Oklahoma Voices: Clinton "Marty" Thompson

Description:

Transcript:

Neuer: Today is Wednesday, April the 4th, 2007. My name is Karen Neuer, and I'm here interviewing Marty Thompson today.

Thompson: I'm Marty Thompson.

Neuer: And Marty, what is your position?

Thompson: I'm the director of the Health Sciences Center at the University of Oklahoma.

Neuer: Ok, tell me a little bit about where you grew up. Are you from Oklahoma originally?

Thompson: I grew up Midwest City, Oklahoma, so except for about 6, 7, well, 7 or 8 years I've lived in Oklahoma.

Neuer: Were you a library user when you were young?

Thompson: Yes, oh, you want more?

Neuer: Sure.

Thompson: Come on. No, I used the public library. Public library wasn't far apart. Public library was only two blocks from my house when I was a kid, and we used it all the time. Then I became a debater in junior high and I became a high, intense library user starting my seventh-grade year on through high school, because I debated every year except one year during those six years.

Neuer: How did you decide on librarianship as a profession?

Thompson: Now that's my mentor. I changed roommates my sophomore year and the young man I was living with was working for the library, and it became obvious that I was going to need to get a job, and he said, “Oh, I get you a job at the library”, and so he took me up to the library at Oklahoma City University, where I was going to college at the time, and introduced me to Francis Kennedy and told her that I'd be a good employee and she had to hire me, and she said, “well come back tomorrow and I'll make up the decision”, and so I went back the next day and she said, “yeah, we're going to hire you”, and so she hired me, and so for the next three years, including the summers, I worked at OCU, you know, in the library, 15, 20 hours a week as a student, and so that's what got into it, and then when I did not get into med school my senior year, she knew almost by the time I knew that I didn't get in, and she called me and said, “you need to come out and talk to me”, and so I go up to her office and she says, “I'm going to take you and Vicki Phillips”, who is Vicki Withers at the time, down to OU to meet the director of the library school, and I said “ehhhh you know”, and she says, “yeah, you're going”, and so I said, “ok”, so about a week later, she piles us into a car, takes us out to lunch and takes us down to meet Dr. Bertalan at the library school, and he talks to us for a while and tells us what a great place it is, and we got ready to leave, and Francis Kennedy was one of those ladies. You did all of the appropriate things that you were supposed to do, so she was one of those people you never exited in front of her and a door. You always backed up and let her go through the door first, so I had stepped aside to let her go out the door with Vicki, and she reached out and pushed me on through the door right behind Vicki, and I heard her turn around and say to Dr. Bertalan. She says, “now, I expect both of these students to get scholarships to attend library school in the fall”, and I'm going “wow”, because that was my first experience with her outside Oklahoma City University. I mean, I knew she had a lot of clout at Oklahoma City University, but, you know, I had no idea what her clout was that way, and so after we got back to the campus, I said something to Vicki about it. She kind of laughed, and I thought, “boy it’d be a cold day in H. I’d get a scholarship to any place”, and so we filled out the paperwork. She made us fill out the paperwork, and sure enough, both of us got federal scholarships from the Department of Education to go to library school, and so that's how I got to library school.

Neuer: And what year was that?

Thompson: That was in 1968. I started library school in the summer of 1968. I was taking the nine hours you needed to take to start the graduate level courses, and the military decided that they wanted my services for a while, and I got drafted in September as I had started the fall semester, and so I went on ahead and decided that I didn't want to spend the two years as a draftee and went on ahead and signed up for three years and was in the medical corps for three years and then came back to go to library school [in the] after I finished my military service.

Neuer: Ok, if we could backtrack just a minute. You said [that there were] that there was a nine hours requirement to get into the library program. You already had your bachelor’s degree.

Thompson: Had my bachelor's degree, but there were there were nine hours that they required that you take that weren't graduate level courses, and so you had to take the nine hours to finish up, and then you started, then normally took in those days for those of us going straight through, then it took I think it was either thirty-three or thirty-six hours that you took in two semesters and a summer session, and that really is exactly what I did, except I did the nine hours then came back and finished the thirty-three, thirty-six hours, then when I came back.

Neuer: When you were working at OCU in the library, what types of jobs did you do as a student worker?

