As Betsy Sorrell celebrates her 40^th year at Duke University Libraries, she is also retiring on October 23! We’ll certainly miss her work in Shelf Preparation Section, as well as her kind spirit and wonderful sense of humor!  All of TS will miss hearing her signature statement, “It’s gonna be allllright!”

Betsy’s Career

Betsy started on December 22, 1980 in the Marking and Repair Unit in Technical Services. One of her early tasks was learning how to use (and clean) the pasting machine. She wasn’t very impressed with that pasting machine, and considered quitting! Well, thank goodness for us, she stuck with it. (Tenacity is one of Betsy’s strong points—she doesn’t give up easily, and has a great attitude about her work!) She started out as a part-time Library Clerk for the first year, then switched with a full-time colleague who wanted to work a part-time schedule.

Over the years, Betsy has gained responsibility on the job, as her position has been upgraded from Library Clerk to Library Assistant to Library Assistant Sr. Her duties have grown, as the name of her unit has changed over the years to better describe the work of Betsy and her colleagues. Betsy started her career in Marking and Repair, which later changed to Materials Processing Unit (or MPU), and last, but not least, Shelf Preparation Section. Betsy’s early duties included typing call number labels on a typewriter, in addition to using the pasting machine that almost sent her jobhunting again! Now Betsy processes a variety of materials, from monographs to DVDs, as well as prepping the YBP shelf-ready materials for delivery to circulation points across campus.

Betsy’s Personal Milestones

Since Betsy’s been at Duke Libraries, she’s gotten married, had two children, and now two darling grandsons who think their “Nana” is the best!

 What Betsy’s Liked the Most about Working at DUL

Betsy has enjoyed learning new things throughout her career, including keeping up with all the new technology over the 40-year span of her career. (No more pasting machines or typewriters!)

But most of all, though, Betsy’s enjoyed getting to know her DUL colleagues, and I have to say that the feeling’s mutual. We’ve really enjoyed knowing Betsy over the years, and we will miss her hard work ethic and fun sense of humor!

And last but not least, here are some comments about Betsy from last week’s DUL Career Service Awards ceremony, captured from the Zoom chat:

• Thank you, thank you, Betsy! You’ve seen a lot and been an essential part of the Libraries. Thank you for staying with us for 40 years! All the best to you in retirement!
• My heart is melting and I really want Betsy to stay! 🙂
• Betsy is the best!
• Congratulations, Betsy!
• Wow, Betsy! Congratulations!
• Congratulations, Betsy! I am going to miss you and the joy and happiness you bring to us in DULTS every day.
• Congratulations Betsy! I wish you the best, enjoy your retirement! We will miss you lots!
• I remember Betsy and I filing cards in the public catalog every week. She made a tedious job a lot more pleasurable. I’ll miss you.
• Congrats, Betsy! Thanks so much for your work and your kindness. I was always happy to see you at Smith.
• Congratulations, Betsy!! It’s a remarkable career, and I hope you have a wonderful retirement!
• Congratulations Betsy!! Enjoy retirement!
• WOW Congrats Betsy….great working with you …..her favorite words…..HEY SHUGG! Enjoy retirement.
• Congratulations Betsy! We will miss your amazing spirit at DULTS!
• Congrats Betsy, I will miss you more than you know!
• You go girrl!
• And for endearing nicknames when she says hello. “Hey, shug!”

Long before I became a librarian I had a fascination with libraries.  They were always magical places for me, and the stacks in particular were magical.  The organization of knowledge on the shelves pulled me in, and all of it was available to anyone.  So as an undergraduate at Appalachian State University, I majored in Educational Media.  The major was created to supply librarians for the public schools.  But I quickly discovered my first year that working in a public school system did not suit me.

I found my niche in an academic library – at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.  I was hired in the Acquisitions department to order and receive all titles.  All those new titles bound for the stacks had to pass across my desk!  It was the height of the paper library era – all financial transactions, the card catalog, the books – everything was on paper.  A glimmer of the online world to come was a single OCLC terminal that provided the most recent cataloging information which we printed out.  The staff fought over time slots.  I still remember mine:  1:00-3:00 every afternoon.

