1998 - IBM - Karen Takle Quinn

Karen Takle Quinn, Ph. D.
IBM

Interviewed by Doreen Cohen, February 20, 1998

This is Doreen Cohen interviewing Karen Takle Quinn, who was the librarian at IBM for 30 years. The interview is taking place at the NASA Ames Library on Friday, February 20, 1998. Thank you very much for joining me here.

You’re most welcome. Delighted to be here.

I have a few questions and we’re not necessarily going chronologically.

Good.

What I’d like to know first is what would you say to the students who are entering a master’s program at San Jose State, for instance?

Today…

Right.

Learn as much as you can about management principles, computer utilization and the integration of information and technology throughout your whole community.

And then…these same students…you’re addressing them again when they’re getting ready to graduate—would you add something to that?

Remember, the library science/information science degree that you’re receiving today is really a springboard to an adventure and career that may not be in a library, a physical library, because you’re really information managers. And you have now the knowledge, the understanding, the know-how and the wisdom to make the right choices to develop information resources and to utilize information resources across the world.

Is that anything what it was like when you got your degree?

When I got my degree, the Wall Street Journal had an article that said that there were 20,000 openings for librarians. I got 20 job offerings within three calendar days. I got the third highest salary for my class and there were 225 members in my graduating class, including some big names in the information/library field.

Well, I think things have changed a little bit…

There aren’t 20,000 openings necessarily. There may be if they aren’t called librarian, but called information manager or chief information officer or chief knowledge officer. Those are potential careers for librarians.

So, to be able to look at the different job titles…

To understand that you have an underpinning in the course that you’ve taken, or should have taken, that will allow you to grow into any of these positions. That is the wonderful base that library and information sciences programs should be giving you.

Tell me about first coming to work at IBM. How did you get there?

I was wined and dined by IBM management to come to the West coast. I told them that I wouldn’t come for just a one-day interview. I had to be able to stay a week so I could look at the housing/living facilities, etc. Burt Lamkin was the manager, and he really wanted me.

How did he find out about you?

I’m not really certain. I think it was at an ASIS conference in Philadelphia. But he knew that I had a lot of contacts in Washington, DC. He knew that I had had an opportunity to meet most of the people who had done anything in the information science field. I helped develop the first information science degree in the United States at Drexel. And that I worked with Claire Schultz and Eugene Garfield and a lot of other names that nobody today would know, but were the people who ran the government agencies and the large industrial firms like Bell Labs, etc. And he wanted to be able to use those contacts and he wanted somebody to come in that had that kind of background.

What was it that made you decide to go ahead and accept the position?

Well, I had a wonderful secretary/mentor, who said, you’ve never been in industry. You really ought to try it. After about a month of thinking about it—and I’m sure at that time most people were not taking a month to decide whether to go with IBM or not. I had also a Ph.D. offer from Case Western. Jesse Shera wanted me also to join his graduate program with a $5,000 dollar a year support offer. I decided…Case Western had old GE computers. Drake Gull_____ _____ [name?] was there at that time. The only PhDPh.D. program that I could find that combined information and engineering was in Oklahoma. And so I thought, well, I’ll go to IBM and I can learn everything I need to know about computers in about two years. And then I can go back to the academic where I really want to be. So I decided to make the leap. My parents were good enough to help me and drive me out to California and stay with me the first six months I was here and help me get settled.

So, exactly what position did you come out here in?

I came out as a systems analyst reference and assistant manager of the San Jose site library.

Santa Rita?

No, no—San Jose. San Jose had a research library at that point and that was a different function. This was in General Products Division. A week after I got there, I got a corporate assignment and I had the responsibility for information retrieval for the IBM Corporation for all employees West of the Mississippi River. I got a chance to do a lot of different things.

Librarian wasn’t in your title…

Well, I’m sure librarian was written in some title in IBM, but titles in IBM really didn’t mean a lot. The only thing they related to was the pay code.

