1999 - Roche Bioscience - Pam Jajko

Pam Jajko
Roche Bioscience

Interviewed by Doreen Cohen, March 5, 1999

This is Doreen Cohen interviewing Pam Jajko at Roche on Friday, March 5, 1999. Thank you for letting me interview you for the FaultLine. The first question I’d like to ask is if you could think about people who are entering the graduate program, say at San Jose State in Library Science, what would be your advice to them?

I would tell them this is one of the most exciting times to go into the library profession. Information has so much visibility. People are really beginning to recognize it in ways that they never have before. I think there are just marvelous opportunities.

If you are talking to the same group the following year, they’re graduating and they’re starting to look for their first job out of graduate school, what would be your advice?

The most critical thing library students need to understand is what their skills are, what they’re interested in and what kind of a library job works best for them. I’ve seen this over and over again where—and this is for people within the profession as much as people outside the profession—everybody gets sort of lumped together, you know. Librarians are sort of one of a kind. And it's really not true. Especially nowadays. There’s a real diversity in terms of the type of work. I think people come in because they fundamentally maybe like working with teams, maybe they like reading, maybe they like the information work, but really when they’re in library school, they should take advantage of getting into different areas. People who dreaded cataloging and then found out that instead of just a menial task that it’s this wonderful challenge trying to classify and organize the world knowledge, it became very exciting to them. Then when you are ready to go into a profession, for somebody like that there are so many exciting opportunities for indexing in the Internet companies. If they like technology, there are so many opportunities. But people who fundamentally like a lot of different people and a lot of diversity in their work might be more happy in a public library system. It seems to me that academic librarians do a lot more training, and lot of the training over and over again because you’ve constantly got these new students coming in. So if you’re somebody who really likes to develop material and use it and test it and then re-do it, then the academic center might be more appropriate for you. The corporate environment is very, very different. It’s fast paced. It calls for higher levels of analysis sometimes. It really depends on which situation you get into. I see too often where people just say, oh, this is an exciting field. I’m in the information business. I want to be a librarian. They look at maybe the location, the geographic location, but they don’t fundamentally try to really understand how they work that’s really different. And what skills and what their interests are and really make that match best.

What is the best way to find the job?

Well, I would say that they should do as many practicums as they possibly can do. I know people have gone to library school who never have even worked in a library. That’s unfortunate because they really don’t have a sense of the work. A lot of it can be done through visitations or just observations. Obviously, if you’re interested in a public or an academic job, there are places that you can go and just sit in a corner and watch the activity and what’s happening. Many of the corporate librarians are willing for students to come in and actually do an interview and basically see how the work is being done.

When you look back over your experiences, can you pick out one, two or three that stick out in your mind as having been especially rewarding?

I would have to say one of the most exciting periods for me was when I went to El Camino Hospital. I was in with a really great group of people, a really great boss who supported us tremendously. And there was something about working in a hospital environment where you know when a rush search comes in, you’ve got a patient in the emergency room and there’s somebody going up for surgery, or the information that you’re providing is absolutely critical to the decision making on how that patient is being handled. Especially at El Camino, which was not a teaching hospital. It was a community hospital. You really had a sense of contributing to the health of the community. That was very exciting.

Did you have the doctors actually coming in there or was it normally a phone call from somebody?

Oh, yes, we had physicians coming in. We did a lot of outreach programs with the nurses and other departments. Back in 1970 I worked in St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, and was part of the clinical librarianship program funded by the National Library of Medicine. You went on rounds with the doctors, sat in on doctor-patient conferences. I remember one particular incident where we were interviewing a psychiatric patient. After the patient was interviewed, we left the room and the head psychiatrist turned to me and asked me what medical dosage I would recommend based on what I had seen in the literature. It was sort of disconcerting to be put on that line, but I knew many of the other clinical librarians were very comfortable and had been even more involved in the surgery and OB/GYN areas where, especially because that was a teaching hospital, they were asked questions like that frequently. Sometimes done by the older physicians just to sort of go to the interns and say, look, you don’t know this information, but the librarian does. It was sort of a way to make sure that they were actually getting into the literature and they really knew what was going on currently in terms of patient treatment. So, we really tried to model that outreach at El Camino as much as possible and it was really exciting to do that.

Then when I came to Syntex, which is now Roche Bioscience, it was exciting to be on the other side. One of the fascinating things was that when I was at El Camino Hospital you would often have these drug reps coming in and people would say, you know, these big drug companies making profits and things like that. But when you actually came to the drug companies it was fascinating to hear them say things like, oh, those surgeons, you know, they charge so much for one hour worth of operation, whereas the equivalent amount of money would take care of a patient for the rest of their life and not be invasive and there would be no risk from anesthesiology and stuff like that. It was just fascinating once you got into the pharmaceutical industry and really met basic researchers, how committed they were to actually improving the health of people through drug discovery and really improving people’s lives. It was just fascinating to see the two different pieces of it.

Over your experiences in the profession, can you think of one or two people perhaps that you would say influenced you?

