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Ann Pettingill: Today, it’s Monday, February 21st, 2005. I’m Ann Pettingill, Head of Reference here at Perry Library, Old Dominion University. And I’d like to welcome Dr. Jean Major, as part of the University’s Oral History program. Welcome, Jean. Jean is the University Librarian Emeritus, and she served as University Librarian from 1992 till 2002. Welcome.
Jean Major: Thank you.
Pettingill: Nice to have you here. And I’d like for you to begin by talking a little bit about your early background, your family and your education.
Major: I grew up in Northern Illinois … in a blue-collar family … with parents who were not professional, not college educated and so on. But it was very clear from the start that their children would be college educated and … upwardly mobile, I guess. I went to Lake Forest College in Northern Illinois and eventually went to Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. And finally, years later, went to Indiana University for the doctoral program.
Pettingill: Were you the first person in your family to go to college?
Major: … I think so. Not … yeah, in my immediate family, certainly. Interestingly, my mother had two cousins in her age group – and my mother was born in 1901 – two cousins who were librarians who had professional degrees. At that time it was the fifth year Bachelor’s. One from Columbia [Columbia University] and the other from Wisconsin [University of Wisconsin]. But I don’t know of anybody else in the family who had any- -who had college degrees. My mother taught before she was married and then later again and took college courses, but that was at the time when you could teach with very, very sketchy higher education.
Pettingill: They must have been pretty excited when you grad--on that graduation day.
Major: Oh, I think so. I hope so.
Pettingill: So, what was it that made you decide to pursue a career in librarianship?
Major: Well, I graduated from college in 1961. And in 1961, I don’t remember any talk about career expectations…
Pettingill: What would have been your major?
Major: Oh, an English major … yeah English major. And at that time, career expectations for women were extremely modest. I don’t remember more than a couple of women in my college class who even talked about going to graduate school. And at that time the choices of careers for women were very limited. Limited to traditional women’s occupations. So, when I exited in 1961 without much notion what to do, where to start, or how long I was going to be doing this. And I taught school one year. That was the year for me to decide what I was really going to do because in October it was clear to me, October of that year, it was clear to me that I was not going to want to teach any more.
Pettingill: A month into your- -
Major: Yes.
Pettingill: - -your job.
[Laughter]
Major: Yes. Exactly. So that was when I began to look for other options and I remember sitting down with one of these older women cousins to talk about whether librarianship was a possibility. To explore it and, and so on. So, that’s how I got started in my career as a librarian. You know, I have thought sometimes about--if I were--if I had graduated from college even ten or fifteen years later, would I have still chosen to be a librarian? I have loved being a librarian. But, is that what I would have chosen, or would I have gone to law school, or who knows?
Pettingill: Well, had they been--what kind of libraries had they worked in? And did they tell you about their actual work?
Major: They did, to some extent. They both worked in public libraries. One of them was the deputy director of a large city public library near where I lived. The other one worked off and on as a cataloger. She was married, she had a family. The one who worked as the deputy director was a single woman, so… So I, I just sort of took a leap.
Pettingill: So, can you describe some of your early positions as a librarian, before you became a director?
