Oral History: June Lester

Description:

Transcript:

Interviewer: Jan Davis 

Interviewee: June Lester 

Interview Date: April 3, 2007 

Interview Location: Oklahoma Library Association Annual Conference, Renaissance Convention Center, Oklahoma City, OK 

Note: There is an intermittent rumbling throughout the interview, like a large truck is passing by the place where the interview is taking place.  The Renaissance is located in a very busy part of Downtown Oklahoma City, so this is likely the case. 

 

Jan Davis: My name is Jan Davis.  Today is April 3, 2007.  I am attending the Oklahoma Library Association’s annual conference and interviewing Dr. June Lester.  Hi Dr. Lester. 

June Lester: Hi. 

JD: I have a series of questions for you.  Let’s start with your background.  Can you tell me about your childhood, like where you grew up, brothers or sisters, and a little bit about the town and perhaps the time you grew up in? 

JL: Okay.  I grew up in the very small town of Wadley, Georgia.  Population when I was growing up was around 1,800, I think.  I lived for six years in another small town named Bartow, Georgia, which had about 350 people, but when I was six, we moved to Wadley.  That’s where I consider my hometown.  I have one sister, who is four years younger than I am.  I started first grade in 1948 and graduated from high school in 1960, so that gives you a sense of the time period that I grew up in. It was certainly very different from today. 

JD: Do you have a memory of any librarians from your youth, any that stand out? 

JL: Well, when I was growing up, there were not – we really didn’t have a library in the town that I grew up in until probably when I was in high school.  The school that I was in in there was what we called a library in the school, but it was one room and the person who took care of the library was also the fourth-grade teacher.  I have many fond memories of her.  Her name was Eleanor Newton.  

JD: Eleanor Newton? 

JL: Mm-hmm (meaning yes).  Her son was in my class.  She was also my Sunday School teacher as well as my fourth-grade teacher, so she played many different roles in my life. 

JD: You had a lot of good connections with her. 

JL: Right. 

JD: Well, the next question is what sorts of books were your favorite as a child, and were there any she recommended? 

JL: The first one that I remember was not one she recommended because it was one of the Little Golden Books.  It was my favorite, and I guess my mother must have read it to me.  It was The Pokey Little Puppy.  I probably still have that book somewhere.  I’m not sure where it is.  The other one that I remember reading as a child, and I think I first read it in the fourth grade, so Ms. Newton could have been the one who suggested it to me.  I read it again in the fifth grade and again in the sixth grade, and I may have read it after that.  It was called Up the Fjord, and it was about a young girl named Petra, who was part of the resistance movement in Norway during World War II.  (Note: She likely means On the Edge of the Fjord by Alta Halverson Seymour.) 

JD: If someone had told you in high school that you would one day be a librarian, would you have been surprised?  What would you have thought? 

JL: I would have said no, I’m not going to. 

JD: What did you think you were interested in being? 

JL: What I planned to do was to finish college and then go to graduate school, probably, and get a Doctorate in History. 

JD: What area of history are you most interested in, or are you most interested in? 

JL: I had two major areas of interest.  One was English history.  I’m a terrible Anglophile.  I was also very interested in Soviet history. 

JD: Good time to be interested in that. 

JL: It was. 

JD: It was a topic that was very interesting with a lot going on.  How did you make the switch from history to your interest in librarianship? 

JL: Well, I was the single mother of a very young child, like four months old, when I left her father and decided I had to go back to school.  I actually taught fifth grade for about eight months and decided that was absolutely not a career that I was cut out for, so I was going back to school and I decided that I was either going to law school or going to library school.  I was going to go to Emory University, which is where I had done my undergraduate work.  When I went to visit the university to talk to those two schools, there wasn’t anybody at the law school that could see me that day, but there was somebody at the library school.  I said, “Oh well.  This is only a year.  If I don’t like it after I do this degree, I can still go to law school.”  That was not a very intelligent, informed decision, [laughs] but that’s honestly how it happened. 