Thompson: I did everything. I, you know, I look back on it and I refer to it that I kind of became Francis Kennedy’s pet. Once I started working there, it was a strange situation. Her sister was the director of reference and the circulation desk area, actually just the circulation area. She was responsible for all of the shelving and circulation and all of that, and that's who you worked for when you worked in the library, but I got assigned to do everything shortly. It seems like almost immediately, but I'm sure I was there a few months before I got that, so I got to do almost everything. I worked in serials, I worked in cataloging, I did binding, I worked the circulation desk, I cleaned the first drum on the first Xerox machine in the library because everybody was nervous about cleaning it., and I was so young and arrogant that I didn't see there was any problem pulling the drum out of the copier and then taking an alcohol swab and swabbing it down to clean the drum and sliding it back into the machine. I just thought that was fun. I just thought everything like that was exciting. She, first summer that I worked for her, she was moving stuff. She was rearranging the library, and I'm not mechanically oriented. My father would tell you that it's a good thing, and that I was kept a white-collar job, never looked at a blue-collar job because he didn't think I could probably have made it as a blue-collar worker, and she comes out one morning and hands me a drill and screws and [book plates] book ends and says, “now you need to go down all those wooden bookshelves and put these bookends, drill them in on the top of the book stack so that we can put books up on top of the top shelf”, and I go, “ohhh she's got no idea how badly I am at that kind of stuff”, so I proceeded down the way to do that, and Vicki and I have laughed over the years. There's probably no question that during the three years that we worked together at the library. We probably touched every book in the Oklahoma City University library. I moved the entire library during the three years I was there and she basically would just come in and say, “Ok, I want this done, and want this moved here and I want that done there”, and I just did it, and that was based on that first summer when she gave me the drill and told me to put these bookends up there, and then I tell a funny story about her. She and her sister, Mrs. David, always took a trip in the summer, and they were always gone exactly a month and always went every other year. They went someplace in Europe. Every year they went someplace in the United States, and they left and went overseas I'm pretty sure that year, and we were sitting around in the breakroom and we had a room We had a library, [which] was on one floor, and then we went down a floor, and we had a small room and it had all the religious and the humanities books in it, and it was organized horribly. I don’t know who did it. I don’t know whether she did it or somebody else did it, but it never run smooth. I mean, when you went out to get stuff, you were always jig-jagging backwards, and the numbering was never correct, and it just drove all of us nuts when we had to shelve because it took you so long to figure out where you were going to have to be, and one of the other young guys, he was a year younger and I was. [He was] a psychology major and I can't remember his name now. I can see him. He's a big, tall kid, but he was sitting, and we were sitting in a break room and he said, “boy that room is horrible down there”, and I said, “boy, you know, [if] somebody had the sense, they’d rearrange that room”, and he says, “well, you’ve rearranged every place else.” He said, “won’t you rearrange that?”, and I said, “well, we've never been asked to do it and I’m not going to do it”, and he said “well let’s just do it!”, and I said, “oh, we won't do that”, so we spent about two days arguing about whether we're going to do it or not, and then we decided that between the two of us and Vicki and a couple other people, that we knew that worked there most of the time, that we had enough man hours down there that we felt we could do it, so we sat down, laid out a floor plan, rearranged all the stacks, and then we proceeded to rearrange it, and so we took them off the shelves, we moved the shelving, we realigned the shelving like we wanted to, put the seating where we wanted it, and then about time for her to come back, and, of course, that was our time scale was to get it done before she got back, and so, you know, it's getting close to her getting back, and we're sitting in a break room [UNSURE], and I said, “we're all going to get fired. I said “we are going to… but why did we do this?”, and I said, “we are going to get fired.” and they said “ahh nothing will be wrong with it, so, you know, we all sweated the day she came back, and I don't… I think she's back a day, and I don't think anything happened that first day, and the second day, I was downstairs working, and there was a stairwell that connected the first floor and the second floor. [There] was a small stairwell, and that's the way we moved all the books back and forth from the returns desk upstairs, and that was the stairs that all the employees used, and there was outside the door, that door came out, and then you came into the room and then going up with a huge staircase, going up to the first floor was one of those kind of old school type things where you came up out of the basement into a foyer, and then you had another huge staircase that took you on to the first floor of the building, and I was sitting down there and we'd all been nervous about being down there, and I heard somebody coming down the staircase, and pretty quickly I realized it was her. I thought, “why me? Why not somebody else? , and so she comes in, and she just walks around”, and so I'm just sitting at the desk and basically said, “hello, how are you today, Miss Kennedy?”, and she walked round, and then that was also the area where we did binding. We had a lot of storage, and she walked all through the downstairs area, then walked back into the storage area, and while she was back in the storage area, I looked out in the hallway and standing on the staircase was all of the other culprits because they knew where she was and they're all laughing and I'm going, “this is not good” because I'm the one who is going to get fired, not them, and she comes back out, and she starts out the door and she really, I think, got outside the door, and then she kind of backed up a step because they had already left and weren't anywhere near being in the vision area, and she kind of stepped back one step and said, “it's a good thing I like it”, and then she walked on out of the room and it was all it was ever said about it, and so it was totally rearranged, so that's kind of how I got into it. Okay.

Neuer: Ok, when you were in library school, were there any instructors who stand out in your memory?

Thompson: Oh, yeah. I you know, several of them that are on the legends list. Tomberlin Urma was the cataloging instructor when I was down there. Dale Huey was an instructor in the library school when I was there, and she's on the legends list. Laverne Carroll was also on the technical side of the house when I was there, and Bruno was on, was teaching down there, so there were several of them, and then Dr. Bertalan was the director of the library school while I went through the library school and then left I think the year after I graduated [I left]. I think he left to go to TWU as the director of the library school down there, so they were all [I you know]. The story I tell is that I was very lucky. I got shots three, four times, three times, three times I got shots to get scholarships to go to school, and that's not saying that is a compliment because I'm not a good student. I'm just an average Joe, and that's to be said, since I didn't get into med school, that tells the story there, but I got scholarships to OU, and I got scholarships to Illinois University when I went to library school because not only did I get the scholarship at the University of Oklahoma that first year, I got an offer to go to the University of Illinois Library School, and when I came back out of the service, OU didn't have any scholarships, and Illinois offered me a scholarship again, but I couldn't. I was two weeks long and being able to get out of the military early so that I could start in Illinois or I probably would have gone to University of Illinois, and then when I graduated, I got a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine to go to the University of Tennessee at Memphis to spend a year on a fellowship in libraries, and so I was extremely lucky and was able to do that, and while I was at Memphis in that fellowship, I was in classes with three graduates, from the University of Illinois, graduate from the University of Maryland and a graduate from the University of Emory, and those are three of at least two, probably the top 10 library schools when I was in school. Maryland would have been somewhere in the top 20 for sure. OU was probably down around the middle of the pack at those days, and I was very, very nervous being in a fellowship program with those people, excited to be in the fellowship because I wanted to go into medical library, so that was exciting to me, and I can remember being back home after Christmas, after being over there for about three or four months and running into some people that I'd been in library school, and they asked me how things were going, because that was something I had talked about before I left here to go to the fellowship, and I said, “they can talk about the big name library schools all they want to”, but I said, “we got as good or better education than they got because I was way ahead in some areas.” Now some of that probably had to do with the experience that Francis gave me while I was at Oklahoma City University, but I never… it wasn’t very shortly after we got there that I took no credence that they had a better education than I had, so I've always felt like that the students at OU get a good education, and I'm very appreciative of the education I got in the faculty that were there