Major: Yes. The first two that I did out of library school, I was a cataloger. It’s a very interesting and appealing sort of thought process, I think. I enjoy a lot of the questions that come up about being a cataloger. And it was very helpful to my development of my first research interest, which is the development of the online catalog. Because I became interested in that in the 70s and began to work on it in the 70s. And I could not have approached it in the same way at all without that cataloging experience. It was helpful. Then I became a reference librarian at the University of Illinois in Urbana. That was a wonderful experience in a lot of ways. It was--it’s a wonderful library, and it was demanding and interesting, and I learned a great deal about being a reference librarian. But I also--that was my first experience with broad contact with the process of scholarship. Both because of the reference context and because we also handled interlibrary loan borrowing. So, we had daily conversations with people who were in the process of scholarship. It also was the place where I really got good experience as a faculty member, because the librarians at Illinois have had faculty status since the mid-40s. It was--it was a very important job. Went from there to be the head of undergraduate libraries at Ohio State [Ohio State University]. And there were a couple of things, couple of important things about that job. That was during the heyday of undergraduate libraries, of separate--separately housed undergraduate libraries. It was a movement of the 60s and 70s, and the people who did that made up their own little professional subset in the professional community. A great deal was written about separately housed undergraduate libraries, and that was my first … the first time I had any reason or any opportunity to be part of the national library community. The other thing about Ohio State is that it was a pioneering automated library. It was automated before any other library that I knew of except Northwestern [Northwestern University]. Northwestern and Ohio State were the two pioneers at that time, in the mid-70s. And that was where I learned about library automation, which turned out to be one of my areas of expertise. So it … I wasn’t there for a long time, but that--the contact with library automation turned out to be very important for me. After Ohio State I went to the doctoral program and then on to be a director. There are a couple of, I suppose one thing particularly to comment about: In my career path there was never a stop to be an associate university librarian. I consider that a deficiency in my preparation. It would have been easier to be a director, particularly the first time, if I had had the experience as an assistant director. But I never did. I spent just over two years as a department head, and after the doctoral program I began to be a director.
Pettingill: And so when you were, after you graduated with your library degree, you had a sense of a career track right from the very start? or…
Major: No.
Pettingill: How did you--how did that develop?
Major: No, that is an important thing that I think has a lot to do with my age and the age when I exited from library school. I finished library school in 1964. For the first ten years I had a job. And I did the job as well as I possibly could, but my chief agenda item was to look for a husband. It was not to get on my career track. And, and so it wasn’t until the first ten years had passed, and I was married, and by that time I was in positions where I had opportunities to have contacts and so on outside my own library where there were some expectations. And the climate had changed: there were opportunities now for … for women to develop a career track. And I happened, I think, I think I just happened to end up with somebody who was very supportive of a career for me, and so then I began to develop a career.
Pettingill: And so you were Director of Libraries at both Northern Illinois University and the University of Mississippi. Can you talk about your experiences as a director before you came here?
Major: Both of those situations had some things in common. They were both organizational turnaround situations … where I needed to develop staff after following an authoritarian director. I followed leaders who were kind of unresponsive to user requests and user priorities. There was a need to foster a sense of professionalism among the staff. And in both of those situations I introduced automation. At Northern Illinois that was my first experience introducing automation, and that started in 1978. The other thing, maybe the most notable thing that I did at Northern Illinois was to be a part of the initial organization of the Illinois LCS organization, which was the statewide resource sharing organization, still in existence. It started out sharing … circulation, online catalog capabilities, and has developed, as most statewide systems have to have considerable bibliographic content. The way that organization started and developed was very educational and very useful to me other stops along the way because I have always been involved in resource sharing and in library cooperation organizations. There’s--when I think about my experience at Ole Miss, it’s a very different place, very, for me, very unusual and very interesting for a lot of social and cultural reasons. But there was one thing about it that was a tremendous asset. The Associate Provost loved the library, and he was in a position to help the library often, bolster finances. Money was scarce when I was at Ole Miss. Their fortunes have gone up and down, partly with the introduction of gambling on the Mississippi River. It’s made a big difference in their finances. But there were--there was no gambling, there was no money when I was at Ole Miss. And … when the Associate Provost was able to see money on the table at various times, particularly at the end of the year, and direct it to the library, it was very helpful. And before and since, I have not encountered anybody in a Provost’s office who was able to do that.
Pettingill: Tell me how--what kinds of skills did you develop as you became a director and started out at Illinois. And it was a challenge, because you came in sort of following someone, maybe, who had been more difficult. What, what things did you really develop, do you think, in both of those experiences?