After two years, you didn’t leave, so…

No—they kept giving me more toys! I started out with a full-text retrieval system where we could actually distinguish between the word "gap" in small letters and the chemical abbreviation for galiumgallium phosphide, which was capital "G" small "a" capital "P." I was having so much fun with all this technology and the exciting projects that I was getting a chance to work on. I worked on the barcode technology for the grocery stores, the money-changing devices for banks across the world. There wasn’t a product that got announced or was talked about—this was the year that was—that I didn’t get a chance to play a part of. I had a situation where the engineers would come and take me into the lab and show me the problem. And then I would go back and find the answer or solution. They wanted something called a diaphragm switch. I found it in the Journal of Blood. It was because I was a librarian and I knew how to search, and knew how to use the computer search and the manual search capabilities that I could do that sort of thing. And because I had an engineering background that blended very well with this community. The community, the engineers particularly, were very receptive to my support. They didn’t expect me to sit there and look pretty.

They expected you to be able to help them…

I acted as a professional, and my attitude was I’m here to help you find an answer, the right answer, to a problem. That’s my whole job. Whatever it takes to get that right answer—we can get it any place in the world.

When you think about the time that you did spend at IBM, what would you pick out as maybe one or two or three highlights?

The chance that I had to develop an integrated library…information library and learning center. Actually, IBM marketed the concept of information center, but I actually developed the first approach to that within the corporation in 1974. That was because I had these programmers who would have to use an end-user tool on occasion, maybe once or twice a year. Every time they came to use it, it would change. So I said, well, OK I’ll learn how to use the tool and I’ll keep up on the passwords and you bring your data and the two of us we’ll make this work. That was my approach to an information center giving the user support. When I was working on a problem related to the STAIRS product, I was up in Canada presenting a paper at the American Society for Engineering Education, and I had a half a day off. So, I went down to the branch regional office of IBM in Vancouver and asked if anybody there knew the answer to this very technical question related to this piece of software we sold throughout the world called STAIRS.

How do you spell that?

S-T-A-I-R-S. They didn’t. But then they asked me what I was doing. I said, I have this information center. I also have a library, but in the information center the users bring me their data and we use these tools to produce the reports or get the statistics or solve problems. That’s what we want to do. That’s what we want to market. For the next year or year and a half I flew up to Canada and helped the strategize the marketing plan. And actually ended up getting a few librarians jobs in Canada as part of the marketing team for the information center. At the end of that time, at the first end-user marketing rally in Canada, I gave a presentation to about 500 [SCs ?]SEs [systems engineers] and marketing reps. In marketing, they always evaluate presentations in terms of ranking them. Mine was in the top ranking, which I was absolutely amazed because I was the only development person there. What I had done, was I had called all the accounts I could get to, most of the accounts across the United States, to find out what the customers were doing and how they were utilizing the STAIRS product. Then I put together a presentation—it was very generic for that marketing group—suggesting to them various ways to employ this software for mining, for customs, for transportation, for organizational resource and documentation archives, etc. Just saying, now, if you have this kind of customer, this is how you might employ this product. That was very well received by that audience.

You keep talking about library and information center, and I just want to make sure I understand how you are using those terms.

The information center is more software-tool oriented. For example, today we have tools like Lotus 1-2-3. We didn’t have those in the mid-seventies. Or, when we did have them, they were only on the mainframe. Or we had statistical tools, and they were all mainframe oriented. Most of our tools would enhance and improve and change command language, format, data-entry format, etc. To be able to use those tools, we had to keep up with what those changes were. The end users couldn’t be bothered. They didn’t have the time to invest in that. The learning curve was just too much time for what they needed to get done in a short period of time. So, I kept managing the learning curve and just providing the support. To me, an information center is for end-user support for software products, which is what it really is in the marketplace today.

They could come to you, and you could help them do the task that they needed to do. They didn’t have to come up to speed on a particular software application.