Neuer: When you finished your fellowship, then what happened with your career?

Thompson: I was working at the fellowship at Memphis. It was an interesting fellowship. I spent four days a week working in the lab for a researcher, and I spent one day a week in the library, and so I was working for an anatomist, and Dr. Shapiro, and all of a sudden, that was a big deal. You tied up for a year with one scientist, and you basically lived with that scientist as I said, four days a week for the 52 weeks. Well, he announces in May that he's leaving, and that kind of left me high and dry, because by that time, they were getting ready for the next class, and I'm sitting there with nobody to work for, and he's headed off to a brand new medical school on the east coast in Norfolk, Virginia, and so he leaves and he goes there, and of course, I'm applying for jobs and trying to look for jobs, and I got to the Medical Library Association meeting that year, and I apply for all these jobs, and now I'm beginning to think maybe I'm not as good as I think I am because [there] aren't a lot of people looking at me, you know, and there were a couple of places, you know, you really wanted to go, and you get turned down and, you know, I wasn’t doing real well, and all of a sudden, he calls me one day, and he says in about July. He said, “have you gotten a job yet?”, and I said, “no.” [He said] it was kind of like the first of the month or maybe the end of June, because he said, “well come over here the weekend to Fourth in July. He said, “I want you to meet the library director over here”, and I said, “Ok, I'll come over there, so we drove over to Norfolk, and I met with him and then I met with the director of the library school. I mean the director of the library, and they were getting ready to take their first class that September and come to behold it was Ann Kramer, and she was a graduate from the University of Oklahoma who had been around the country at a couple of other places before she landed there, and the meeting went really well, and I later found out that basically she was told, because they were heavily recruiting Dr. Shapiro and he was there. She basically was told that if Dr. Shapiro wanted me to come and be the reference librarian, and that that was who she was going to hire, but she liked me, and I was from Oklahoma, and she'd grown up in Norman, and so she decided to hire me, and so by August, I was on my way to Norfolk to work at Eastern Virginia Medical School and about 30 days after I arrived, we took our first class as medical students, and so that was kind of fun, I was building a library. It was fun working with her. One of the stories I tell about that was the fact that the only time in my life that the Marty hasn't followed me was the year I was a fellow. When I went there, I thought, “well, I ought to have professional names, so I had to go get my real name”, and so I started using Clinton, and so everybody in Memphis and everybody I met while I was at Memphis called me Clinton, and that was the only thing they used, and after I had met with Ann that time, she called back to the library school and she was asking the faculty about Clinton and what were they doing, and it took all of them a while to figure out that that was me, because in library school, I was Marty, and so during all the interviews, they called me Marty, and so by the time I arrived at Eastern Virginia, the personnel department call me Marty, and so I said, “that's it, forget it”, and went back to using the nickname Marty and have used it ever since, but that was part of that, and it was part of her, and her relationship with the library school that they didn't call me anything but Marty, and so she used it, so for years, I could tell where people were from by the way they’d address me because if they were people I met during the fellowship, they’d call me Clinton. It took them years to change and quit calling me Clinton, and everybody else, that knew me and especially the people in Virginia that I got to know people there. They all knew me by Marty, so it was kind of funny.

Neuer: How many years were you at that library?

Thompson: I was there from… till 1976, and so I was there from 1973 to 1976. I was there three years, and I ran the reference department, so I did all the things with reference department library, and then it was a good thing that Francis had let me do all the things I wanted to do, because after the first year, my boss fired the cataloger that she had hired at the same time she hired me, and so for a short period of time, we were without a cataloger, and so I took up all the serials duties, and she took up all the cataloging of the books, and so I did all the ordering and I did all the binding of the journals and everything for three to six months till we got a new tech services librarian hired, and there were only three of us, her and the Tech Services Library and myself, and then I had one assistant that worked in the library who then later on went to library school and got her library degree, so and the young man that came in as the head of tech services still works at Eastern Virginia Medical School. He's never worked anywhere else. He's always worked there, so he's still there, and the young lady that worked for me as the technician is now one of the reference librarians at eastern Virginia, and she's never been anywhere else except eastern Virginia, so it was kind of a neat thing. It was very small. We only had 40 kids the first year. It was the first class. Everybody who was there was all new. Everybody had come from someplace else in the United States. Most of the faculty was young. They were all PhDs and had either just finished PhDs or finished fellowships. Most of them were doing research in cancer. Most of them were trying to get grants from NIH at the time so that they could help support themselves and support their departments, so it was an interesting atmosphere. [It] was a lot of fun for three years.