That would be very hard to actually name names in part because I remember being at a Medical Library Association Conference where Leland Kaiser spoke. One of the things he said was, "always know at least three people who know more than you do." That should be part of your little book. When I listened to him, I said this is the way I operate. If I’m into something or I’m trying to explore something, I try to figure out who are the three people that already know more than I do. I would pick up the phone and make contact with them and then try to use whatever their experience had been. I remember when I was at El Camino for the Northern California Nevada Medical Library Group, NCNMLG, I actually put together these monthly forums. What I would come up with, what do I need to know? What would I like to know? One time it was integrated library systems and one time it was database management and one time it was competitive information and one time it was increasing staff, decreasing staff. So, you would take a common problem or something you would face, and say, OK, who are the people I can turn to? You’d invite them and have them come in as a speaker for the session. It was just marvelous what you could learn. It all depended on what I needed to know at a particular time. Those experts and those mentors would sort of emerge out of that process.

But how could you not list Eugenie Prime. She’s always been such an inspiration to all of us. She’s just been a marvelous friend. Eugenie is a strategic thinker. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoyed working and talking with her because I tend to do the same thing. I like understanding what the business means, what the big picture is, then trying to figure out what four years down the line, what you need to lay in place now. I’m not as much of a detail operations person, so for people who get really caught up discussing the nitty-gritty on how you want to index for Yahoo! or something like that, I’m much better off leaving that discussion to somebody else. But Eugenie and I have wonderful discussions in terms of what’s happening next, what are areas that need to be paid attention to, what does this mean overall in the information industry and library field. That, to me, is very exciting. I like those kinds of discussions.

Does someone come to mind who is perhaps not in this profession as such, but who has influenced you?

Yes—I would have to say my boss at El Camino Hospital, Ann Houseman. She is now Director of Nursing at San Jose Medical Center. Just the way she treated people. When you’ve had a lot of different jobs, you get to a point where you realize some organizations are very repressive and they don’t stimulate creativity. It’s real easy to get a Dilbert boss, somebody who really doesn’t basically respect people, who doesn’t try to support them. When you’ve had some exposure to those kinds of people, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking in any bureaucratic organization that that’s sort of the norm and that’s the way you need to behave in order to be a manager yourself or director yourself. What was really wonderful about Ann and the way she managed her whole group was that she was open, supportive, respectful of people, and you began to understand that whole model of community and teamwork in a way that I had never quite experienced before. It was something to really model.

Tell me how you came to work at Roche.

I was at El Camino Hospital and I got a call asking me if I might be interested in this position. It was Syntex at that time. One of the things that really interested me was that it was a for-profit organization. I’d never worked for for-profits. I’d always worked for hospitals and I’d worked at NASA as a contractor for awhile. I had worked in public libraries. I’d had a diversity of experience, but never in the for-profit sector. I thought it would be really interesting to have that experience. So, that was enough to peak my interest, but what was even more exciting was that Syntex was a global operation and we had employees all over the world. This was the corporate headquarters and it was a way to explore a whole different way of providing information services.

Not everyone gets a call, so how does that work?

I think anybody who really understands the way jobs are filled nowadays is knowing people who know people. What do they say, you can always get back to six people. So, especially through the forum that I mentioned before, those groups that I organized, I had met a lot of people and knew a lot of people. So that when the position came up, there was somebody who suggested me.

If you had not decided to become a librarian, what would you be doing?

I know you like to ask that question, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know how to answer it because I’m one of those people in the library profession who knew I wanted to do this years ago.

How far back?

Fourth grade. I remember when I made up my mind. This was sort of a funny story. I went to a three-room schoolhouse when I was in elementary education. There was first-second, third-fourth, fifth-sixth—those combination classrooms. It was in the middle of Indiana. We had the two classrooms when you first walk in the brick building, and there was this central area where you had a little platform and you could put on little skits. And that’s where your music class was run. Then the fifth-sixth grade room was in the back. I was in the auditorium for some sort of exciting presentation, probably by the fire marshall on safety, one of those things, and the librarians came in. The public library would bring books over. We had maybe the equivalent of seven or eight shelves where you could check books out at the school as opposed to going to the library. They came over while this presentation was going on and started weeding. They were literally taking the books and ripping them up for discard for any that had not been read. I was so upset because I came from a large family. We only owned a few books. You always went to the library to borrow. Right then I made two vows. Number one, that I was going to check out every book on those shelves so that there would be nothing next time they came that hadn’t been read in the last five years, and second, that I was going to become a librarian and stop this tragedy! I’m older and wiser now and I understand the need for it. We were always a family of great readers. It was always one of our great treats to go down on a Saturday and load up our arms with books from the public library and then read. But that was the defining moment in terms that this was the profession for me.

Did you waver in high school or college?

No. I worked all through high school in our school libraries until my senior year. Then I actually went to Earl College in part because Evan Barber was there, who was very well known in the library field back then. He wrote one of the big books on collection development. He was a guest lecturer at Columbia. So I started working at the Lilly Library before I even started my college education. I came the summer before in order to start working and worked there all four years that I was at Earl. Then immediately after a short stint as a second-grade teacher, I went on to Columbia for my master’s.

