1999 - Nortel Networks - Roseanne Macek

Roseanne Macek
Nortel Networks

Interviewed by Doreen Cohen, February 19, 1999

Thank you for agreeing to let me interview you for the FaultLine. First, I’d like to ask you, thinking back to your days in graduate school, if you were going to address the incoming class in the fall at the school of library and information science, what would be something you’d want to say to them?

I would want to advise them to be flexible about how they use the skills they have acquired in library school. I think many of the exciting opportunities that are available to us are not in traditional libraries. In fact, I’ve seen a few corporate libraries close or be downsized and people move on to different things. So, I think it’s really critical that people be open minded and realize that the skills that we have are extremely valuable in many different ways.

Anything in particular that you’d like to see them concentrate on or learn that year in school?

I think developing some level of technical skills is really important. I went to library school a long time ago and I was the only one who had a personal computer at the time. This was in the early eighties. So we did not really cover technology at all in the curriculum at that time. Now those skills are very important. Basic HTML skills are something that everybody’s going to have to have to some degree. For myself, personally, I sometimes feel that the lack of technical skills is a struggle for me. I would really, strongly encourage people to focus more effort in that area.

Image that you’re addressing the graduating class and they’re getting ready to go out and look for the career opportunity. What would be your advice?

Again, think in non-traditional ways in terms of looking for a job. There are the usual library joblines that are available to us. The jobline that’s done by the San Andreas and San Francisco Chapters is an excellent place to start. But, I find that there are an awful lot of jobs out there where they’re looking for someone with library science skills, but they don’t know that. Scouring company websites, you see all kinds of fascinating opportunities out there. Those kinds of jobs aren’t advertised through SLA. So in terms of finding a job, really moving beyond the traditional library sources for jobs and keeping an eye on those other kinds of places. The web is just a terrific resource in terms of company websites. All companies list their job openings there. There are these new sites. There’s one called Monster.com—they advertised during the Super Bowl. They pull in job information from company websites and a variety of sources. You can do a search using key words to locate jobs in a variety of different places. So, I think people need to make sure that they keep an eye on the broader job market. And then try to develop those job contacts through professional associations. Many of us have been able to find jobs that were never really advertised anywhere formally just through people that we know. Developing those professional contacts is absolutely critical.

How did you end up here at NorTel Networks?

It was through my network. Even though this job had been advertised on the SLA Jobline, I was still employed at the time so I hadn’t really paid much attention to it. But when I got laid off from Apple, I sent an e-mail out to about 15 or 20 local colleagues. This is a great example of the power of the Internet. I wanted to let my local colleagues know that I was leaving Apple and that my staff was leaving Apple. And that if any of them knew of any job opportunities to please let me know. That e-mail must have been forwarded all over the world because I got responses from some unusual places. Somehow that e-mail got forwarded to the staff here. They saw it. They sent it to a recruiter who immediately started calling me. So, it’s a good example of how to use that network and also the power of the Internet. That little message that I sent out to a few local colleagues went far beyond what I had ever anticipated.

Would you share with me a little bit about what that was like to have to leave Apple?

I am so grateful for the opportunities that I had there. I was there about 15 ½ years. Having a little bit of distance from it now and thinking back, I just feel so fortunate. I started at Apple in early 1982 when it was a somewhat smaller company. I was still in library school at the time. I just had great opportunities to grow professionally and personally and to work with absolutely brilliant and wonderful people. It’s changed my life in a lot of ways that I may not even realize. It was really amazing to me to see people’s attitude. Some of us stayed for about a month after we were notified that we were going to get laid off, and everyone was so committed to closing down the operation in a professional way. To the very end doing the absolute best job that we could do. It was just so positive to see people react that way versus feeling negative or whatever. For the most part, people really stepped up to that challenge and wanted to leave there on a positive note.

Thinking back over all of your experiences, what is it that excites you about your work?

I think right now I’m really excited about taking my skills in a different direction. We are going to be closing the physical library here—by choice this time. We are going to be developing a group into more of a competitive intelligence group. That’s one of the directions that’s open for us as librarians because we have those research skills and some of those analysis skills. I think it’s going to be wonderful for myself and my staff in terms of our career to be able to do something different.