Major: [Sigh] I think the collaborative skills, problem solving. One of the things, in a way it’s a skill I take for granted, but every time in other parts of my life that I write a letter to some organization to point out a deficiency, and I get back something that’s an inadequate written response, I realize, that’s one of the skills that I learned being a director. How to respond to complaints, how to respond to, to suggestions, concerns, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, how to conduct myself so that … conversation can continue in a productive way. I think I also learned a lot about making good use of people’s times in conducting efficient meetings. And in moving things ahead so that wheels just didn’t continue to spin. There were a lot of process things that I learned. Some of them, of course, I learned in happier circumstances than others. [Chuckle] But I don’t think that there is anything that can prepare a person in a new leadership position for the process requirements and the need to appreciate process.
Pettingill: So, what interested you in the position of University Librarian at Old Dominion University? And it must--that ad must have come out in 1991 … is that …
Major: Yeah, but I was watching for it because I, you know, Cynthia Duncan and I have been professional friends for a long time. And I--so I was kind of watching for it. But what interested me in the position was location, location, location. My husband was working in Washington, and I was in Mississippi, and we were flying back and forth every weekend, and this was an opportunity to get much closer, to improve our life style tremendously. And the university had a number of doctoral programs, about the same number that I was used to at both Ole Miss and Northern Illinois. So there was a research university orientation which, which was a requirement for me. It had one drawback, tremendous stumbling block, and if it hadn’t been for my personal situation I wouldn’t have even slowed down to look at this job. And that is the fact that librarians here don’t have faculty status. But I decided that my personal priorities would take precedence, and so I pursued it.
Pettingill: So when you accepted the position here, what did you see as your role in the library, and what did you think at the initial--at the beginning that your challenges would be?
Major: I thought then, and I still think that, that the first thing was to continue the library’s progress from a primarily undergraduate library to one that serves a university with research ambitions. That has always seemed to me to be the main focus of--and the transition in the time I was the Director. There was another major agenda item. The day I came for the interview I was told that funding had been approved for an addition to the library building, so there would be building planning. And any building planning offers the opportunity to reexamine services and to anticipate developments and so on. So as a process that was going to be important, too. But I could see right from the day of the interview, the days of the interview, that one of my priorities would have to be improving the working climate for both librarians and staff. Developing a greater sense of professionalism, initiative, and so on, on the part of staff, too. And addressing customer service concerns. Those were the things that I anticipated being most important, and I still think that they were most important.
Pettingill: And how did these ideas play out?
Major: I think that they played out. A number of these things I think have, have--I think there’s been tremendous progress, or what I would regard as tremendous progress in achieving these things which were my priorities. Which became my priorities.
Pettingill: What were some of the organizational changes that you made during your tenure here at Old Dominion University?
Major: Well, when I thought about that before, and I realized that when I wrote the history of the library, I recorded all those things carefully, documented them carefully. And I looked again last night at the history, and all that stuff is there, and I think it probably is, is good news to everybody in two--after you retire--been retired for two and a half you don’t remember those details. I don’t. [Laugh]
Pettingill: Do you feel like you made huge organizational changes, I mean, they’ve just kind of melted into the past at this point?
Major: No. No, no. And I certainly didn’t think I turned the place upside down and didn’t intend to turn the place upside down. The things that happened seem to often come from what we all anticipated for the development of librarianship and, you know, as part of the building process--building planning process, or sometimes they happened because of funding difficulties. Some organizational changes had to occur because of losing a position. Mostly it was evolution.
Pettingill: When you came for your interview and those first days in 1992, what was your impression of the building? And what role did you play in the renovation?
Major: Well, I had seen the building before. I had only been to Norfolk once before I came to interview for this job, and we had walked around campus, we’d walked through the library. And I thought then and I still think when I remember what it was like: it was overcrowded, both the shelving and the seating were in short supply, and it had kind of a drab and stale appearance. But it was not a bad building. I don’t think it was a bad building. But even so, I thought it was a tremendous asset that the architects planned to gut the building and redesign or redevelop it to match current trends and needs and so on. But I have seen lots of buildings of its era and a little bit before, which had considerably more problems than this one, did.