Neuer: Then did you move back to Oklahoma?

Thompson: Yeah, my mother sent me this notice for the director of the library in Tulsa, which at that time was called the Tulsa Medical College, and I left that letter laying on my desk for months and finally decided that I better pay some attention to that, because I didn't know whether I could see my mother and tell her that I didn't apply because she'd sent it and said I should apply. I knew a lot about Oklahoma. I hadn’t been gone that long. I couldn't figure out what kind of a job it was or what it was with because it was with the university, but it didn't report to Leonard Edy, who was the director of the library and Health Sciences Center, so I just whipped off this CV and a letter of application and fired it back, and I said, “at least that way I can tell my mother I applied”, and next thing I know, I get this notice and they want to know if I want to come for an interview, and so I'm going “well jeez, you know, do I really want to leave here, but my daughter was only about 2 years old at the time, and my parents, because we were on the East Coast and didn’t get to see them too much, and she'd still fly for free, so I figured it was a pretty good deal, so I called my parents. I said, “you know, I'm going to come in and I'm going to do an interview and I’ll bring Christine with me, and you all can come up and take her down and I’ll maybe stay a day longer, [and then we’ll] and then I'll fly back. You can bring her back up and we’ll fly home, and that way you'll get to see her for a while”, so my parents said, “well that’s a great idea, we’ll do that”, so I came in and I interviewed and I figured, no way I'm going to get this job. I only had about three years. They were had just pulled together a library. We're going to use the Tulsa County Medical Society library that was at that point in time stationed at Hillcrest. They were going to bring it over to the university, and we were going to make that the core of the library and then build a medical school library to support the clinical curriculum that was being offered, and so there were two people I found out later that came in for the interview and why to this day, I don't know, but they hired me, and so I got my first shot to run my own library and got to hire my own staff. [I] got to hire one other librarian and two technicians to work the library after I arrived here, and so then I spent from 1976 in about August of 1976 to August of 1980 at Tulsa, working at the library up there.

Neuer: Ok, well, we stopped here at 1980, so let's just keep going. Then what happened after 1980?

Thompson: In 1980, Leonard decided to leave the Health Sciences Center and go to the University of Louisville as the director of the library at the University of Louisville, and I thought about it for a while, and of course most of that I'd gotten to be very friendly with most of the staff at the Health Sciences Center, and you know, we were [more than] just colleagues, and you know and I'm thinking, and the gentleman that had hired me at Tulsa came up to me one day and said, “are you going to apply for the job in Oklahoma City?”, and I said, “well, you know, I you know, I'm I just got a few years in here” . At that time, I only had three years when I applied. I said, “you know, I'm not real sure that's enough time to get a job and that job in Oklahoma City.” [He said], “so I think you ought to apply”, and I said, “well, you know.” He said, “how many chances are you going to get to make the big jump”, and he knew I was from Oklahoma City. He was a kid that grew up in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and his dad was one of the deans at Okmulgee, and he had gone to OSU, and of course, he and I had great fun about OSU and OU, and of course, he was working for OU, so that was even more fun, and so he said, “I think you ought to apply”, so I went on ahead and put my application in, and it was a strange situation because I'd also been asked to be the interim once Leonard had left, and so I was coming down here three days a week and working two days up there and applied and then went through the interviewing process, and the young lady who interviewed against me was extremely qualified, had more experience than I had, and I knew who she was, and so I figured, well, she'll get that job. It's no big deal, and the next thing I know, they're calling me and offering me the job, and Dr. Howard’s dad, who’s a urologist here in Oklahoma City, was the interim provost at the time, and he ended up hiring me, and so I accepted the position and then came down here in the August of 1980 as the director of the Health Sciences Center library, so and for whatever reason, they have not seen fit to fire me in the some odd years that I've been working down here so.

Neuer: How many staff did you have in 1980 and how does that compare to today?

Thompson: Basically, the staff's not that much bigger than it was when I took it in 1980, and that's one of the things that the late 1970s and the early 1980s were the time when staff increases were going on. By the middle 1980s, staffing in libraries was beginning to level off tremendously. We've juggled staff. We've changed positions and made some tech positions into faculty positions and sometimes taking faculty positions and put them into staff, but they're about the same. There's always been about eight or nine librarians at the Health Sciences Center, and we've got a total staff of about 36 full time equivalents that work in the Health Sciences Center, but it's stayed almost exactly the same, just switches here and there.

Neuer: What was considered the newest cutting-edge technology when you were in library school?

