a couple of occasions to the extent of being late to meetings to sit down and talk with me and ask me how things were going and this and that and the other, so again, that's a relationship that Ed and I still have to some extent because he's teaching for us and involved with our program. To some extent I sort of always knew that at a certain point wanted to have a career in education at this level. It wasn't in this field. It was to be a history professor. It was my background and I have a degree even at the graduate level. I was afraid you were going to ask this question. I went into teaching in this field more because I think the education I got was so bad, not because it was so good, and I thought I could do a better job. And so, although every instructor I had when I went to library school wasn't terrible, I certainly thought my education could have been a little more dynamic and I could have been challenged to work a little harder and some other things along those lines. And so when it came down to making a decision going for a Ph.D. and teaching, I figured I could do and perhaps have as much impact in this field as I could in a field that was certainly at that time and still is reasonably saturated. So it was pragmatic concerns as well, but I sort of gave up on history and went into this field.

What was the most rewarding experience of your professional career?

It's hard to really point out one single example. I can remember very clearly when I was a rookie reference librarian down in Florida the first time somebody came back to the reference desk --and I don't think I'd been there on the job more than 6 or 8 weeks--and a student came back specifically to thank me for helping him find some resources to do a paper, and it was either art or music, I don't remember quite distinctly what the subject matter was, but it was not only finding the resources, finding that these resources existed, he even had problems physically locating the stuff, and we both went upstairs and located the materials. And he came back to thank me, to let me know that he had in fact done the assignment and that he had gotten a good grade on this particular assignment. And, so that was the first time that happened. Fortunately, it wasn't the only time that happened. So that's one example. With teaching, those rewards are sort of there all the time. And I do have in addition to the sort of numerical evaluations in the classroom by the students every semester, I also have the students do a more narrative sort of evaluation and those are usually very positive and so you sort of get your reward that way by people indicating--for example, because I teach real popular classes like management--and some students are pretty honest about how they are not really looking forward to that class and 15-16 weeks of that kind of stuff yet by the time the semester was over they see the importance of why they had to take it--they enjoyed the class, they actually learned something and this and that and the other, and so I kind of get that reinforcement looking at these after I get those back from our testing and evaluation people.

Would you discuss whether or not you see today's challenges as being different from those of your graduating class?

Well, I think to some extent no. The challenge is exactly the same. I graduated in what was then being called the worst job market in I don't know how many years. And I think the only job market that can match the badness of that one is the current one. So, to some extent the challenge is virtually the same, and that is getting that now all too important first professional position. There are some things today that I think we do for the students that are a little more helpful. Some practicums, some field work--so they can actually go out and get some professional experience to put on a resume so they don't walk into a situation totally cold. My first experience working in an academic library was my first day on the job in Florida, and as I tell my students in the management class, which is why I tell them they're in that class, three hours after I had gotten in that building I was the only professional left in the building. And I was in charge with all of three hours of experience. The only kind of practicum I had was something that I put together myself with another student over the summer, which we were not doing for any kind of credit or anything like that. And that was in a public library and that was just to get some kind of contact with the public to have some of feel for what was going on out there. Because it was a one-year program. There wasn't that kind of time. And I don't even remember any more whether practicum or internship was even on the books as a possibility--and there were all the courses you wanted to take. So, I think to some extent, certainly here at San Jose State, we try to give our students a number of opportunities to get them out in the field and really get a taste for what's going on out there. Otherwise, I think some of the challenges are today the variety places you can go and utilize your degree, whereas when I graduated it was still pretty much, you were thought to be pretty regimented into one of the four basic environments. A few people were starting to identify information brokering as maybe some of those kinds of fields as a fit, a possibility, the first type of "things you could do with a library degree without being in a library" kind of book, or with people doing lectures on that, just hitting the market when I was graduating. It never occurred, I mean quite frankly, the whole idea of special libraries never really much occurred to me when I went to school--even though we were near suburban areas, it was a fairly rural, small community campus, so you didn't have a lot of the industries and businesses and things like that that you have in this area. So, for me, it was a clear sort of situation of I'm going to work in a public library or I'm going to work in an academic library. Nobody ever really helped identify other fields for me to go into. Today, I think the big challenge--if I were starting out as a student--the big challenge would be trying to narrow down the great variety of fields that you can get into--the different kinds of things I could do with the degree in the school or similar kinds of programs.