Pettingill: Can you talk about the process you went through to create the new library and some of the problems that you encountered along the way and maybe some of the results?
Major: The … developing the building program was a very important element because it allowed us to set down what we anticipated needing and to describe what kind of facilities would meet those needs. And it was a participative process. I never sat in my office and dreamed it up by myself. So, I initiated the process, the program document, developing the program document. Worked with the architects and designers. One of the things that I think made this project much more successful than many others on campus is that one person was responsible for the whole project. Morel Fry worked almost exclusively on this project for two years. For two years she came here in her construction clothes and her sturdy shoes and saw that everything went right. When you look around campus at lots of other buildings, there was nothing like that, and it shows. So … there were a couple of problems with this project, things that I think … if they had been addressed would have resulted in a better project. Some place about a half to two thirds of the way through the project – the construction project, not the design, the construction – something happened, some upheaval happened in the architectural firm. I didn’t know then, I still don’t know exactly what happened, but the principal architect that we worked with suddenly was gone. It made a difficulty, and there seemed to be something about the allocation of the project funds within the architectural firm. So the--a difficulty that, that prevented us from having the interior design advice that the contract called for. We could have used that help, and it made a great deal more work in some ways, particularly for Morel, to identify appropriate furnishings and do the purchasing, do the acquiring. We definitely would have done better with that interior design help and should have had it. There’s one other thing. That was at a time when the university’s purchasing services were sort of underpowered, for lack of a better term, and the result was that they were not able to give us the kind of expert help that I have seen at other universities and that would have been much better for the project. But the chief problem with the project was that it was sort of under-funded. We don’t have as much shelving as the project called for because of funding problems. And there are some parts of the library that are furnished with library furniture that was built--that was bought for the Hughes Library, which was finished in 1958 or 9. This is a contrast with the library at William and Mary, the addition that just opened, where I think that they raised almost as much private funding for that project as there was state funding. And of course it makes an extreme difference.
Pettingill: Would you say that many of the deficiencies that were in the earlier building that you had noticed when you first came, were they corrected, do you think?
Major: I think so, and that was why I was so glad that we were able to gut that building and start over, have a cohesive plan, a cohesive building. Around the state you can visit libraries which just had additions put on. And the transition from the original building to the addition sometimes is very awkward and can be dysfunctional. We were veryfortunate that whatever money was available was used to redesign the whole library, I think.
Pettingill: So, moving on to that exciting topic of the budget …
Major: [Chuckle]
Pettingill: During your tenure here what budgetary issues did you contend with?
Major: Well, in any public institution the major budget issue is periodic fluctuations in public funding. But there are a couple of things that are, I think, unusual in this situation that I might point out. Usually, the Academic Affairs budget, which is the biggest part of the budget for the university, in most universities that is controlled in the Academic Affairs structure. The Provost, the Provost’s staff and so on, make the major decisions. At the time when I was the Director, that was not the case here, though it appeared to me that those budget decisions were controlled in the President’s Office, and it made a big difference….
[Alright. Let’s pause.]
Pettingill: So talking about the budget you were talking about funding that comes through Academic Affairs.
Major: In most universities, the Academic Affairs budget is managed by the Provost and the Provost’s staff and comes from Academic Affairs – those budget decisions are made in Academic Affairs. As nearly as I have ever been able to figure out at Old Dominion University, during the time I was the director, those decisions were made in the President’s office, and the Provost had limited influence over them. And it makes an enormous difference in how the funds are distributed. And I believe now and I’ve always thought that the library would have fared better if those decisions had been made in Academic Affairs. So that that’s one of the budget issues that I contended with. Another one that is a little unusual at Old Dominion University is the faculty here are quite passive, they ask no questions about the library budget … And in fact, one of my friends who’s a long-time faculty member here said to me a couple of times, “The faculty here don’t do their job. They don’t ask enough questions, they don’t keep their eye on things.” The library’s budget would have prospered better if people like the Senate Library Committee and so on had been asking every year, “How much additional money did you ask for, and what did you get?” But they’re very passive. It’s a comfortable situation for administrators, but it is not the best for the university. The other thing that I think was--had a particular effect on the library’s budget in the last ten years was the cost--the start-up cost for distance learning. The start-up costs were very significant, both the staffing – built new staffing from the beginning – the technology costs were very high; faculty training costs were significant. There were some very significant start-up costs to distance learning, and probably those allocations were made at the expense of other programs in the university, certainly they were made at the expense of the library, so … collections or programs.