How will that work?

We’re still working out the details. I’m working with facilities on closing this area down and trying to determine where we’re going to be located. We now report into NorTel corporate marketing, so technically I’m not part of the Bay line of business any more. We’re still getting a handle on the organization and how we’re all going to work together. I think my staff and I will still be located in the same area together. But I think that is another possible direction for us. And I’ve seen other corporate libraries go that way—where they actually disperse their staff amongst their top users. I think that’s an excellent strategy, because one of the things that I worry about with corporate libraries is that sometimes we’re sort of a separate group, separate service group sort of off to the side. We need to work really hard at making stronger connections within the product groups. By actually locating information specialists out there, that’s just a great way for them to be part of those teams and really understand in detail what that group’s information needs are. I think that’s an excellent direction to be headed.

So, if I’m understanding what’s exciting is that you can morph into these different areas using the same skills but not necessarily in traditional settings.

Yes. I’m so excited about that. We aren’t going to have a library any more, but our skills as librarians are still going to be extremely valuable. Moving more towards competitive intelligence is one possible direction. I’ve seen other colleagues move into knowledge management. We have other MLS folks in the company who are part of the knowledge systems groups. They’re taking their skills into knowledge management and helping the company better organize our internal information. Even though I see some corporate libraries closing, I think there’s still recognition that our skills are important and we can take those in these other directions. I’m real excited about that.

Thinking back in your professional life, who would you say has influenced you?

Again, I feel extremely fortunate that every boss I’ve had in special libraries has been a great role model and mentor, so I’m just very, very lucky. I would say the one person who really stands out is my manager at Apple, Monica Ertel, because we worked together for over fifteen years. She hired me when I was still in library school when I didn’t know anything, and she encouraged me over the years. She had more confidence in me than I had in myself, and sort of helped me develop in ways I probably wouldn’t have on my own. She was a great mentor and a huge influence on my career. I’ve had other bosses as well who really were a factor in my career. The woman who first hired me into my first corporate library job was Sandra Ferguson. She used to be active in the local chapter during the early days. We worked for a company called American Microsystems, which isn’t even around any more. I was a page at the public library and she hired me into a corporate library and introduced me to what a good corporate library could be. So, I’m very grateful for that. My next boss at AMI was Nancy Walton. The key thing that I got from Nancy was developing professional contacts. She got me involved in SLA whether I wanted to or not. I’m very grateful for that because I’ve made very strong professional and personal contacts over the years, which has been a great support to me in my career. And my current boss, whom I’ve only worked for since last July, who is not a librarian. He’s been really good for me in that way. Not explicitly, but he’s sort of challenged me to think about things in a different way.

What has been the most rewarding experience of your professional career?

I talked a little bit about my career at Apple, and I would say overall, that was such a rewarding experience because I kind of grew up there. I started there when I was in library school and over the years got a chance to do a lot of things that I never thought I would do. I ended up managing the library and it wasn’t my original intention to get into management. I wanted to be a reference librarian—and I was—but I had other opportunities come up. And I had a chance to do some things in management. That was a really great experience for me. We also tried to use our own technology in innovative ways. We also were able to reach out to the library community as a whole and participate in doing trade shows. Monica started the Apple Library Users Group and we made some great connections there. We went beyond what you’d consider a corporate library. We really went more into marketing our company’s products to trade shows and the user group. That was a lot of fun.

Do you see today’s challenges as being different from when you first started out of graduate school?

Oh, boy—yeah! Definitely. I think corporate libraries are under fire. Maybe because of my experience closing down a corporate library, that’s affected me quite a bit, but I’ve seen that happen to other corporate libraries. I’ve seen other corporate libraries be outsourced or face the threat of being outsourced, and it just feels to me like we’re under attack. We need to really look at what’s happening there and figure out how we are going to continue being relevant in the future. Personally, I think it’s not necessarily in traditional corporate libraries. We need to get away from associating ourselves with a physical thing and look more at what are the skills that we have that are valuable to our companies, and how can we best use those skills. In the future, that’s going to be in different environments than a physical library.