Thompson: When I was in library school, I came into the profession on the verging edge of computers. I mean they were the thing in the future, and of course, we were still using punch cards to run the computers at Norman when I was in library school, but they were the thing that was what was going to happen. They were going to revolutionize us. We were going to just be tremendously different than what we were. One of the stories I tell is, is that the Health Sciences Center was one of the beta tests for the Medline databases. They search on Twix machines. Those were telex machines. They searched on those machines and they did that, and in 1978, 1979, they were one of the test beds, but by 1980, almost every medical school in the United States, well actually I guess they did that earlier then. I apologize. That's wrong. They actually did the beta test in 1971 and 1972 because I was searching on Medline in 1976 when I went to Eastern Virginia Medical School, so medical libraries have been using the machines to search databases for a long time. One of the stories I tell when I teach library school students is that when I was at Eastern Virginia, I'm on the machine and I was using a heat sensitive machine, and so that fascinated all the researchers, and so that was a way to get to talking to researchers because they were all getting into computers as well, so they were always really interested, and I can still remember one day sitting there doing a search for somebody and [the] one of the researcher says, “so where's the person on the other end is typing that information into the computer”, and it took me a while to understand what he was asking me, but he thought that the information that was rolling off on my end was being input by a person on the other end, you know, and I laughed like heck, and so but that, you know, in those days the guys at the National Library Medicine were really clever and those were in the days when you could get away with things, so like Christmas, all the searches would end with happy holidays and Merry Christmas. You know, and other times of the year, they'd put messages on the bottom of the searches and they were just convinced that there was a human on the other end, typing the searches out and that I was just typing them off on a telex manner back at our place, so it was I got a big kick, but that was the beginning, and so, you know, almost from the time that I arrived into the profession, you know, I've had the ability of using some kind of a machine to connect to a computer and search the databases and provide information to health professionals, and that was the byway when I was in library school. Everybody was elated you know, [I can] but the other thing was, is that when I was in library school, you know, they were going to replace print in 1970, you know, and that's only become a probable reality in the late 1990s, and so, you know, 20 to 30 years behind what the futurist thought was going to happen.

Neuer: Do you remember? Did you automate the library at all the OU Health Sciences when you started there?

Thompson: Yeah, I actually helped them purchase the first online catalog. We bought notice the first time, automated the catalog. [It] was the first time as a director that I ever really had a necessity to remember anything that Urma and Ms. Huey had taught in cataloging class, because all of a sudden all of that garbage that I thought was truly garbage, I had to know about and had to understand how I was going to pull it out, and why we needed it to be known and all of this kind of stuff, and so we bought the first one there and we automated it . [It was a…] I think for librarians in those days it was it was traumatic, but it wasn't traumatic because everybody was so excited about getting the computer and getting an online catalog, but [they] no one grinched or witched about what they were having to do to get it all up and get it running, and, you know, the second time I did it, it wasn’t nearly as peaceful and quiet, but that first time, you know, everybody was just so excited because they were finally getting an online catalog, and we're going to have our information, and everybody be able to search it, and so everybody was excited about what we were doing.

Neuer: Did you all convert the records yourselves?

Thompson: Yeah, we did. We used OCLC tapes for some, and then but we had to convert a lot because a lot of them we didn't have an OCLC at the time, so we put them in OCLC and also put them into our catalog as well.

Neuer: How have the collections changed at the library over the years? The print, electronic, of course there's much more of that now, but [have] how has it affected the print collections?

Thompson: Well really I've seen a couple of things happen in my career in health sciences libraries, and this won’t parallel all libraries, but it's the parallel of what happened in health libraries. We saw a real resurgence in 1970 of nonprint media and health sciences libraries, education and in the health professions is very visual, and so the introduction of 35 millimeter slides, audio cassettes, eight millimeter film was a big deal, and so I had seen that come in and in the early 1970s, and in my career at Eastern Virginia, we were purchasing a lot of non-print media, so I was used to changing materials, and then most of that settled down again until we moved into the electronics and then the electronics took off. The other thing that's happened in health sciences is that when I started, it was a medical school library typically, and that's all you have, but at the Health Sciences Center, I have seven colleges. We're one of three health sciences centers in the United States that have seven colleges in one campus. We're kind of unique in that to use that term inappropriately, but we're different. We sit alone out of the hundred and thirty-four, thirty-five medical schools in the United States right now. There's only three of them that have that many colleges of health professions in one place, and that's the other change that I have seen is that our collections have grown into what I used to call peripheral information is now necessary information, and that [what I] when I teach library school and teach health sciences library courses, I say there used to be a core and that core has grown and the peripheral used to be very large outside and it has grown, so it's that along with, and of course the electronics has taken us by storm, and it'll be interesting to see you know, my comments when I speak, get a chance to talk to library school students right now, is that we're still seeing print in electronic, and we all call it electronic. We all think it's fantastic. We read it on a screen, and we're all elated and we get so excited about all of that, but we're still reading print. I mean, to the point that if you offer an HTML file for a journal article to faculty, they get agitated because it's not to be a PDF file and it doesn’t look like the journal, and how do I cite an HTML, because I need the PDF so I can cite the page, so we're really still in many cases we're still in my opinion, we're still in the early childhood of electronics. We're still looking at truly print in electronic, and it's real funny because I see a lot of people who have problems and they start looking at issues and they start doing this, and I said, “well, what would you do if it was print?”, and they have an answer for that, and I go with, “then that's your answer for electronics”, because it's just the medium that you're looking at, and I was lucky because the non-print media taught me that, and so, you know, now we're starting to see and I say that all the time about health sciences. I've got two products now that I offer electronically to my faculty. One of them costs me 30,000 dollars a year and one of them has costed me about 40,000 dollars a year. Those two products never existed in print. It would have been very hard for the way that we utilize them in a health setting for them ever to have existed in print. I see them as the first influence of what I see as the future of electronics. You know, to me, an electronic journal will be when I'm reading the article and it says, “here's the EKG strip that we use to determine that this patient had such and such heart disease”. We will have moved into the true electronic age when I actually see the EKG on the screen, not a flat image of a piece of paper where it's been printed out, but I actually see the EKG being passed across the screen in front of me, so that I'm seeing more than, you know, two or three inches of that EKG strip. I actually see the whole EKG strip, or I see the true ultrasound, not just a picture off of an ultrasound, but I see the entire ultrasound from the point in the time that they saw what they wanted to see to the point that they finally made the decision that this is what they were looking at. [Those things will] we will have moved into the true electronic age instead of just reproducing print into the electronic. The electronic right now that we're getting is the ability to expand access. You know, I was talking. Our appointments for faculty are in the College of the Graduate College at the Health Sciences Center, and so I have some reporting to the dean of the graduate school, and somebody had been witching about the library, and so he called me down to talk to me about it, and so I'm explaining the issues and the problems about why the faculty couldn't get what they wanted to get, and why they couldn't get it in Norman, even though Norman is the University of Oklahoma. We go through all of this discussion. He finishes me, says “well I think you do a pretty good job understanding this”. He said, “the faculty ought to be able to understand this”. He said, “we're just going to have to be sure they understand it.” He said, “I couldn't understand what they were talking about”, because he said, “you know, I don't ever come up to your place anymore. I do everything from my desk over the computer”, and that's what the electronics so far have been allowing [allowed] us to do. The electronics that we currently have now are allowing our patrons to see what we had in print and in an access mode that they couldn't get otherwise. They don't have to come to us anymore. They're getting it electronically. They're getting it at their desk theoretically in a health sciences center setting that is saving those people that time that they would have had to spend to walk over and use my library. They can do that now from their desk or their labs or in many cases nowadays from the floor where the patients are being treated, so what we've really done right now is increase the access. We're eventually going to get to the other and we're seeing more of it, and as I say, we've got two products that could have never existed in any other format.