How do you think working in libraries all those years, because as you mentioned not everyone has that experience? Sometimes we make the decision to go into library work later. How do you think that made it different for you?

Because I had such a diversity of experience, I really understand all the operations. I worked in acquisitions, I worked in cataloging, I worked in journals, reference. I mean, you name it. I’ve done almost any area of library operations. So, even as things become much more computerized, I understand the basics. I also understand fundamentally how important it is that all of those pieces are integrated. And that when, especially in a corporate environment, you may be doing a literature search or working with a program, to be able to feed in a new book that came in and to understand how the collection or interlibrary loan function works, and how to better make sure that all is seen as one piece, not as disparate services. I think that really formed my whole attitude on how a library should be organized and managed.

Do you have any ideas on how or should we be doing recruiting of undergrads for the profession?

I remember when I went to Columbia the hot thing there was getting people in who already had other master’s and who had subject specialization and who were interested in other areas other than just straight public library work. I think that’s still a viable way to go. But, I think, if you’re asking what would be a key for recruitment, it’s just to let people know the tremendous diversity of the kinds of positions librarians can hold. Because there’s still too much of that stereotype of people assuming when you say the word "library" or "librarian" that people know what we’re referring to. I was talking to somebody the other day who was a very intelligent person, I’ve known him for awhile, he works in television news, on cable news, and he said, you run the library, right? I said, yes, we work very much with proprietary laboratory notebooks, we do competitive intelligence, we do this, we do that, and I just basically gave him an overview. He was absolutely stunned. He had no idea that somebody in the library field could be handling the kind of diversity and responsibility for something so critical to the operation of the company.

Thinking ahead a hundred years, imagine a historian looking at this interview. What would you want that person to know?

Depending on what kind of a person it is, maybe I should qualify that. If it were another librarian, I would, even a hundred years from now, I would like for them to be able to look at this interview and say, she was my peer. She was a colleague. Even if the technology has changed, even if the world has changed, we both basically are interested in the same thing, which is the organization and dissemination and enhancing the flow of information. If it’s somebody who is outside of the profession, what I would love is exactly what I love about my job now, do they get it? Do they really understand what we do that enhances their productivity and makes them a more efficient worker? To me, that’s where the excitement is. To work with people who are struggling doing all this stuff on their own and thinking they need to do it on their own, and they’re fine. They haven’t been enlightened. They don’t know what it’s like when they have really good information scientists supporting them. Then all of a sudden you start working with them and you just see the light go off in terms of, oh-my-god, you know. All the difference in the world in terms of how they’re doing their work.

When you have somebody who’s really committed to trying to make people’s lives better, their work better through better information management, and they get it and they appreciate it, that’s when you really feel that you’ve made a contribution.

Switching over to SLA and the San Andreas Chapter. You can answer these questions either for SLA as an international organization or our chapter. As a member of SLA, what have been the highlights for you?

Certainly SLA has been important because it’s an organization of special libraries and librarians. In that respect, it’s an important organization and has influenced my thinking. On the other hand, I have to tell you quite honestly that when I was more active in library organizations and professions. For me the Medical Library Association was really where I did most of my big work, I would say. I actually was national program chair one year and I did a lot for that organization. I was president of the NCMLG group. Was it de Tocqueville who talked about the one interesting thing about American society was that no matter where you went somebody had founded an association around something and that was more important in some respects than the community, than the religion or anything. You had this group of people with common interests. The professional associations facilitate that work and enhance my skills.

If the local chapter could do something different so that it would be more of interest or help to people like you, what would you be looking for?

One of the things I’ve observed, and I think SLA tried to address this a few years ago when I was more active in the strategic planning group, is that there comes a time when you’ve been in these associations for awhile where everything almost is deja vue. Sort of like you’ve seen it, heard it again but in a different wrapper, and so it loses a lot of its usefulness. Part of that’s just your own learning and growth. So, for some of us who’ve been in the business for a long time, we actively then go outside that association model and actively seek other associations that might actually help us see a different perspective or help us with the next layer of work. I think in any association, the association is defined by the majority of its members. To tell you the truth, at this point I don’t know what the make-up is for SLA at this point. But for me right now, I’m in some associations that are focussing on intellectual capital, I’m involved with the DIA pharmaceutical group (Drug Information Association). Those are the things that have been taking my time.

Just one last question then, is there a question that you wish I had asked?

No. I think that really covers it. I really feel that this is a great profession and I think it’s an exciting time. I do think that, and I’ve seen this happen before, we’re a profession that didn’t have a lot of visibility, maybe had some money but not a lot of money attached to it, is done in a very collegial team spirit. There’s a lot of sharing going on. It’s really important to remember the things that brought you to the profession in the first place. Love of information, love of service, the enjoyment of working with like-minded colleagues. And not lose sight of that.