That’s right—or they didn’t have to have the password to get on that system. These tools were located on multiple systems I had access to. Because I was very assertive as a librarian. I got access to information across the world. Actually, in ’77 I had my databases running in Hursley [?], England, in a resource-sharing environment. What was happening, our lab was brand new and we didn’t have enough computers to give our programmers sub-second response time. My files were very big, so it was politically smart for me to volunteer to move my big library relational databases to Hursley [?], England. I had the system automatically logging onto Hursley [?] at 4:00am in the morning. When anybody came in to start working and they turned on—‘77now—their terminal, it said HURVM6. HUR meant Hursley, VM6 was the mainframe we were operating on, the system we were operating on. It was difficult for my clerical people to understand when they pushed that enter key, that data went up to the satellite (we were in the satellite business at that time) and it went down to the computer in Hursley, England, and the data was really being stored and operated against in Hursley. There was a whole computer room right down the hall from me the size of a football field, or a little bigger, and they were sure that’s where that data was going. But it really wasn’t. It was really going to Hursley. Also, I got a whole computer in 1977, which was an IBM 3101, and an acoustical coupler that I could hang my phone in, which transmitted at a 350 baud line, which we thought was amazingly fast! The 3101 had 16 little bit switches on the front of it. Depending on which system I was going to, I had to set those bit switches. At that point, because of the telephone lines and the acoustical coupler and the security checks on the computer, if you got on in twenty minutes to thirty minutes, you did well. So, today, when you have to get on in thirty seconds or less or you think the system is sick, it’s quite a different world. Plus, it’s been fun to see this whole change.

The trip to Canada and all the things that came from that—it’s one highlight. Is there another highlight?

Well, the idea of an integrated library and information center and learning center was something new at the time I did it, which was ’74. I did that based on what I was reading about information resources management, which looked like it was the future for computers. The other thing—I was having problems getting staffing. So, I turned to a leaf in the management book that said you could use interns. So, I set up an internship where I brought graduate students in library and information science across the nation in to work on a full-time basis for six months. I’d fly them in, IBM would fly them in for an interview and fly them back home again, then we’d make them a job offer. They would come at a certain time and have a series of tasks to do.

These were paid?

Actually, what I negotiated was they got entry-level engineering salaries for the Bay Area. When I first went to Personnel and asked about this, they said, well, we’ve never done information science. I said it doesn’t mean you can’t. Here it says right here in the book. We have had some big successes out of some of the students. Others I’ve kind of lost track of. I don’t know where they’ve continued in their career. A lot of good people that I had a chance to work with, very talented students. I used to call the deans of the library schools and say, I need somebody to do this, this and this. Who do you have that might meet these requirements and might be interested in coming for six months. Through that I would get recommendations. So, we usually ended up with very talented people. A few people still in this area.

Just think, if you hadn’t had the program, you wouldn’t have done any of that…

One of my interns is a VP of a software company in New York, doing very well last I heard.

It would be a highlight that’s very satisfying… When you think about your professional career, can you think of one or maybe two people you would say have influenced you?

Into going into the career?

No, in your professional career…

My first manager was Jay Lucker, and he’s just recently retired as Director of Libraries at MIT. He was a good person to start with. John Harvey was the Dean at Drexel, who stole me from Lucker. I’ve had a number of excellent managers and mentors within the IBM Corporation. I always tried to have mentors both at corporate level and as lab director, men and women, around the corporation that could help me look at a problem or a situation from multiple perspectives. I think that people are willing to be your mentor, in most cases they were—it gave me special tutors. They really helped me look at, not just from the eyes of a librarian, but from their perspective as well.

Can you think of an example of something that maybe you did as a result of the influence of some of these people?