Neuer: Can you name those two products?

Thompson: Yeah, it's called Up to Date and Dinamen. Those are the two [that were…], they're called clinical decision tools, and what they do is they assist the health care professional in providing the evidence-based current treatment for whatever disease that they've diagnosed. Health professional people, the M.D.s, everybody else that's involved in that process, still have to make the decision about what the disease process is, but once that's established, they can then refer back to these resources, and [tell you] that resource will then tell you what the state of the art, what should be done, what might not be yet quite proven in research, and then, but one of the tools will even tell you what the other options are, that might not have yet in research been proven to be possible, but somebody thinks that they've seen that that particular treatment has had some effect in a patient that they've been working on. I mean, they're exciting tools. I mean, again, we had Close, we had similar tools that the students used to use. These tools are updated daily. If something is printed in the research one day, within 24 to 48 hours, the information is changed. You couldn't have done that in print. You couldn’t have made that change, and then everybody in the United States knew what the change was. That only can happen in the electronic and the computer world.

Neuer: What are the colleges that your library supports?

Thompson: We've got the College of Public Health in all of its various activities, and we stream almost the entire stream of the various fields that are in the College of Public Health. We have a College of Dentistry. We have a College of Medicine. We have a College of Nursing. We have a College of Allied Health that has four different allied health programs. We have occupational therapy. We have physical therapy. We have nutritional sciences, and we have communication sciences. We have a graduate college and College of Nursing. Did I say that? Probably did, and the college pharmacy.

Neuer: Ok, let's talk a little bit about service to the profession and involvement in professional organizations.

Thompson: Well, I'm kind of a mundane person when it comes to that. I've spent my career in Medical Library Association and then their chapter, which I refer to as the South Central Region, it’s now called the South Central Chapter, which covers the five states Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and then I've been in the Oklahoma Library Association, and that's why I say I'm kind of mundane. I have not been involved in too many associations. I spent most of my career doing stuff in one of the three of those associations.

Neuer: Were you involved with the Oklahoma Library Association when you first came back to Oklahoma?

Thompson: Yeah, when I first came back, I participated because I was told that I should participate by people at the Health Sciences Center, that they thought that would be good, and it would let me get to meet people, and it was great because it opened doors and introduced me to other librarians in the Tulsa area. It opened that door. I didn't really become real active in the Oklahoma Library Association, until the early 80s, after I had gone to the Health Sciences Center and I felt it was extremely important for the director of that library, because I never referred to it as being the best health library in the state, but it is the largest and the oldest. It will always be the oldest, may not always be the largest, but it will always be the oldest. I thought it was important that they had a presence in the Oklahoma Library Association. I had two or three staff and at the time that were there that had always been very active in the Oklahoma Library Association, so that made it easier for me to become more active and start getting involved on committees and doing things and in the Oklahoma Library Association.

Neuer: What do you think is the most lasting contribution you've been able to make to the Oklahoma Library Association? You've served as president. I'm sure you've served in many different committees and roles, and you actually were honored this week as a library legend for the Oklahoma Library Association. This is Oklahoma's centennial year, and you were one of the librarians that were selected for that honor, and you have been honored for distinguished service as well, which is the highest honor that the association has.