At the SLA dinner the other night, Jane Dysart made the statement, "Forget collections! Think of the school children using the internet today, and consider how you will meet their information needs tomorrow." I would be interested in your comments on that statement.

Well, that's a controversial and interesting statement, obviously showing from her perspective a good deal of belief in the now euphemistic (I don't know whether it's euphemistic or not) virtual library kind of thing. Probably it's going to happen. I don't know whether it's going to happen in my life time and I kind of doubt that it will. I think although we're going to get a lot more information electronically, there's still going to be print based collections. I think the point of Jane's comment is more not really collection based but just a focus and an attitude, and that is...and that almost goes back to the situation we were talking about with regards to people interested in the program--the traditional kinds of people for which I still strongly believe there will be a role and a need, yet the other kind of people that are going to identify that more and more information is going to be available electronically, whether it's available also in print or not--that's simply going to be the wave of the future for any one of a number of reasons, some of them economic, some of the preservation-oriented, and some of them just shear we can't keep building buildings or adding onto buildings and housing all this stuff. And so I think Jane's comment probably deals more with the fact of realizing that within another generation people are going to think first to turn on a computer or go to a certain kind of screen or service to get information before they think about going and taking a book off the shelf to get information. Right now, I think a lot of people still probably think in terms of going to that book on the shelf first if it's available and it's current. Maybe there're some places where it's almost fifty-fifty, and a few cases we probably have people who get most of their information via a computer as opposed to going to the shelf. Last year I was doing some research and I was working under a fairly tight timeline, and I was doing some database searching and I was specifically looking for those items that were indicated full-text online because I wanted to get everything printed out right at that terminal and I didn't want to have to--I didn't even want to look to see whether we carried subscriptions to these things over at our university library and let alone think about going over there to get them because at this point I was searching fairly late at night and it would have been the next day. And I wanted to get some of that stuff and start reading it and analyzing it that night. I'm going to assume that that's not a typical case for most people in the world, but you probably do have people that will tell you that they're getting 80% of their information from their terminal in one fashion or another. Eventually, I think more and more people are going to get those kinds of numbers, that high of a percentage, of where their information is coming from. Especially, if we're seeing things like these kinds of kiosks that Gore and some of these other people are talking about in--and I don't care whether they're in post offices, I don't care if they're in public libraries, I don't care if they're just out on the street near a post box--if we see that, that's really going to tell us a lot about where information...the format information's going to take in the next generation.

If you were going to interview someone in Silicon Valley about our profession, who would you pick and what would be your reasons?

Well, I would talk to Monica Ertel over at Apple. A.--highly visible, B.--gets a great deal of support from Apple, support with regard to...she goes to all kinds of wonderful conferences, stays on top of and ahead of a lot of what's going on and certainly having been on the board in the last couple of years I've been able to...I sort of new that about her to some extent, but I've never really had the opportunity to talk with her to the length that I've had the last couple of years. So, she would almost be the first person I would go to. There are some other people certainly in our profession that I would talk to. People, again, that are predominantly working in the high-tech industry and who've got to being staying on top of that. So that would be like a set of people who would include for example, Linda Vinker, some of the things that are going on over at Adobe. And when you talk about everything being full-text online that's a lot of it I understand that Adobe is really getting into seeing as the future. Then you have to look at, know for example about some of these big projects, for example the project that NASA's involved with, so I would talk to Mary [Walsh] or you, or some other people over at NASA to see how that electronic library kind of project is going on. And identify people that are involved in those kinds of programs, and those are the people that I would go to.

If you were not in this profession, what would you be doing?

Well, certainly if not in this profession as an educator, A.--I'd probably be in this profession as a practitioner. If I wasn't in this profession at all, well...there's a couple of things. I would try to...and at one time eons ago discussed the possibility of going into business with a friend of mine to do something dealing with athletics as it was an interest of both of ours. So, maybe my first choice would be to try to do something like that. At that point we were talking predominantly about running, but this is somebody that I've also done some other things with--our latest thing sort of was mountain climbing, so we would get into or probably try and make a living doing something along those lines. There's a friend that I have up here that we always --our big psychological release was putting together the model book store and going into that business. So, I'd probably be in some sort of business or another.