Pettingill: One of the activities you were involved in was the cultivation of possible donors. How did you develop into that role?
Major: Well, when I came … at the time I came--it was just at the beginning of the period where that expectation was very broadly accepted. And I started reading, the same as a librarian would do with any new area probably, I researched the issue. I got very good guidance and very good support from the university’s development staff. When I started to do things, as I learned and I started to do things, I got great feedback, great guidance, wonderful suggestions from them. But what--probably the most interesting thing, the thing I thought was most beneficial: I had been doing this reading, I had been gathering information, I had been experiencing a lot of things, unrelated, disparate things about development, and one day the organizational structure just clicked. And I understood how it all fit together and how it all was supposed to work, and each piece to contribute to a different part to fund raising. That was really tremendously helpful when that happened.
One of the other things that I think was helpful was that I have always been involved in things around this community, and so I knew my way around town. I saw development being done in other community organizations. I knew, became acquainted with, got to know people who enjoyed being philanthropists, who made contributions, supported various things. That was all extremely helpful.
And finally, I suppose age and circumstances have helped because it’s in the recent years as we’ve been able to engage in philanthropy ourselves I’ve learned a lot by watching how others have done it to us. [Chuckle]
Pettingill: Well, I guess this is part, in a way part of fund raising: you were very instrumental in forming the Friends of the Library group that was organized during your time here at the library. Can you talk about your involvement in getting this group started?
Major: When I interviewed for this job, President Koch made it clear that he expected me to organize a Friends of the Library. So, the first year I just learned--I just started learning this job, and then after a year I got started and as usual began by reading a lot of stuff about organizing Friends groups. Interviewed a number of people on campus and in the community to get their suggestions about programs, about approaches. And also, their suggestions about people who could help us start this. Early on I involved the President’s wife, who had had other experience with Friends of academic libraries, other places they’d been. She was an invaluable partner right from the start. She helped the Friends organization tremendously. And with suggestions from her and with other people, I assembled a steering committee to start the organization, and it just grew from there.
Pettingill: And was that a process you enjoyed? Did you enjoy that building process?
Major: I did. Yeah, I did enjoy it and enjoyed meeting some people that I would not have met. Some campus people, some community people. It was nice.
Pettingill: And it’s still going today. You celebrated today.
Major: Tenth anniversary!
Pettingill: Yeah!
Major: Yeah. [Chuckle]
Pettingill: So, during your time at the library a lot of technological change took place. Can you talk about some of the important advances that occurred and what role you played in those.
Major: My best role probably was to recruit excellent staff to develop technology services and products. That has been a real asset. This was the first library that I came to and they already had automation, but we upgraded to a new system. And as always, I managed the process. Got good funding commitments from the Provost’s office. Guided the procurement process - that was the hardest part, getting the procurement process through the university’s Purchasing Department because that was another time when they were sort of underpowered. One of the things that I noticed that I thought was most interesting about the technological development during my time was: as technology became more important all over campus, people discovered that the librarians were more knowledgeable about technology use and were very helpful in technology planning. And so, a number of librarians had more of a role in technology planning on campus than I’ve ever seen in my previous positions. That was interesting to me the way that sort of evolved.
Pettingill: How were you involved in building the Collection Development program here?