Thompson: I, you know, I don’t know. I don't like this legend thing either. There [are] several people that I know that should have been on the 100-list way before me. I don't think that there's probably anything outstanding that I've ever done for the Oklahoma Library Association. I think the associations [have] given me more than I'll ever give the association. I've enjoyed the opportunity. I enjoyed meeting people. I enjoy working with people, and that's what OLA has allowed me to do in Oklahoma, is to meet a lot of people and work with a lot of neat people. You know, I've already said once I'm not the sharpest guy on the block. I'm pretty creative, can make things work. I can get stuff done. You know, and I think those are the things that I've done. I, you know, I got elected president in this this organization way too early, and I know that. Idiots that voted for me don't I guess, but, you know, I was pretty, pretty new and still pretty, pretty young as far as many other people were, but to me, and it's been the ability to have the association with the people [UNSURE]. Special libraries can become twits pretty quick. You know, we live among ourselves. It's one of the reasons that I like health sciences libraries is because our clientele are very smart. You know, we have some of the smartest people in education going through our place. You know, I don't have to babysit as you'll hear, some of the junior college and some of the public library people refer to their patrons. You know, it's a really nice thing. We can become pretty arrogant and pretty twitty, and I think being in the association kept my feet on the ground, and I think the other thing that's always been neat, and I've said that to several different directors, I find it very interesting how we're a lot more like public libraries than we probably would like to admit in any kind of a conversation with other library directors, but special libraries are a lot like public libraries. We do a lot of service. We're concerned about service. We're involved in service. I think it's fun in OLA to be sitting around talking to other public library directors because they talk about some of the same kinds of issues and problems, [that] we have about being sure that our clientele are happy with what they're getting, they are receiving what they think they need to be getting, how they're giving those services. There's a lot of relationships, so for me, it's been a lot of fun and I've gotten a whole heck of a lot more out of it, I know, than I've given.

Neuer: What about mentoring? Have [there been] some students that some people that you've seen come up through the ranks and you're especially proud of that you've been able to mentor?

Thompson: At one time, almost everybody on my staff was somebody I had taught at the library school. A lot of people have asked me, because we've talked two courses in health librarianship since before 1980, and actually Leonard taught them when he was here before me, and you know, people always find out that we did it and we did it for no additional money at the university, and I've said I've gotten more money out of it than I could have been paid because it gave me an opportunity to find employees, so, you know, if I've selected many of the employees that have been at the Health Sciences Center, not all of them, but many of them were former students that we had in class, and we had an idea about how good they were and how well they could perform, what they could do, so that's been fun, and so, you know, [I've got is] the Oklahoma, the Medical Library Association not Oklahoma, but the Medical Library Association is real into, right now, about have we trained enough leaders for the future and are people going to be leaders? Well, when I came into the profession, it was right at the end of the growth and people were moving up, moving around, taking jobs, and my belief is that if you get somebody good, you throw them in the pit, they'll do it. Some of it they need to learn. Some of it they can do from different coursework. Some of it they can do by following people, but the way you're really going to learn, you know, maybe I shouldn't have had that military standard between undergraduate and graduate school. A lot of us, OJT, you learned it on the job, and, you know, you can get a lot of book work, but I've met a lot of really good work people that I wouldn't hire in my library, so I think you learn it on the hoof, and you know, when they went into this, a lot of surveys of library directors, you know, this, that and the other, and there were several library directors they were amazed that I would say that I had three or four people on my staff that could be directors of libraries in the future, and I said, “why wouldn't I have”. You know, I want people on my staff. You know, I had one of the things that I've said over the years is I always hire people that are better than I am because I think how else can the library be better if the people working there aren’t better than you are yourself, and I still have two working for me right now that I think eventually, whether I live long enough or not, I don't know yet, but I think both of them will be library directors, and I've got two or three others that are out working at other libraries now that are working their way up the line, and I think they'll be directors of library someday, so, you know, and then the other thing is, as far as dealing with youngsters is that, you know, I've always been a director that I think you ought to give kids a chance. I try to be sure that all my kids get to meetings. I try to be sure that all my kids are involved and in associations. I try to be sure that they're doing things and for a variety of reasons. At one time, everybody at the Health Sciences Center Library had a degree from the University of Oklahoma. There are a lot of institutions that don't hire students from the library schools in their areas because they don't want everybody to think the same way, and I think one of the ways you prevent that from happening is that you get those people out and get them exposed to other people and you get to expose the associations. Their mindset is not going to be what they were in library school. You only spent about a year or two years in library school. Your patterns are really going to get established once you get out of there. They teach you the theory, then you got to practice, so, you know, I've always tried to be sure that those kids get out and had a chance to get some experience and learn.

Neuer: Another award that you've received, the Michael DeBakey Outreach Award. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Thompson: Yes, that’s from the National Friends, the National Library of Medicine's Friends Group, and it's given, and I'm not real sure I was deserving of that one either, but that's given to someone who does training to health professionals and now to consumers on how to utilize databases, how to find information linking them up either to libraries where they can get that information or teaching them how to use the various databases we've had in this state. The Byrd Health Sciences Library is a resource library for the National Library Medicine through our regional office, which is currently located in Houston, and every year we have a responsibility of doing training for health professionals that are not at the Health Sciences Center, and so that's one of the things that we've tried to do. Currently, we’re following up on a project that we started several years ago that we did with public libraries through the state library. We're doing some training in the Southeastern Public Library System and in the Chickasaw Public Library System, teaching the public librarians about the various databases that are available in the health sciences, and then teaching any of their patrons that they want to, or that want to learn about how they themselves can use those databases and get things, and when I teach at the library school, there are only two national libraries in this country. Everybody thinks Library of Congress is, but that's not their directive to be a national library. There are to be the library of Congress, and the two national libraries are the National Library of Agriculture and the National Library of Medicine, and they truly are national libraries for us. They direct us. They move us in the direction they want us to move in, they help us move ahead, they provide us with lots of money to do grants and research, and one of the things the National Library Medicine has encouraged is this training to ensure that the databases that are provided by the National Library Medicine are made available, or at least people understand that they're available. National Library Medicine provides a database that would cost a ton of money if one of the private firms had ever [developed] and that's Medline, and that's free not only in this country. It’s free to anybody in the world, and so basically, it's an extension and doing things that they have encouraged us to do, and I didn't do anything fancy. It's just something that I think we ought to do, and we stay committed to doing it.