JD: So the librarians won out because they were in the office. 

JL: Because they were in the office, yes.  [both laugh] 

JD: There’s a message there, I think.  Did you consider other universities? 

JL: No. I had decided that I had graduated from Emory, and I wanted to go back to a place at that point that I was familiar with, and I was comfortable being in Atlanta, so that’s where I was going to go.  They actually tried to talk me into applying somewhere else.  They said that I did my undergraduate degree there and I should consider going somewhere else, and I thought they really didn’t want me, but I was going there and that’s too bad.  So I went. 

JD: Good for you.  I can recall library school having some faculty members that really stood out for me or that over the years have meant a lot.  Are there some in your career, in your studies, that meant a lot? 

JL: There were two that were very important to me, not only during the time that I was in school but also later because I went back and worked.  I was actually on the faculty at the school at Emory for seventeen years, and they were important to me in both aspects.  One was the director of the school.  His name was Venible Lawson, and the associate director John Clemmons.  They were both very, very dear friends. 

JD: Were most of your faculty male? 

JL: It was about half and half, I think. 

JD: Tell me about your first library job.  How did you get it?  Did you like it?  What did you do? 

JL: Okay.  When I graduated from my Master’s program, it was back in the good old days when there were large numbers of jobs and not enough people to fill them, so people were recruited very early on.  I was not completing my degree until August, but I had a job by the end of March.  I was recruited by the person at that point who was the fairly new director of the University of Tennessee Libraries, and I became a cataloger and I was cataloger for two years.  The deal was that I was going to catalog for two years and then I would be transferred into the reference department because that’s what I really thought I wanted to do.  I wanted to be a reference librarian.  Well, I’d never been one in my life, but at that point that’s what I thought I wanted to do.  I was there for a couple of years before I moved back to Atlanta. 

JD: Was there anything you decided you especially liked about cataloging?  

JL: I thought it was absolutely a lot of fun.  I was very fortunate in having a cataloging instructor who treated cataloging like a game, and you were just trying to figure how all the pieces were put together and what kind of puzzle you had and how to solve it.  [deep rumbling noise, like a plane passing overhead] That’s how I always thought about it.  I thought it was great fun, and it also seemed like – I only did original cataloging.  We could choose what we cataloged.  We didn’t have to catalog anything that specific.  We could just go to the shelf and pick out something we wanted to catalog and do it.  Usually, I’d pick up something I knew absolutely nothing about so I’d have to go to the reference department and look up something about it and find out things about it.  Invariably, I would find that there was something wrong in the catalog that I had to go and fix, so I would have to go to other parts of the library to figure out how the puzzle was supposed to have been put together when it wasn’t.  It was like a game.  It was great fun. 

JD: It sounds like a tremendous amount of freedom.  I can’t imagine that the choice would be there today to go select what you wanted to catalog. 

JL: We had one rule, and that was the shelves would be totally cleared at least once a month.  Anything that got left that nobody wanted to catalog would be toward the last part of the month.  The person that was sort of the assistant head of the department would go ahead and gather everything on a book truck and go and parcel them out.  Then you could swap with somebody else if you didn’t like what you got.  We got the work done.  It was a lot of fun. 

JD: Interesting.  So how long would it take on a short cataloging experience or a long catalog?  What’s the length that it might take to catalog something? 

JL: It really depended on what it was.  Some things I could do in big batches.  I became the expert in doing environmental impact statements and you could catalog a whole truckload of those in no time at all.  If it was something that was very difficult like an art exhibition catalog, which very often didn’t have a publisher or an author or anything else, it might take three of us working together half the day to figure out how we were going to catalog this thing.  It varied quite a lot. 

JD: Tell me about a mentor or a role model that you had in the early part of your career. 