After my husband and I moved from Massachusetts to Oklahoma, I worked briefly in the private sector.  I became a company librarian at Engineering Enterprises in Norman, Oklahoma.  They employed geologists and engineers to provide environmental remediation for contaminated groundwater.  I was hired to not only keep the company library but provide research on request.  Automated searching was now available, and I provided DIALOG searches for the geologists and their clients.  Utilizing the citations from those searches, I would drive across town to the University of Oklahoma Library to find the full-text printed articles and books.   I straddled this print/electronic divide many years before full-text online became a reality.  In that role I functioned as a sort of information detective, and I was Google before Google.

My cumulative experiences led me to think I should make librarianship my professional career.  I finished my MLS in 2000.   Another world opened at the same time as eJournals made their first appearance.  I jumped back into the academic world at the University of Central Oklahoma to order, process, and make available their eJournals and databases.   Electronic full text was another universe compared to print world and a true paradigm shift.  I remember many librarians with decades of experience were overwhelmed by it.  Perhaps because I was young and foolish, I jumped in and took on anything the Library Director threw at me.  I’m glad I did because it gave me a thorough grounding in this new format, and I could see how improved discoverability for patrons.

It also led me to a new job at Duke.  I came on board as the Head of Electronic Resources and Serials Management in 2008.  By that time full-text online had exploded.  It was imperative to decide on best practices, tools, and workflow for managing the fire hose of electronic text coming at us.  On top of this, print world didn’t die.  In fact, it still grew – just not at the same pace.  Over time ERSM became SRM (Serials and Retention Management) when the electronic pieces were shifted to other departments.  My own department focused on projects for older print (Papyrology collection) and something new:  collaborative print retention.  This was a new paradigm administered by multiple libraries to insure that aging print texts would always be available to patrons within a geographic area.

Last year I stepped out of the department head role and into my final position at Duke:  government documents.  Collaborative print retention took hold in government documents through ASERL (Association of Southeastern Research Libraries).  We began a project to resize our own documents collection in light of other TRLN document collections.  We also committed to acquire and retain all publications from six government agencies.  So I came full circle, from print to electronic and back to print with a different twist.  In July 2020 I will retire from Duke Libraries and am ever appreciative my experiences and learning.  I picked up a Master’s Degree in Graduate Liberal Studies along the way.  That also opened new worlds for me.  Keep growing, keep learning, and don’t be surprised in your career if you shift back to something you knew in an earlier time and see it with new eyes.

Interview by Christina Manzella

Most of us who work in the library bays at Smith Warehouse have not set foot on campus since March 20. One of our colleagues, however, has been there 24/7, keeping watch over the place. Below is an interview with this Bay 10 mainstay, conducted just before working from home began. Holiday Tree, we miss you!

CM: What is your role here at Duke?
HT: I play the very important role of seasonal décor for Technical Services. I really love my job. You talk to most “artificial” trees out there, and they’ll tell you they’re stuck in an attic 10.5-11 months out of the year. Not me. I’m on display year round, bringing continued joy to all the residents and visitors of Bays 9 and 10.

CM: What is your favorite part of working at Duke?
HT: It’s got to be the people. I can always count on Antha Marshall (and her candy bowl) when I need a pick me up. Will Hanley always makes me look dashing in his photos. I’m also very close with Leeda Adkins. She leads the team of folks who change out my decorations each season. I’ve witnessed some very creative problem solving when it comes to tree toppers. And, obviously, Squirrel and I are inseparable.

CM: Do you have a favorite season?
HT: That’s a tough one. I might have to say summer. Not a lot of conifers can say they’ve seen the beach. Oh, to be clear, I haven’t either, but I really think I have a good sense of what it’s like based on my decorations. I’ve often contemplated what SPF I would need.

CM: Is there anything else you would like to say to our readers?
HT: I bleed blue, but I live green! Please recycle.

May 29^th will mark the last day of Rosalyn Raeford’s forty-three-year career at the Duke University Libraries (DUL).  Ros is the Head of the Resource Description Department. The department is responsible for creating and stewarding the metadata that make discovery of library resources possible, as well as shelf preparation of physical materials. When Ros joined the Duke library staff in the late 1970s automation of library cataloging existed, but it was deep in the background.  Its tangible output was the card catalog, local access points were added manually in aid of user discovery and access.  As time and Ros’s career went on, the interplay between the technological and the manual trended more and more toward automation.  Yet, a lot of manual work was still involved in cataloging, as catalogers worked on printouts that were then converted to computer format through data input.  During these years of change, Ros was there not only to witness, but to shape the trajectory of DUL’s approach to resource description.