Neuer: That sounds like that's a well deserving honor and award. Then, you’re all doing good service.

Thompson: You know, it's one of the things you learn as you go up the pike. Again, I learned that in the military. You know, lots of people get recognition, but it's typically never that individual who did it. It's typically people who are involved with that individual. That's especially true about somebody who's a director of the library. [There’s] always a lot of people doing work. I mean, if they're out doing stuff, and it puts them up so that they look like they might not get an award, that somebody was doing the stuff at home. Nobody does all of that stuff, and all that stuff at home and does it all on their own. There's always a lot of people doing it, and my staff has always been very good. I have always… they laugh, and there are people in, especially in the region that laugh because I've always said, “give me my staff and take me to any library and it'll be better than it is now.”

Neuer: Is there anyone… I think we're winding down here, but is there anybody in Oklahoma who is library related that you want to mention or say anything about? You shouldn’t overlook?

Thompson: I mean, if I mentioned anybody, it would have to be Francis. I mean, she got me into the business. You know, I think she was in the background a lot, once I came back and stayed, even though I didn't see her that often. You know, the other thing is, is that I think at one time there were 14 people that were at OCU at the same time that were working as librarians in Oklahoma, and Vicki and I are just two of those, but there were 14 people that had OCU ties, either directly or indirectly to Ms. Kennedy that were in the business. You know, I'd have to say that she's the one, and then the other one who's not, didn't finish her career here, but was an Oklahoman who was involved in OLA when she was here, and that was my first boss, Miss Kramer. You know, she much again, like Francis, let me do a lot of things that some directors would not have allowed me to do. I mean, my whining and crying about not getting the jobs I wanted and having to go to work for her, in retrospect, was fantastic because if I had gotten some of the other jobs, I would have never had the opportunities to learn and do the things that she let me do during the three years that I was there, even to the point of telling an architect, actually it was an interior designer, that she didn't know anything about what she was doing about putting the furniture in a library that we were designing at the time, and she didn't even, Ms. Kramer never even hesitated. She just laughed, and we moved on to the next subject, but, you know, gal made me mad. I was young, I was arrogant, and Ms. Kramer agreed with me, luckily, so I got away with it. You know, those two people, they gave me a lot of chances, give me chances to, and then the other thing is all the people I've ever worked with. I mean, I've always had a really great staff. As I said a while ago, currently, I wouldn't change that terminology. I’d take my staff, I go anywhere, and I think that my staff could do a better job than probably what is being done where it's at. I think it's a great staff. I've always had good support. I've always had bright people working. They've always been really intelligent. They've always gotten along really well together, and I think that's important. I told the search committee at the Health Sciences Center when I was being interviewed for the directorship, they asked me, you know, when would I know it was time for me to move on from the University of Oklahoma because they were very worried about how young I was, and I said, “I know it was time to move on. When I didn't want to come to work and didn't enjoy the people I worked with”, and that hasn't changed much.

Neuer: Anything you see for the future?

Thompson: Oh, I think it’s great for the kids that are coming in. I keep thinking because I always compare where I was, we've talked about, you know, we were starting to search on Twix machines that were basically telex machines that you found in the union stations, and, you know, and I see these kids coming out, and they've got all of this knowledge about computers because they've been using computers all this time. I just can't imagine what the libraries, thirty years later for the kids that are graduating today are going to look like. It’s just almost unbelievable to me about where can they be? What can it look like, you know, how will things be? You know, the only thing that I probably believe is that I don't think print’s going to be replaced. There are some things that can only be done in print. You know, I think as long as the baby boomers are around, the books are going to still be selling. You know, mentioned the other day that sales of books are higher than they've ever been, and yet we're further into the electronic world than we've ever been, but even some old fart like me that, you know, has a hard time using the computer hates reading anything on the computer more than a screen long. You know, I’ll tell this story on myself. I don't have a computer at home because I know if I did, that's all I would do is do work. I wouldn't do anything else. I'd be at work, but I still and I'm probably going to have to break that policy here very shortly because, you know, if I'm at home, and I get ready and I'm going to go someplace, you know, I want to get on MapQuest and get the map. You know, I want to Google it to find out whether the restaurants open, you know? I mean, even I am becoming, you know, addicted to being able to get that instantaneous information that I used to get out of pulling out of a telephone directory and dialing a phone number, so, you know, it's just amazing about where they'll be. You know, what will, what kind of computer screens will they be using? What will be the search engine for someone who's searching for information in a library. I had the opportunity a few years ago to see one of the diagrams, search machines, where instead of just getting a search back, you got back a diagram of the search that showed you all of the interlocking information and how all of the articles that had been retrieved were related to each other, and then you could narrow the search by determining where you want to go, and I'm just going, how fascinating, you know, that that's going to be in the future to see how kids have done, and then as I typically say, you know, about people, I don't text message on my telephone. I always tell everybody I don't have my nineteen-year old with me today, so I can't text message today because she does all my text messaging, you know, but all of those advents that people use. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Neuer: Ok, well, thank you. This was a great interview. I enjoyed it.

Thompson: I doubt that, but I had fun.

Neuer: Oh, it was a good one. Ok.

Neuer and Thompson: Thank you.