JL: That’s a little bit harder to answer than some of the other questions because I’m not sure I ever thought of anybody specifically as a role model.  I guess if I had to choose one, I would choose the woman who was my dissertation advisor when I did my Doctorate at Columbia, Kathleen Moltz.  She’s an absolutely brilliant woman and I went to Columbia specifically to study with her.  She was very kind to me and very, very helpful to me.  I always thought if I could do things as well as Kathleen did, then I would be perfect. 

JD: That sounds like a perfect role model, a good example of one.  We talked about how times were different when you grew up, and the question now is what were some of the major issues facing libraries when you first started working? 

JL: When I was first a cataloger, some of the major issues – and this sounds kind of ridiculous – but how we were actually going to get those catalog cards reproduced.  At the time period, we were experimenting with a lot of different ways of getting things reproduced, some of which didn’t work because the ink would smudge and we would have all these catalog cards that we had to do over again.  Not that we had to catalog over again, but the reproduction of them.  Other kinds of issues was it was fairly early days in terms of some of the automation things that were going in.  When I was first at the University of Tennessee with the new director, he was turning – literally turning the library upside down about every two or three months.  He physically re-arranged things several times during the first year that I was there, and we also were part of the pilot project for the Association of Research Libraries Management Review and Analysis Program, which meant we were studying how the library should be managed differently, what kinds of things should be done.   

It was a very interesting time to be in as a very brand-new librarian with those sorts of opportunities.  I was also someone who probably had more ideas than sense, and I marveled that they didn’t throw me out on my ear with some of the things that I did, like going and telling the associate director that he didn’t know what he was doing in terms of the position description that he had for a new personnel librarian.  He was hiring somebody who was not a library person.  He was hiring a personnel person, and I said that this was never going to work because they’re going to have some kind of authority over the librarians and it won’t work.  Actually, I was right.  After a year it didn’t work, so he hired somebody with a library degree.  [laughs] 

JD: So he did come around to your way of thinking. 

JL: Yeah, and I never reminded him that I had said that.  Somebody who’s just started work there going to the associate director and saying that is kind of more brash than I would have put up with if I had been in his place.  [laughs] 

JD: You’ve benefitted from some patience along the way. 

JL: Absolutely, yes. 

JD: Compare what major issues you saw then with some you see now.  What major issues do you see in the field now? 

JL: The issues that I see now, in a way, are the issues of the library trying to define what its role is in society.  I think that for many years, we have seen ourselves as being the sort of center of the information universe.  I don’t think that has ever, ever been true, but it’s impossible to keep up that mythology anymore.  To define what we do best and how to do that best in the service of society is something that I see as a major issue.  The other one on a more practical level, the other major issue I see is the real challenge of trying to keep up with the technological changes.  I’m sure that everybody has always said that, but it seems to me that they’re much more rapid than they used to be, or at least that’s how it feels to me.  They’re much more fun in a lot of ways, but the challenge of trying to keep up with – as soon as you learn something, there’s something else that replaces it. 

JD: Keeping up personally as well as keeping up in your institution, so there’s two different arenas there, and it’s hard on either one. 

JL: For me, in a way, keeping up personally is the only part that I worry the most about, or keeping up in terms of how we change our curriculum, which is in constant evolution.  It seems like the de-evolution has to be much faster than it ever has been before in terms of changes. 

JD: Reacting to what’s out in the world.  My next question is what types of libraries have you worked in and what positions in libraries have you held?  You’ve talked about your cataloging position. 

JL: Right.  I was a cataloger for two years at the University of Tennessee, and then I became the Director of the library that served the library school at Emory University.  After about I think it was about three years in that position, I started teaching and I was still in charge of the library for sort of half of my position.  I also managed all the non-personnel budget for the school for another part of my position, and then I taught for another part of my position.  It was sort of self-inflicted because we were having some faculty changes and I decided that this is what I wanted to do and these were the other kinds of people we should hire.  I went to the director of the school and said this is what I think we ought to do, and he said, fine.  You can do that.  [laughs] That’s what we did for a while.  After that, after I left Emory, I left in 1987, and became the Director of the Office of Accreditation for ALA. After that, I was the Associate Dean at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences for two years.  Then I came to OU as the Director of the School in 1993. 