Major: Probably the main thing was to identify it as a very high priority program. And establish a position of Collection Development Officer and guide the formulation of the whole Collection Development program. I made funding for Collection Development a very high priority. And in a way, kind of prosaic, but I think that I developed a fund allocation process that could be explained and defended to faculty to the extent that they asked or to the extent that they challenged it. And was very open about how it was all done and what everybody--how everybody benefited. But the main thing I guess, I think is that I identify it--I identified it as a very high priority.
Pettingill: So one important thing that happened while you were here was the implementation of VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, the statewide consortium. Can you talk about how it all started and any recollections that you have about your involvement in the steering committee, especially in the early days?
Major: Yeah. The impetus for VIVA came from the staff of SCHEV, the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia. I don’t, I don’t think there’s a good way to verify the sort of casual understanding that existed in VIVA. They were interested in developing this project, which would be centrally funded, and it would be a shared project, partly to get around the fact that every president used some of the money allocated for library services for other things. They reallocated some of the funds. That at least is what we all always believed, and they certainly didn’t discourage us from believing that. But the--in any case, the impetus came from the SCHEV staff. One of the interesting things about the original conception for VIVA is that when the project was designed we all thought that we would share access to databases … and the way that would happen was that each doctoral institution would load some databases on their own systems in their own libraries, would host the--the databases on their own systems and then make them available throughout the state. By the time we actually got up and running, the market had changed somewhat, and each of the vendors was selling access to databases, which they hosted themselves. It made a much easier process from the point of view of technology, it seems to me. Probably in many ways it was much easier, but at any rate that was a major difference in how the project was designed and how it all played out. This--VIVA really was a pioneering project. In this case Virginia was in the forefront of a new national development, and I think everybody in VIVA is justified in feeling considerable satisfaction at getting this started and developed. It’s developed into a wonderful mature project, I think. I can’t emphasize strongly enough what a godsend VIVA was to ODU’s Distance Learning programs. Without that kind of electronic access to information resources, it would have been much harder for us to satisfy our users--our far-flung users, particularly the ones not in the state. But the other part of that that I think is so interesting-- because ODU was the state’s pioneer in distance learning, the other members of the steering committee were tremendously hostile to distance learning development. And I encountered a lot of hostility in the VIVA steering committee. Interestingly, now every university, all of those people who objected to it so strenuously now are in universities where distance learning is a part of the program, and it’s accepted everywhere, but it certainly was not at the start. So--and that became a major part of my participation in the VIVA steering committee: encountering and dealing with the feelings that the others all had about distance learning.
Pettingill: Thinking about your involvement in the library profession, either on the state level or national level, what kinds of things did you end up getting involved in while you were here?
Major: I always was involved nationally - offices and boards, committees, publications, all of those things - because the career path I had selected required me to develop national visibility and a national reputation. So all of those things were a given. But the other part of that is that I understood that one of my responsibilities was to participate in national debate on major professional issues. That it wasn’t going to be feasible or even acceptable for me just to be a spectator. And so I did. And I do think that that’s one of the … features of life in a major university library that you do have to participate in national debate. I also believe that any academic library director has a responsibility to participate, to make contributions to the state association. And I accepted that as sort of an obligation. When I look at my record of contributions to state associations, they’re modest compared to what public librarians contribute, but I have always done some, certainly any time I’ve been asked, and sometimes I’ve gone after certain kinds of assignments, and I think it’s very important. One of the most, probably the most rewarding thing that I did here--while I was here--in the way of professional activity was serve on the SOLINET board. It’s very interesting to see how an organization like SOLINET operates and prospers and how the business decisions are made- -what business decisions are necessary, how they’re made. It’s … it’s a very interesting and satisfying assignment, and I’m very glad I was able to do it. I guess the one point that I want to make about all this professional activity is: unlike a lot of disciplines in the university, librarianship is advanced through collective action. It isn’t advanced primarily by solitary pursuit. So all of this national activity is very important to advancing the development of librarianship. And that’s really why people need to do it, I think.