Well, somewhere along the line—I’m not quite sure who I learned this from because it was many years ago. It might have been Don Streeter, who was on corporate IBM. But what I would do, is look at my tool basket of what did I know, and look to the future in terms of where was the industry going. Because I had to have industry eyes, not just library eyes. I would get myself a theme for the following year and then I would try to add twelve mini-themes to that theme without telling anybody what the theme was as a way to grow my knowledge and my know-how and ability to make choices as well. But focussed with many focussesfocuses, so I had twelve building blocks. One year I chose that I should be visible outside of the library and I decided that I should do twelve presentations or publications within that year. And I did. And they were all outside of the library.

Was this person someone who sparked that idea in you?

I think maybe it was he, but I’m not quite certain. It have just simply been that you have to continue to grow. Although I also had that…I had a father who started me with my numbers when I was three, and taught me to add to twenty-one by the time I was five, and taught me chess to teach my mind strategy, and taught me decision tables at seven. So I was doing algebra by about the fifth grade. So, a lot of influence from home on learning and growing. My mother was very influential too, but more in the cultural side.

If you were not a librarian, what would you be doing?

I would probably have been an engineer, which is where I started or maybe a medical doctor if I would have followed my earlier…math and science were always my highest aptitude and I love technology. I love to teach and I like to share my knowledge, and that’s why I’ve gone on and gotten my PhDPh.D. when other people might have said, come on, put up your feet and play golf. It wasn’t my choice. I love to see the light that goes on in someone’s eyes when they learn something new.

How did you, then, end up going into the library field?

I was recruited by the head of the Library School at Rutgers and my girlfriend’s mother, who was the state medical librarian, who arranged the interview. She couldn’t get her daughter into library science, so she thought, well, she was going to do the second-best thing and pick her best girlfriend. I hadn’t really made up my mind. I had a scholarship to the University of Oslo. So, I kind of applied from Oslo to Rutgers and was accepted, and I think it was because…anyway, I was accepted. And when I came they were expecting this Norwegian girl. Well, they couldn’t have expected this Norwegian girl because my undergraduate degree was from Wisconsin. I was coming from Norway because I had a scholarship over there.

Your heritage is from Norway?

Yes, my parents are both immigrants. I had looked at library schools. It wasn’t just a drawing of a straw. I had decided, at that point, after looking at all the library schools in the country that Chicago, Columbia and Rutgers were the best at that point. I thought that Rutgers looked like the better school for me because the faculty seemed to be more forward thinking.

You were talking about being recruited. That sparked a question in my mind. Do you think that library schools should do more recruiting?

I think the whole library field needs to make people more aware, as we’ve said for a long time, about the image and the potentialities of people who are trained in the information/library field. Especially when you start looking at what are the real, marketable skills out there? Database knowledge is one of them. One of the students who just graduated from San Jose State recently got a job with a software company over in the East Bay. And the reason why he got the job was because he had a library degree because they wanted somebody who had knowledge of databases. He has this wonderful opportunity and is working with this good, growing, young company. Someone in that company recognized that training in library school was the right kind of training for the job they wanted this person to do.

They understood the terms. Sometimes we use terms like cataloging, and we find our counterparts are using metadata.

Oh, yes. And the interesting thing is that if you look back on the Data Dictionary, which was a big metadata. When we went to build the Data Dictionary way back in the ‘70s, they went and looked at library literature to look at classification. I always like to present cataloging as organization of knowledge. That was what it was called or referred to by faculty members at Rutgers when I was there. So, I always like to say, well, librarians know how to organize knowledge. And that’s a skill. They also learn to utilize users’ needs. There aren’t many professions that are taught to utilize users’ needs. The computer-human interface people are about the only ones that really look at needs. Most library schools have at least some training in analyzing users’ needs. That’s critical in today’s human-to-computer interface. It’s not only human-to-computer, but it’s human-to-computer to information resources. Yes, sometimes I think we ought to learn to say, well, it’s not really cataloging, it’s really organizing metadata. Because of the popularity, shall we say, or the utilization of that term, it’s been understood. Cataloging is something they did in the Dark Ages in monasteries when they had hand-scribed books.