JD: Fantastic.  You’ve got almost fourteen years in Oklahoma now.  That’s great. 

JL: I’ve only actually worked in academic libraries 

JD: And ALA, a nice national scope to add to your career.  Over your career, what has proven to be the most difficult part of working in libraries? 

JL: [pause] That’s a really interesting question, and I would like to answer it in terms of what’s been the most difficult for me in my career rather than working in libraries because so much of my career has not been working in libraries, per se.  I think one of the most difficult challenges that I have had was trying to, when I first came to Oklahoma, [truck brakes squealing] trying to be the person that was the representative of the school for the whole population of Oklahoma because I felt like we had things that we were expected to do in terms of the university’s expectations.  There were things we were expected to do in terms of what the library community in Oklahoma wanted the school to be doing, and then what the faculty wanted me to do because I was supposed to be doing things to help them as well.  Having multiple bosses, but multiple goals that had to be served all at the same time, I found very challenging because sometimes those goals were definitely in conflict with each other.  Trying to balance and figure out how to put it all together was a great challenge. 

JD: Let’s take the flip side of that question.  What’s one of your greatest joys in your career? 

JL: At the same time I said that was a challenge, it was also a great joy to be able to make some of the changes that we were able to make during the time period that I was Director in terms of increasing the outreach to the state as a whole in terms of making courses available in other areas of the state.  To be really honest, I think the greatest joy has been since I stopped being director and teaching and doing research.  I’m in charge of myself only.  I think that that’s been the greatest joy and seeing the kinds of things that the students who have graduated from our program have gone on to do.  Some of the great moments have been when one of my students from Emory became director of an ARL library.  A student of mine is now the director of the Master’s program at Syracuse University. Seeing students that you’ve taught go on to do such wonderful things is extremely rewarding. 

JD: You see a lot of success based on their work and yours.  Let’s switch to libraries and technology.  What was considered the newest, cutting-edge technology when you were in library school?  Would you describe it? 

JL: I’m not sure whether you would call it the newest, cutting-edge technology, but the cutting-edge idea that was going on at the time was OCLC.  It had just been established when I was in library school, and was, at that point, still the Ohio College Library Center.  People weren’t really sure whether Fred Kilgore was a genius or something else.  I remember it very specifically because Kilgore came to speak at Emory during the time that I was a graduate student there.  I decided that I wasn’t going to go hear him because I wasn’t sure which way he was going to go, and I really have always regretted that because it would have been a very good opportunity to have heard him at an early age, early time.  I didn’t go. 

JD: That was then.  Let’s talk about now, the last few years.  What would you consider the most interesting innovation in library technology now in the last couple of years? 

JL: This is not necessarily just libraries, but I think the whole movement towards – the way that I’m hearing it expressed is changing from a consumer society to a producer society and the way that that is influencing libraries in terms of the kinds of connections.  Instead of being – well, I said the library never was the center of the universe, but I think that looking at the way that users are now doing things like doing tagging and things like that, if you’re familiar with Library Thing, and the way that our users are now doing the kinds of things that we have always thought of were sort of professional jobs.  They are taking these kinds of activities and making them theirs in ways that I think we’re not quite yet accustomed to.  We need to learn how to deal in very different way with our orientation towards what we do and the way that we interact with the users.   

JD: Maybe the way we express our value and what different we can bring to what they’re trying to do. 

JL: Right.  Exactly. 

JD: Let’s go back a little bit.  Tell me about the first time you used a computer.  Do you remember what it was? 

JL: I don’t remember what, exactly, it was, but it was when I was a junior in high school.  I was fortunate enough to go to a National Science Foundation math camp when I was a junior in high school.  We had a course in programming computers.  Although the program I wrote didn’t work, [laughs] I got to interact with a computer, and it obviously it was a mainframe that probably took up about this space in here or something.  It was – 

JD: And this is a rather large room. 