Ros began her career as a clerk-typist responsible for typing local access points, such as call numbers, on printed cards.  This regularly entailed typing unique access points per title on multiple cards.  Though critical to the user experience, it was not the most enlivening work. Ros always found ways to make it fun, for herself and her colleagues.

Next for Ros was working with the Demand Cataloging team.  This group managed a huge backlog of books by boxing them for storage, creating a paper trail on boxes and on catalog cards, and retrieving titles for cataloging when library users requested (or demanded) a title.  Think a very low-tech Library Service Center.  Ros really began enjoying her job when she became a copy cataloger, working directly with materials to assign call numbers, and then moving onto subject heading work.  Ros remembers that the more complicated an item was, the more she enjoyed it.

About eight years after Ros joined the library staff, at around the time computers first became part of cataloging, Ros became the supervisor of the Pre-Cataloging team.  It was in supervisory work that she found her “true love.”  This true love encompassed both people and process, and that is where the magic happened.  Ros saw opportunities for workflow efficiencies that leveraged both available technology and the skills of her colleagues.  An early efficiency that Ros envisioned and worked with colleagues to realize was automation of call number creation for copy cataloging.  Cataloging work was done exclusively in a DOS environment with command prompts.  Another efficiency that Ros conceived of was cataloging in a Windows environment.  She and a colleague designed a Windows-based system that a third colleague programmed.  Thus, the Cat Editor was born.

Automation, efficiency, and process saved time and created an environment that freed up resources to tackle bigger things.  Remember that the more complicated something was, the more Ros enjoyed it?  Ros has led many large projects over the years, but the project to reclass DUL’s collection from the Dewey Decimal Classification system to the Library of Congress (LC) Classification system stands out because it enabled efficiency on a massive scale.  Until late 2004, DUL was one of a very small number of large academic libraries that used Dewey.  At various times over the years, the library had looked at switching to LC Classification.  Arguments for the benefits of switching were never compelling enough to effect the change.  Switching to LC was always deemed too expensive, too undoable.  Ros made it happen!  She analyzed and synthesized in-house cataloging statistics to show that upwards of 85% of catalog records had LC class numbers.  Ros showed that by using LC classification, it would be possible to move the bulk of materials more quickly through the cataloging workflow and into the hands of library users.

The LC Reclass Project was a multi-year project that began in 2004 and transformed DUL’s collection and how we catalog.  Once LC classification was in place, Ros was able to lead further process changes, namely shelf-ready processing of new monograph titles and working with vendors to provide cataloging when it was not feasible to do in house.  A philosophical change also ensued that led the Resource Description Department to its current approach toward cataloging: follow national standards and avoid local practices.  Certainly, elements of this approach were already there prior to LC reclass, but the project pushed us further in that direction.

Now cataloging is on the brink of a fundamental shift in the creation and use of metadata to linked data.  Ros will not be here to lead us through this sea-change, but her approach to people and process will continue to inform how we embrace and manage it.  We will thrive, and library users will benefit as a result.  Ros said that in her first days at Duke, she felt smarter just being here.  Well, DUL and Duke are smarter, too, because Ros was here. (Recommended reading: Dennis Christman’s January 31, 2020 post titled A Linked Data Primer.)

Now for a parting gift from Ros, here are some of thoughts in her own words.

On joining the library and what stood out to her at the time:

“The first few days that I was there I remember walking out on campus and just being awestruck.  I remember just this really warm feeling of just being on Duke’s campus. … I felt smarter just being there.”

On being a manager:

“Being a manager was like the best thing that could have happened to me.  And, being a manager in a process-oriented environment. It’s my ideal thing because it was a breeding ground for creativity.  There was no limit to what you could do.”

On automation and its opportunities:

I was fascinated about how to make things more efficient and what could be automated. … We were automating and most people hadn’t even thought about it.”

On having fun at work:

“I love planning and problem-solving.  And I think that for me that was what the LC reclass project was.  The fact that so many people had looked at doing it and it got abandoned at least four times. … I don’t know how you describe it.  It was almost like a competition.  Like when I played basketball; it was like sports.  I’m competitive.  I was like, ‘okay this can be done.’”

On linked data and the future of cataloging:

“Something major is about to happen. Another major shift in how we think about metadata, another major shift in how we think about discovery.”

“If you can give catalogers something else to embrace that taps into their intellectual value, that taps into their skill set regardless of how those skills play out, I think they will embrace it.”