If you were going to choose someone to interview here in Silicon Valley, in this profession or not, who would you choose?

It’s really hard to decide because there are so many fascinating people both in our profession and in the Valley in general. It’s such a special place. One person that I think would be fascinating to interview would be Steve Jobs. When I first started at Apple he was there. I remember my very first day at work, Monica took me to lunch at the cafeteria, and we saw him running around in cut-off jeans and bare feet, and I knew right then that I was in for quite an experience. I can’t quite remember exactly when he left Apple, but it wasn’t too long after that. Maybe a few years after that, and he was gone for some time, and then he came back. And it really was his decision that closed down the corporate library there. So, I think it would be very interesting to interview him about the whole Apple experience, what it was like when he left Apple, and maybe get more information from him about how the information needs of a company’s employees can be best met. Even though it was his decision to close the library, he’s someone that I greatly admire and I think he would be just a fascinating person to talk to.

Have you always felt like the library was valued by your organization?

Definitely, here and at Apple, I felt that way. I think at Apple we had good support from the top levels of the company for most of the time that we were there. John Sculley wrote most of his book, Odyssey, in the library. We had a little conference room in one of our libraries, and he used to come in to get away from the phones and whatever to have a quiet place to work on this book. So, I think we had pretty good recognition at the top levels for the work that we did there. And, I would say that that’s true here as well. There was an article in a recent San Andreas Chapter bulletin that I submitted, which basically was a reprint of an interview with Dave House, Bay Networks CEO at the time. One of the questions he was asked was what were his favorite Websites and how much time he spent on the Internet. He mentioned Yahoo! Finance and sites that he liked, but he said that most of the information that he received came from the Bay Library. We were thrilled when we saw that interview because it’s very rare that you get feedback directly from your CEO. Usually they’re working through your staffs, so we never heard from him directly whether what we were sending him was valuable. To see it that way in print was just a huge boost to us to know that our work was that important. I absolutely have to recognize my predecessor, Katherine Lewark. She managed this department before I got here, and it was her vision that these services came out of. She was extremely proactive. She never really did devote too much energy to maintaining a collection. She was always out there finding out what people needed and delivering it before they even had a chance to ask. She knew what people’s needs were. She was out there scouring a variety of sources every day and sending the right information on to the right people. So, it was really her vision that our group came out of.

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

I would be either a pre-school teacher or a technical writer, because those were the two fields that I pursued before I accidentally stumbled on libraries. When I first started college, I was an early childhood education major. Then I decide that that was probably not the right path for me long term. So, I switched my major to English, because I got to take all these cool literature courses. I wasn’t sure at the time what I was going to do with it, but as I got farther along in the program I thought about a career as a writer, and in the Valley being a technical writer would be the way to go, so I started moving in that direction. Then, when I was a senior in college I got a part-time job in the public library. I loved that. I wasn’t sure that that was going to be the career for me. Then, when I moved on to corporate libraries, it was like everything just clicked. I remember interviewing with my first boss, Sandy, and the whole time in the conference room saying I want to see the library, and she took me in there and talked about what she was doing, and everything just clicked for me. This is it. This is what I want to do. So, I learned a lot from that experience and that’s when I started library school.

How do you go about changing with changing times?

Anyone who works in this Valley or in a big company has to somehow get comfortable with a lot of change, because we deal with it every day. It’s hard. But I think the approach that I try to take is to step back and try to look at the situation from a different perspective. To try to get out of my own experience. To take a fresh look at things. I also am a firm believer that chaos equals opportunity. I just feel so strongly about that. In much of my professional career, I’ve been through an awful lot of chaos in the companies that I’ve worked for. As a result, I think I’ve been able to make things happen that may not have happened otherwise. I’ve felt that especially here. I haven’t been here quite a year and a half yet, and I’ve been through tremendous change in terms of getting different bosses, reporting to different places in the organization, having different staff work with me, now being bought by a very large company and learning how to work in that environment. Every time I would be going through one of those changes, I would try to look at the situation and see if there were opportunities to do something different as a result. So, while that amount of change can be difficult, I think it’s a great opportunity to stop doing things, start doing new things, just taking a different look at a situation and see if maybe there’s another way to tackle this problem. So, change is difficult, but we absolutely have to get comfortable with it because it’s a fact of life around here.