JL: Yes.  It was very, very, very early days. 

JD: My next question is during those first days with microcomputers, how did you think they might change libraries?  Did you, as a cataloger, did you see a potential with the computer? 

JL: Well, I wasn’t a cataloger when the microcomputer really came online.  I was already at Emory and the Director of the School of Libraries there.  I did see it very much influencing what libraries were doing and the whole way that we did business, but at that point, I was not directly – I was moving out of being directly involved with the library, per se, in terms of my responsibilities.  I probably didn’t think about it in quite the same way.  I looked at it more from how it could be used in education than I did in terms of the Master’s program, rather than specifically how it was going to change what was going on in the day-to-day work of the library. 

JD: The next question may not apply, but let’s see if we can figure out a context for you.  Tell me about bringing the Internet to your library.  Maybe you could address bringing the Internet into education for library students and how it’s involved with how they provide services? 

JL: I think the way that we began to use the Internet in many cases in terms of teaching, had to do with using it for support in courses that were not totally delivered through the Internet, but that had support aspects to them.  This is the way you got the syllabus.  This is where you went to get your support materials.  This is where the slides were posted.  Using it in that kind of way, and I was probably one of the first people at OU to stop doing a paper syllabus.  In fact, I probably did it before some of the students were quite happy with it.  It seemed to me that it was always there and available, and you didn’t lose it, and it was also a way to try to equalize the resources that were accessible by students in Norman and students in Tulsa or students that were in other parts of the state or in Arkansas.  They can access everything on an equal footing. 

JD: That does make a big difference in terms of making sure everyone can do what they need to do from where they are and saved a lot of gas for a lot of people and late nights at the library.  Let’s talk about your service to the profession and OLA.  Can you tell me how you became involved in the Oklahoma Library Association? 

JL: As soon as I moved to Oklahoma, I joined OLA and started going to conference and I assumed the – actually, the first committee that I was one I guess was the legislative committee, [starts laughing] and I’m still on the legislative committee.  It’s one that I think is extremely important.  One of the things I had the opportunity to do early on was to serve on the Long-Range Steering Committee for the Oklahoma Department of Libraries.  People were brought in from all over the state working on future directions for ODL, and that was a way to begin getting to know the professional community and to work in the professional community in a way that was very, very helpful to me.  I don’t know if I was helpful to ODL, but it was very helpful to me and a very good opportunity.  It had representatives from OLA.  I’m sure everybody on the committee was a member of OLA. 

JD: It’s a good way to get involved with everyone.  What do you think is a lasting contribution that OLA has made to the profession during your time as a member? 

JL: [pause] I think the contribution that OLA makes that is the most significant, and I think this is not just the time I’ve been a member, but I think in terms of the overall contribution of OLA, is the opportunities that it provides in two directions.  One is for the building of community within those who work in libraries, and the connections that are made, the networking that goes on, the support that anyone who is the least bit interested in libraries or anything to do with this profession can find in OLA is quite remarkable.  I think that OLA has done a lot of things specifically for libraries, but the opportunity for that support and the opportunity for continuing development and learning that OLA provides is extremely important, not just in terms of the workshops and in terms of the conferences, but also in terms of the opportunity to learn how to become a leader by being active in committees and working on various kinds of projects.  I think that’s extremely important, and in the long run probably contributes more to what goes on in libraries in the state than anything else that OLA does. 

JD: Great.  What do you consider to be your greatest contribution to OLA?  That’s question A. Question B, your greatest contribution to the library profession? 