So, it would help us to use different terminology…

Since, I think, a lot of the computer people have taken a lot of good ideas and used them from the library field and simply just changed the names, I think we ought to just update our terminology. Just use the same terms. We understand what they are and that helps the outside world to understand who we are.

What would be your strategy for changing with changing times?

A systems approach.

What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that people have to learn to use systems management approaches. Today, the two that I usually suggest to people looking at messy situations—a messy situation is a term that Atckoff, Dr. Russell Actkoff, has applied to this. Any time you’ve got humans involved, it’s a messy or complex situation. So, you need to really look at what are the attributes and the relationships of attributes and the goal of the system. And system is just a conceptual way of looking at the problem. The current two approaches that I suggest to students are soft systems methodology, which came from Peter Checkland [?] in England. His first book came out in 1981. And then the popularian system has been the work that Sanghe Senge has done, which is really based on the work of Arduousgyris and Forrester. His book came out in 1990, called The Fifth Discipline. Really, the book to go along with that is The Fifth Discipline Field Book, which is extremely useful. There’s a lot of software along with that, like I___[?]ithink® and S_______[?]STELLA ® [and vensim ®],, that allows you to create models. I prefer Checkland right now because I think Checkland is easier for people to comprehend and it doesn’t expect you to create a computer model right away. You can hand draw these things. Sometimes I think you need to, not just sometimes, I think you need to reflect on a problem and look at a problem from multiple perspectives to really understand what’s happening. Who are the players? What are their relationships? If you change the goal of a system, you actually change a system. I can give you a whole lecture on that, you know.

Would you say that you’ve actually applied those principles over time?

Yes.

Maybe you didn’t have that name for it…

Yes. I have always been…I have a very strong background in science and I’ve always used the scientific method to approach problems. I was taught in grade school to take a problem up and put it in a glass bowl and turn it around and look at it from multiple perspectives. I’ve tried to do that my whole life. It’s hard to do, sometimes, when you’re emotionally involved. You sometimes just have to step back. That was part of the training out of my home and out of my education, both grade school and high school. I had science from kindergarten on in a public grade school. I had something like 120 credits of lab science as an undergrad. Those were the easiest subjects for me—that and math. And I think the training at Rutgers was really systems based as well, because we did look at even management systems from a systems perspective. Well, we didn’t put strong systems labels on them. Then working with computer systems and doing all the systems analysis—systems is way of thinking. A way that your mind gets trained. That’s part of the reason why I could see where things were going and allowed me to utilize from Ned Herrmann’s perspective the upper-right portion of my brain. I really am a futurist. I really look at what’s going to be going on out there in the future. How do we integrate what’s happening.

Could you define the word "systems" for me.

Systems is whatever you want to call it. Systems has so many definitions. People think of systems as something hard, or like a human body as a system, a biological system. A system is really a conceptual view. You look at the goal of the system. You look at the components. You look at their interrelationships, their dependencies. Actually, the interrelationship among the components is what develops the structure. And you have to look at the supersystems and the subsystems. If you can do that…I used to play a game, an organizational game, when I first came to IBM. I would look at all the departments within my organizational chart, and I would figure out who was the next person, or two people, within each department who would move and try to guess where they might move to. It’s like a mental chess game to me. I never shared it with anybody, but it was my way to kind of analyze how each of these departments related to the organization. How the components, the people within the departments, related to their management and where else they might have the potential to move within that organization. Yes—I’ve thought of things from a systems perspective for a long time. And I really taught systems for a long time because many of the students at San Jose State may remember back when I was teaching library automation, that I made them do flow charts. And I made them do ______[?]. decision tables. I always made them do matrices, because to me that was the easiest way to present a lot of data in a small piece of work.

We’ll take a break here. What I’d like to do now, is think about the San Andreas Chapter and your experience with that. Could you tell me a little bit about how you first became involved with the Chapter?