How do you go about changing with changing times?

Well, that's...A. I mean just keeping up with and trying to identify what those changes are, which is hard enough as it is. B. trying to see or anticipate what the impact of those changes are, because not all the changes are things that we...we may have to deal with them in one aspect or one way or another, but not every change needs to be addressed and needs to be incorporated into the programs. The other big thing is simply not to feel that sort of tied down to any one thing you do any more. Of course, that...I tell the students again in the management class...that there's a couple of underlying themes that we can't just talk about as a unit because they're going to hit upon everything, virtually every topic we're going to look at. One of those underlying themes is dealing with change, and you can't escape that. That's all there is to it. That nothing is really going to stay the same, and so you try to identify what your problems are, set some goals and objectives to deal with those, but you cannot think everything's working fine, you certainly cannot get overly comfortable with a system or set of procedures or the way you're doing business. Because everything's going to change and eventually you're going to have to make some adjustments if not give up on that altogether and do something entirely different. We're dealing with that right now in our distance education program in southern California that we're utilizing this semester for the first time interactive television. And we were just in a meeting this morning, a faculty meeting with some of the faculty that are doing this--they're some of the first that are really utilizing this technology and I'm not part of that group, but they were saying that some of the pedagogical techniques that we sort of rely on do not work in that kind of environment. And that we really have to evaluate what's going on in those classrooms. This semester we're taping everything, so even if I can't get over there and see them sort of live, I can go back and view the tapes and see what seems to work and what doesn't seem to work. And that's scary. It's exciting on the one hand, and you're sitting there thinking about the impact of this and what it can do for our program, but on the other hand, it's very scary thinking everything I've done and the success that I have built upon now is going to be challenged and I'm going to be starting almost from scratch. And that's, again, a little unnerving to think about it, but you can't be successful doing the same stuff over and over and over again. Maybe you could, and get away with that for a lifetime forty or fifty years ago because change didn't happen quite that rapidly, but you just can't do that anymore. So the big thing is developing that mindset that change is not something to be put off or gotten around...that it's something to be anticipated and something to be expected, something that when it happens you've got to be ready to begin to move with it as soon as possible. Because if you don't all it's going to do is overwhelm you. That's why you try to stay two or three steps ahead, so you can be positioning yourself in the right direction.

What would be the most important elements of your epitaph?

I don't know. Unfortunately, right now too much of my identity I think is in this office and in this profession. And that's a problem that I'm trying to deal with myself. So, my epitaph may be that I worked myself to death, which is my own damned fault if it is. And I would much prefer to have an epitaph of having been more of a well-rounded individual and not even having been successful in all these different areas, but having attempted a number of different things and not having spent quite so much time and been quite so focused on...well, more time to spend with friends and family and things like that. Some of the relationships...that have... struggling to maintain relationships with very fine people that I met and knew when I was a student in library school. And there's one or two people that I still have sort of contact with, but it's a struggle to maintain that kind of contact with. You remember when life wasn't necessarily quite so hard or you had quite so many things to do or deal with that you could go and visit with these people. And part of it is that there's one individual in New York and I'm in California, but I mean just the idea of sitting down with people and being able to talk about any one of a number of different subjects and to some extent I think the same thing is true for him because he's so focused on his job and his career, and I know a number of people in the same situation and I'm sure it's just that you're at a certain level of your career development, that age kind of range, etc., and that eventually there's a hub that I'm going to get over, God willing, that I won't have to...you know, you will have made it or you will have realized that you're going to make it as far as basically you're ever going to make it and you can begin to relax a little bit. And so I'm hoping that I'm getting a lot closer to that because it's getting pretty tiring.

Is there one other question that you would ask if you were doing this interview that we haven't touched on here?

No, I don't think so. You've done a good job of identifying important areas to look at and trying to ask some of the things that make people think.