JL: I guess with OLA, the thing that I remember the most through OLA the most vividly was, and I’m not sure whether it was through OLA or just in conjunction with OLA, was when there was a threat by the state legislature to change the state law that requires an ALA-accredited degree for those who work in public libraries over a certain size, and also for those who are the director of ODL.  Working with OLA leadership and with others in the state to try to defeat that bill, I testified at the committee and it is impressed in my memory as one of the things – I don’t think that I made the difference.  The difference was really actually made by someone who wasn’t there.  Mark Herron, who was the director at OBU at the time, wrote a letter to one of the members of the committee and convinced that one person to change his vote on that particular bill and we were able to keep it from coming out of committee.  If that had ever gotten to the floor and that had passed, I think it would have been a tragedy in the state.  I remember that as a highlight of something that I did.  The other thing that I think in terms of OLA that I hope has been a contribution has been working with the legislative committee over the years, particularly last year when we had a very, very difficult legislative session, but we came out of it unscathed. 

JD: Unscathed is good.  What would you consider your greatest contribution to librarianship to date? 

JL: [pause]  For me, the fact that I was the director of the Office of Accreditation at ALA at the time that the current standards were accreditation were written, and shepherded that process through the examination of the old standards, the decision to re-write the standards, to write new standards, and then through the process of making sure that the entire library community and all of the other associated associations, like the law librarians and the Medical Library association and the SLA and so forth were all incorporated in to that project.  We held hearings all over this country and in Canada related to that to get support for it.  I think those standards have stood the test of time, and I’m very pleased to have been part of that process. 

JD: Standing the test of time.  That’s a true testimony to how effective it’s been.  It looks like we’re coming to the closing questions.  There’s a long question.  It is: is there some person who is Oklahoma library-related who we really don’t want to forget, or someone you know who really has done a great deal for our profession and should not be overlooked? 

JL: [pause] That’s another difficult question without time to reflect on it.  I think that actually I was quite impressed with the breadth of the list of the 100 Library Legends, the variety of types of libraries and types of positions and types of activities that were recognized through that project.  Probably someone who has spent their entire career in Oklahoma, which I haven’t, might be better placed to answer that question than I can. 

JD: Well, then, we’ll switch to what looks like a fun question.  This says: Share an “I can’t believe they did that in the library!” story.  Just about everybody has one.  We might want to switch yours to “I can’t believe they did that in library school” if you prefer.  Do you have a great one? 

JL: Well, I’ve got one that sort of blends both of those.  When I was the director of the library for the school at Emory, we had the world’s best Halloween parties.  We decorated with all kinds of cutout spiders and we had tubs of water with apples for apple bobbling, and we had all the other kinds of things that one does on Halloween, including costumes.  We showed a horror movie as part of our party, and the horror movie was – and I don’t know if you – you probably don’t remember this, but when I was growing up, there was these films that we were marched into the auditorium to see when I was in grade school.  One of them was about what you do and don’t do in the library.  It had the shushing librarian and the little boy was forced to show his hands to the librarian to make sure they were clean enough to touch the books and all of this sort of thing.  We annually showed this film as our horror film of what libraries were not and never had been, and certainly never were going to be as long as we had anything to do with it.  I guess at the time, I was always concerned that the person who was the Director of Libraries at Emory at that point in time – and we weren’t part of the Emory University libraries.  We were part of the school, so he had no control over us, but I thought if he walked in when we were doing apple bobbing or laughing hilariously at this horror movie that we were showing, he would probably be mortified.  I’m not sure what he would have done, but he never did show up.  He came to the library a lot, but he never came on Halloween. 

JD: He missed the movie. 

JL: He missed the movie, and we didn’t invite him, either.  We didn’t want him to show up.  [both laugh] 

JD: That sounds like a pretty good party.  What was your best costume over all those years? 

JL: I don’t remember. 

JD: All right.  Is there anything that you would like to tell us that I haven’t asked you about? 

JL: I think you’ve done a pretty good job of asking questions.  I don’t know of anything specific that I would like to elaborate on. 

JD: Is there a piece of wisdom that you would like to leave listeners with? 

JL: [pause] Remember that the library, and I think probably just as sure as I say this, the library will last only as long as it is a useful institution for society.  If it doesn’t remember that, it won’t be here anymore. 

JD: Thank you Dr. Lester. 

JL: Thank you, Jan. I enjoyed it. 

 

 

End of interview.