Pettingill: How did--what developments do you think happened here in this library as a result of that level of participation?
Major: Various people in the library had some opportunities as a result of that. Sometimes contacts made it easier for things to be published. Being involved in the discussion phase of some kinds of library developments I think helped us--always helps to form the project. And I think that individual librarians get a lot from involvement in national, national development.
Pettingill: In developing that philosophy yourself, do you feel like you have particular mentors out nationally who sort of were ones you went to along the way for ideas about how to do this?
Major: I had a lot of good friends nationally. I don’t think that I had any mentors in that aspect of my professional development. I had one--I had only one mentor, I think. The director who was at Ohio State when I was there helped me considerably and was very influential in a lot of things, much less in the way of national visibility than in other things, though.
Pettingill: Who was that director?
Major: His name was Hugh Atkinson. He died twenty years ago. It’s--one of my great shocks is to realize that most of my colleagues are--don’t know his name or don’t know anything about him. But I forget that he died twenty years ago.
Pettingill: So now I’m thinking a little bit about the university. How did you--how do see the role of the library within this university?
Major: The … the library’s role here is not as prominent, not as well supported as at some other places I’ve been. The expectations are certainly less. But I firmly believe that the library’s role will be integral as the university is more ambitious about planning and developing more ambitious programs, getting greater visibility, greater recognition for the strongest programs. There’s a lot of talk at the university right now about becoming a more prominent research university; that cannot happen without a stronger library. To me that means a bigger and broader collection, more depth. More staff, staff with more research library experience. There has to be a stronger library if all of this talk about developing as a research university is going to amount to anything.
Pettingill: Looking back over the ten years you were here, do you feel as though the library’s role changed and developed during that time? I mean it was a little bit in advance of this idea and goal right now that the university has for developing as a stronger research institution.
Major: I’m not sure whether there was a great deal of development. I do know, mainly because of my work with the library history, that the financial support has never been there. There hasn’t been a change in the financial support in recent times. Couple of things that I do know have improved in the last ten or fifteen years: many more librarians are visible, involved all around the university than there used to be. And, the other thing that I mentioned before, librarians’ technology planning expertise is definitely recognized. Some of the things about developing a bigger and better library, I think are not significantly different than they were.
Pettingill: What about changes in the status or contributions of women on campus over the time you were here?
Major: Well, you know, when I came here I looked around to see if there were enough women administrators so that there would be, you know, some people to be friends with and mutual support and so on. I thought then and I still think ODU is well ahead of the norm in the status of women on campus.
Pettingill: At ODU, did you have a mentor?
Major: I don’t think I did. I had a number of good colleagues and a lot of very … very positive relationships, but I don’t think I had a mentor.
Pettingill: Did you act as the mentor, not necessarily just here but in the library profession over your time while you were here?
Major: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have had protégés all around the country. There was one person here that I developed a friendly relationship with – I don’t know if it was a mentor-protégé relationship, probably not. But at one time the university recruited a woman to be head of OCCS. I reached out to her as soon as she came on campus, both for friendship and to try to facilitate her contacts with other people, other big technology users. A number of--I set up a number of kinds of contacts. And that relationship continued as long as she was here.
Pettingill: What kind of relationships did you establish in the community at large, outside the university?
Major: I have always been involved in community organizations. I’ve served on boards of arts, arts organizations… a lot of things that brought me in contact with other community activists of one kind or another. Interestingly, my membership in Rotary has helped with that. My involvement with the arts has helped a great deal. I have thought that it was important to… to develop those kinds of involvement, both for visibility and to make real contributions, and to make friends for the university. I… I’m curious about the fact that lots of the university’s leadership doesn’t seem to do that. And I don’t know what to make of that. But I have thought that that was one of my responsibilities--in fact, when I joined Rotary, I didn’t know if I was going to like it or not because it really is a men’s club. And at the time I joined, when I came here, I guess I was 55 or something like that, and I joined, and I was definitely in the younger half of that organization. I was younger than the average age of members of that Rotary. And I remember, I went to the meetings; I did what I was supposed to, and after about six months I was sitting in a meeting one day, and I thought, “You know, I really like this stuff.” So when I retired I never gave a minute’s thought to resigning from Rotary because now I like it! And I guess I think that, that if other people around the university would get involved in some of these things, they’d discover that they liked them, too.