I became involved with the Chapter before it was a chapter. When I came to California, it was the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter. Very early on I was a director for the Chapter, and I did…

For the San Francisco…

For the San Francisco one…and I did initiate the idea of library visits. I thought that was a good way for people to meet one another and to see what the different libraries looked like. As a newcomer, I wanted to meet the people and I wanted the opportunity to see what kind of a library they were working in.

At some point the San Andreas Chapter was formed. Were you part of that?

I don’t remember as I took a very active role at that point. I don’t know what was going on, but I thought San Andreas was the best thing that could ever happen because we were splitting off. I thought that was just a marvelous choice of names. I thought it was the right thing to do because the Chapter had grown so large. The meetings were just 500 to 700 people sometimes at a meeting session. It was just too many people—it was like a national conference. I belonged to both chapters over the years, or have until the last couple of years.

Have you had an active role in the San Andreas Chapter at different points, or was that formed when you were at a different place professionally?

I think I participated in little spots off and on, but I certainly haven’t been one of the major movers in the San Andreas Chapter. At least, I don’t feel I have. I did have them for a library visit three days after we put our library card catalog on a relational database. We had 85 people to an open house and tours of the Lab, and an opportunity for them to see the different tools we were using. I think that was very much appreciated by the local chapter and by the local librarians. I’ve also tried to contribute to the bulletin throughout. I spent, I was really very much tied up in international marketing in the early ‘80s and I was always working usually a twelve-hour day. Because even with the interns you couldn’t just expect them to know what to do. You had individual weekly assignments as to what they had to learn. There was a lot of time tied up in that. So, I probably wasn’t as free and there were plenty of people doing a great job. They knew if they needed me, I’d help. I’ve forgotten a lot of the things I’ve done. I know I was very active in CIN…

Cooperative Information Network…

But I think that that was before the San Andreas Chapter was formed—I just don’t remember any more. The San Andreas Chapter, to my recollection, was formed in the ‘70s. I started putting together this integrated information/library learning center in ’74. And designing a whole library and integrating all the services. I’m not sure I had time to breathe. And then I was always teaching at San Jose State, usually one course a semester until about ’85. Then I started teaching online from home in a distance…I helped put together a master’s degree program in information management, which was offered across the United States and Canada. I started teaching online from home in that in 1988.

Were you then involved in other professional groups?

Oh, yeah. In 1985, I was elected to Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists in the UK as a recognition of the work I had done. And I had belonged to the Society for Technical Communication, which originally was the Society for Technical Communication, no, the Society for Technical Writers and Publishers, STWP.

These were not local organizations…

Oh, yeah—STC has five local chapters. I tried to cover the field from the creation of a document to the information retrieval. I was also a member of FID, the International Federation for Documentation. I belonged to ASLIB, the Association for Special Libraries and Information Bureaus, from the year after I graduated from library school. When I was in library school, I decided that that was the best journal out there and that was the best way to keep up with what was going on. That was my way to keep up with what was going on with the rest of the world, was to read that literature. I also, you know, was in Southeast Asia for the Ford Foundation. I was a consultant on libraries and library automation awhile back. Lately, I’ve been active in the Bay Area Deming Users Group. I’ve been a member of the ACM. I’ve been a member of the American Management Association—everybody knows that’s rather a non-involvement, it’s more of a receivership. Just pay your dues. I’ve also belonged to something called the International Interactive Computer Communications Society [IICS]. That’s been a really good group. The group in San Francisco is very heavy into multi-media, but it’s a world-wide organization. They’ve got some interesting things. They’ve got some great programs going on.

Typically, the San Andreas Chapter would have several dinner meetings and they’d have a speaker. What about these other organizations? What is it that you’ve found to be of benefit?

