Librarians and NCLB

Some notes on Cataloging Books and NCLB

When I took my cataloging class in college, I really hated it. But, I learned how to do it and swore that I would never accept a job as a cataloger. I imagined being buried deep in the bowels of the library with no sunlight and nothing but rows and rows of books. I couldn’t imagine doing that for a living! So, I did not accept the first job offer I got. I turned it down and later accepted a job as a children’s librarian.

As much as I hated cataloging, I was good at it and in later years I found that I did need to do it. When I started working for the public school system I discovered that I needed to catalog the books for the school library. Sometime in the 1970’s I found that certain book jobbers would add catalog cards with book orders…for a price. So, when my library budget was good enough I would spend the money and order the cards. I still had to give them a local call number, sort and file them in the card catalog, but I didn’t have to type each card. That was a great help.

By the mid 1980’s computers were coming to the libraries and there were programs that were helpful for typing and printing catalog cards. And finally, in the late 1980’s companies came out with MARC record programs and barcodes were put on books. This really was major. A librarian could order books complete with barcodes and full processing. Sometimes we would have to change the call numbers or subject headings to match our particular library, but this development was a real turning point. It saved so much time and that time could be spent reading to and teaching children.

By the 1990’s most school districts had processing departments to do the cataloging of materials. At first this was great and then all of a sudden, it seemed we were not allowed to do our own cataloging. When the online web based programs came about, most school districts opted for that system and hired a person to be in charge. The school librarian was no longer in charge of her own school library. We couldn’t even buy paperback books. If we did, we got them back with notes saying they were not worth cataloging. Apparently now we had rules about how thick a book could be, how old the copyright date could be, and were told which publishers we could not purchase from. So, I began wondering why I bothered with all those classes on cataloging and why I took that class in Book Selection. I actually know some librarians just out of school who never had to take a cataloging class.

So now here we are in the 2000’s and school librarians are handed curriculum guides and scripts on how to run the school libraries. What ever happened to individual library programs? My main objective was to show children the wonders of books and how to use them. Somehow this was all disappearing. My last school was very small, only 300 students, so I had a limited budget. My library budget was about $7.00 per student. You can’t buy a lot of hardback books with that kind of money. So, it was all very frustrating. When I did buy books and send them in to be cataloged sometimes it took months to get them back and then some of them were banded together with a note that they were not good enough to be cataloged and that I should give them away as prizes.

And while all this is going on, the teachers are being handed scripts to follow. Teachers used to bring their classes to the library to do reports on countries, animals, and science projects. But with the advent of NCLB this all stopped. The teachers no longer had time in their days to bring their students to the library for research projects. It seemed to me that NCLB really was put there to automate teaching. Teachers are becoming robots and so are librarians. I chose not to be a part of this system, so I retired. I was fortunate that I could retire. I feel for the individual teachers and librarians who became teachers and librarians because they wanted to teach children and thought they had something to offer. Now the various levels of government are telling them what to teach and how to teach and leaving no room for individual creativity. How is this going to help our children? My children are grown now, but if I had small children now I would not send them to public schools. I would home school them or find a good private school that still encourages creativity in their students and teachers.

Memoirs of a Librarian

Memoirs of a Librarian
Chapter One

THE SIXITIES

I began my library career as a student in 1961 at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. I doubt that the library science faculty had any idea how their world was going to change! We were not the students who normally came through this school. After all, it was the beginning of the sixties. We argued, questioned and did things that were outrageous.

Every year before Christmas, the freshman class was to put on the program for the staff, faculty and students of the school of library science. In the past there had been book reviews, book talks, etc. We were different. We took the poem “The Night Before Christmas and transferred it to a beatnik poem about books and libraries. I wish I had kept a copy…it was hilarious! I wore a long white turtleneck sweater and black tights and read the poem while brandishing a cigarette in a long cigarette holder. We talked about books like Chaucer, Tropic of Capricorn, Lady Chatterly’s lover and so forth and ended up throwing paperback copies of the books into the audience.. I think we were the only ones having a good time….every one else was in a state of disbelief.

Things continued in that vein until we graduated and went our separate ways out into the big world of public libraries and school libraries. I accepted a position with the Houston Public Library as a children’s librarian in 1965. For a while I worked in the main library in downtown Houston. While I was there the female staff got very excited by an advertisement that came out in Playboy magazine. It was a Tipparillo ad. I need to see if I can find a copy online and add it to this. There was a beautiful woman sitting holding a book…she obviously had no clothes on and the book was strategically placed to cover her…she was looking up over the book. The ad said, “Should you offer a Tipparillo to a librarian? Then in parenthesis it said, “yes, but offer to light it for her, she’ll have to put down that book!”

We purchased many copies of the magazine and posted that ad in every lounge for staff members to see! Thank God! We might be getting free of that awful image of the little old lady with her hair in a bun and a pencil behind her ear!


Then there were those of us that wore mini-skirts. Some patron always seemed to be calling and complaining to the powers that be about those mini-skirts in the libraries! Heaven forbid!

Oh yes…that first job paid a whopping $4000.00 a year! You must remember though, a brand new VW Beetle cost around $1300.00 in those days! I soon got a raise and a promotion to assistant librarian at one of the nicer branches. One of my jobs was to keep track of the overdue books. Once a month a Houston Police Officer would report to my branch to escort me to various addresses where we demand our library materials be returned. Didn’t Stephen King write a story called “The Library Police”? Some of the places we went to were cordoned off with police crime tape and we were informed that everything in the house or apartment was being kept for evidence and we couldn’t get our books back. The library was in an affluent section of Houston and so some of these people had expensive art books out worth hundreds of dollars.

Well, by 1967 I was the Branch Head Librarian for one of the newer branch libraries in Houston. The hours were long and the headaches many. One Saturday morning a patron came in and announced that there was a motorcycle gang parked on the lawn of the library and people were afraid to go past them to enter the library. I called the supervisor of branch libraries and found there was nothing I could do about it…it was public property and if they were not terrorizing people or trashing the place they had the right to be there.

I got married that year and resigned from the public library. The next day I started my career as a school librarian in a Houston Jr. High School. I was there for one year. My husband and I saved all our money that year and then took off to hitchhike all over Europe. But that is a story for another time. We did not return home until 1970. Stay tuned for Chapter 2 The Seventies.