If you could imagine a library historian, say a hundred years from now, digging up this interview, what would it be that you would want this person to know?

A hundred years from now, I would hope that someone looking back at us would see corporate libraries as a real influence in our organizations. That we were able to take our skills into different environments and different functions and really make an impact on our companies. Personally, I would hope that people would see me as someone helped encourage and support others in the profession. I’ve spoken at the LTA program at Foothill, at San Jose State, I’ve had some informational interviews with people who have considered getting into the profession, I’ve had a lot of interns over the years, so I hope to be known as someone who supported and helped people get into the profession or who were starting out in the profession to grow in their careers.

Which is the next area that I wanted to get into, and that is your involvement with the Chapter. There’s just this whole list of different positions you’ve had with the Chapter over the years. Could you just give me maybe a couple of highlights, things that were important to you?

I first got involved in the Chapter probably about a year after San Andrea split off from San Francisco, so I wasn’t there when that split happened. I didn’t start getting involved until the year after that. As I mentioned earlier, the reason that I got involved was because my manager at the time, Nancy Walton at AMI, was involved in the chapters. She dragged me along to a couple of dinner meetings. That was hard because I didn’t know anyone yet. She got me involved as a member of the program committee. I think she was the chair at the time. That was just a great opportunity for me to get to know other people in the Chapter and I’m grateful for that. I’ve done a lot of things in the Chapter. I’ve been on most committees. I’ve been on the Board. It’s just been a great support to me. I don’t know how I could have gotten through some of the things that I’ve been through without my friends in SLA. I’ve developed some real close professional and personal contacts. When I’m facing something at work, usually I know someone who’s been through something similar. And I’ll just call them up and just brainstorm a little bit on how they might have handled a certain situation. So, I feel very lucky to have been involved.

Do you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see. At this point in your career, you’re not brand new any more and you’ve seen a few things. What would be helpful to you?

I think SLA needs to help us through the tremendous changes that we’re going through. I think SLA needs to change its name. Special Libraries Association sounds rather odd for someone like me who is going to be in a competitive intelligence group. How is that relevant to what I’m going to be doing? So, I think we need to seriously consider changing our name. Our current name associates us with a physical entity. I don’t think that’s where our future is. So, I think SLA needs to seriously consider that.

Do you have a suggestion?

I don’t! Off the top of my head, I don’t. But I think it’s something that periodically comes up and we haven’t managed to do it, but this is the year that we should really put some serious thought into that. I hear some colleagues say, Gee, I’m not sure that SLA is relevant to me, as they move into non-traditional kinds of roles. Maybe they need to be involved in SCIP or ASIS or other organizations. I still think SLA is relevant, but we need to better reach out to those members who are starting to move into some different areas.

Anything else for the San Andreas Chapter that you’d like to see?

One thing that just occurred to me earlier today was—I’d like to see us better share information with each other. One example is doing a local salary survey. We used to do that, and I don’t think we’ve done that for quite a few years. When I look at the national SLA salary survey, I don’t find it to be that helpful in terms of working in the Valley. So, because this Valley is a unique place, we could better share information between ourselves on salaries, budgets, what we’re doing. Really, better benchmark with each other. I haven’t seen us do that for awhile.

One last question—is there a question that I should have asked or that you wish I had asked?

One of the questions that I’ve been asked periodically is what do I look for when I hire somebody. I think it’s a really important question in terms of library education and continuing education. What are the personal and professional characteristics and skills that people in corporate libraries today are looking for when they hire. My answer to that question is better technical skills overall. But also, just in terms of a person’s approach to their job, we really need to encourage people who are entering the profession who are risk takers, who have the ability to deal with change and look at things in a non-traditional way. In terms of continuing education, too, we need to have better business skills. Many of us came out of the humanities. That’s been helpful to me personally. Having good communication skills, good writing skills and good analytical skills are important. But, I think we need to build from there and go with better business skills.