IICCS IICS doesn’t have a dinner meeting. They have generally a buffet that is paid for out of the dues or out of a sponsoring company. And they have speakers or panels on copyright law, new technical things that are happening. The ACM has, like the human-computer interface group, has some very good seminars at the Xerox PARC auditorium. The Deming Users Group has a meeting once a month, usually at 3:00 in the afternoon, for two hours, two and a half hours, with an excellent speaker. I’ve also been going…I just keep learning from different groups. I’ve been going to the Web Guild. I’ve been going to a lot of different, kind of changing direction—I’ve been going to Organizational Development Network because I’ve moved more into organizational development and management.

The professional organizations that you’ve talked about and your participation in them has been that you’ve been able to go to something they’ve sponsored and they bring you up to date on something…

Yeah—I’ve learned something. I’m always looking at the return on investment. If I spend this much time to go to someplace, how much am I going to learn, what am I going to gain, what am I going to walk away with? I like to go to the Special Libraries to see friends. Some of the seminars that I’ve gone to have been excellent. The one they had up at Genentech was very interesting, especially the discussion of the use of database with genetic tissue matching. These are the kinds of things. So, my interests may not be exactly the same as some of the other members of SLA. I think we grow and we change as we grow in terms of where our interests are.

What would you like to see the Chapter do? What would make it interesting for you at this point?

I’d like—since we’re in the Silicon Valley—I’d like to know about all the new, exciting start-up companies, what they’re doing, what’s the technology, where’s the technology heading? I’d really like a market-research approach to what’s happening in this valley. I’d like us to be on the leading edge of learning and communicating and dealing and making these entrepreneurs understand the role that an information specialist, information manager or an information provider can offer them as they’re starting up. I think there’s a great lack of understanding where, if we could get together with these people and understand what they’re doing and they could understand what we could do for them. Not necessarily do we want to do a hard sell to them, but more of a soft sell in terms of understanding. I don’t think we need all the document delivery agencies pounding on their doors, because they don’t need that. But the capability to integrate knowledge, the capability to manage knowledge in multiple formats is a skill and a resource that other people can’t offer them. I think we need to do much more in that area. I think our members, especially the young ones, need to understand the opportunities and what’s happening in this valley. We ought to be a wonderful umbrella for all the technical ventures that are happening. And the well-established companies as well. I teach a class in systems, as I told you at lunch, and I found an article on Failure Analysis and I had one of my teams read it. Two of the engineers in that group have never heard of Failure Analysis. So I said, well, you haven’t heard of this company called Failure Analysis. They’ve been very successful, and all the interesting things they’ve done. And they said, no, they haven’t. So, it’s amazing how narrow in channels some people tend to be.

Those are interesting ideas…

I don’t want us to wear blinders. I want us to take those blinders off, and say, hey world…what can I learn, what can I see, what can I do.

If you could picture a historian 100 years from now, what would you want that person to know about us here as librarians in Silicon Valley in 1998?

That we made a difference. We helped the companies be successful. We helped the companies solve their problems. We contributed to the society without getting in the way of people getting their jobs done. It would be nice if people had that perception. When you ask me that question, I think about a story Dr. Warheight used to use when he did his lectures. Dr. Warheight was in this geographic area. He’s the man who actually wrote the first program for an inverted file, which allowed for indexing. He was a librarian. So was his wife, Betty Warheight, who just died. And their daughter, and I don’t know her married name, is also a librarian. He used to talk about this science fiction story of the lost piece of microfiche and how a whole society was lost because of that index that was lost. I don’t remember the name of the story or anything else. Someplace I may still have it. It just was a charming story about how a whole society’s culture was totally lost because the index was lost and they didn’t have a librarian to retrieve it.

That’s a great story. One final question—is there a question that I should have asked?

Perhaps you should have asked me about what kind of marketing skills should librarians have. [interruption] Maybe one of the questions you should have asked me are what are some of the things librarians or information scientists or information managers should be taught. Some of the things that come to mind—the concepts of marketing. I think marketing is a topic that gets neglected in the program. I think that’s both an ability and an understanding and a know-how as to how to market themselves and package themselves as an individual. We may be doing that. We tend to do that in our professional societies, but maybe we don’t do enough of it or maybe there’s more going on today than I realize. Marketing the individual and marketing the service. I think we need to take a broader view on that. I think we also need to learn to look in terms of our management skills, in terms of systems thinking. You know, I like Deming. My favorite quote from Deming is that all management are systems management. You really have to take a systems view and you really have to do systems management to do any kind of management. I think systems thinking—systems approaches to problems are something that perhaps gets neglected. The other thing is innovation. Innovation is not just doing something different, but doing something different that is profitable or useful or moves us forward. Most librarians and information managers, information scientists, have to be innovative. I think that’s an area that we could enhance our ability and our awareness.

What about continuing education?

Oh, I’ve taken courses all my life. There is no—to quote an IBM person whose name was Watson, there is no saturation point to education. I firmly believe that. That’s a cultural value that came to the United States from Europe, because they’ve always had adult education.

Do you see this as something the library schools or information science schools have responded to adequately…

I haven’t really been keeping my finger on that. There are lots of programs around. I did a paper once about the librarians sitting on gold mines and not mining the gold within them. I feel that many times we get so busy with all the things we think we have to do, that we don’t take time and put aside time for growing. I think we need to learn to grow in new directions. There’s a wonderful book coming out from Mike Munn from Heineman Butterworth on June 3^rd that is a really interesting book of looking at how to grow using stories from ancient Indian stories from all over the world [Beyond business as usual; practical lessons in assessing new dimensions, by Michael W. Munn, Ph.D.]. And has about 30 exercises in it. I’m going to be teaching a seminar at a national session in July. I’m really excited about that…

Where is this you’re going to be teaching?

It’s going to be at a national session for the Educational Leadership and Change Program from the Fielding Institute where I’m on the faculty. I think Mike has so much to offer in many ways, I think this book is just one of the many things he has to offer. One of the things that he has done is he’s changed some lives. He used to be over at Lockheed. There are lots of other people out there like that who are really on the leading edge of thinking. You have to understand that things change. You can’t stop it. It’s going to change. And sometimes you really need things to change. We’re all resistant to change, but you kind of have to go with the tide and figure out what’s the best direction for you. How do you grow yourself as a person? For me, how do you contribute to society? Or maybe to contribute in some other way. I don’t know. My attitude is you can’t stop growing that intellect—you can’t stop growing that or you die.

Any final thoughts?

No—I hope I haven’t said anything dumb!

[Note—turned off tape recorder, then added further thought.] OK—there’s one more thing?

Well, a couple. I’m the Distinguished Alumna of the Graduate School at Rutgers, in the Graduate School of Communication, Library Studies and Information Science, for 1990. They choose one a year. They can choose them from the School of Communication or Library Studies or Information Science, so I was deeply honored that they recognized what I had contributed. I also got a Centennial award in 1993 from the American Society of Engineering Education. That was their 100-year anniversary, and they awarded it to me for my contribution not only to the society but to the engineering profession as well. I thought by that time that they would have totally forgotten about me. I hadn’t been involved in the society for many years, and it was very nice.

A nice way to bring back your engineering background and to be recognized for that.

Right. Another very exciting time that I never talked about. I served as a consultant for Southeast Asia for the Ford Foundation. That was a wonderful experience. The Chief Justice’s wife designed clothes for me. The Prime Minister’s mother gave me cooking lessons in her home. One of my student assistants was married to a member of the Lee family. They were living in the old Lee estate, so she set up the opportunity for me to meet all the socialites of the Singaporean culture and even had a special mooncake festival party for me. I’ve really been so fortunate. I’ve had so many wonderful people around me. I really appreciate all the nice things people have done for me. There have been a lot of good people to work with through the years.

Thank you.