Pettingill: Did you belong to Rotary in other--while you were directors in other universities, or was this your first?
Major: This was my first experience with Rotary. At Ole Miss I was a member of another men’s service club. And I learned some things from that, and I had contacts because of that, too. When I was at Northern Illinois, I think that, that was be--well, I know it was before Rotary International permitted women in Rotary. That was easy, I didn’t have to decide. [Laugh]
Pettingill: Librarians at ODU have administrative faculty status and do not have teaching faculty status. What are your thoughts on faculty status for librarians?
Major: I really believe that the role of librarians deserves, merits faculty status. I am a strong proponent of faculty status for librarians, and I think that the whole process … where librarians do what--what’s necessary to qualify for tenure and promotion, they have a different and better place in the university community. I think that it’s … it was a serious mistake for the librarians here to give up their faculty status, whenever it was that they did. And …
Pettingill: When was it do you think, about?
Major: I don’t remember, but I think it was--it was during the Brewster Peabody era.
Pettingill: So, it was way, really very early on … in history.
Major: It was quite a long time ago, yeah. It was quite a long time ago. Where some of the earliest librarians in the history of this library were involved in the whole transaction. There’s one more part about this that I feel strongly about and may be harder to appreciate. I think that trying to appoint a university librarian without tenure is … is an affront. No- -no dean at this or any other university would accept an appointment without tenure, and yet, at this university and most universities in Virginia they routinely appoint university librarians without tenure. It would have to be … I’ve never served on a search committee for a university librarian, but I--it would have to be a real setback for the recruiting process from the start, to have to say to any good candidate that you couldn’t offer them tenure. That’s nuts.
Pettingill: As you look back on your ten years here, at this library, what would you say are your chief satisfactions and your principal disappointments?
Major: Probably my greatest satisfaction is that this is clearly the best library staff I’ve ever worked with as a director. And it has been a real pleasure. I have been very gratified at the fantastic customer service improvements that we’ve been able to make. I personally feel gratified about the collection development program and its development during my time. And I have one little event at my retirement party that I regard as a plus: Four or five of the university’s most productive, best, most recognized researchers came to the party to thank me for what I had done to improve the library. I was delighted.
As for disappointments, I was certainly sorry that the university chose not to raise additional funds to make a better addition and renovation possible. I do think that that speaks to the role of the library generally. And one sort of bizarre development was disappointing: the university decided not to have a celebration to celebrate the reopening of the library after the construction project or the naming of the library. I still think that’s very odd. It has always disappointed me that the university is not embarrassed by the unfavorable comparison of its library support with the support of the other Virginia doctoral institutions because Old Dominion is way behind.
Disappointed that I don’t hold the rank of Professor. My prob--I guess this is my last comment on the faculty status issue. [Laugh] But one--something--I came to a realization, sometime in the last couple of years, a sort of belated realization that I’m disappointed I didn’t see twenty years ago: that most academic librarians that I know identify with the faculty in their role as teachers. Whereas it would be … very helpful, very beneficial and … well, very beneficial for them/us to identify with the faculty in their role as researchers because most faculty regard research as their first role and teaching as their second role. And it would be … it would make a big difference for librarians to identify with faculty as researchers. And I see now – I’m sorry I didn’t see it twenty years ago – that that’s a major deficiency. In fact, I would be writing little things about it for the journals if I had realized it with twenty years to go.
Pettingill: Well, this is the perfect transition to my next question, which is to talk a little bit about your research interests. You wrote a history of the library. Tell me how you went about your research.
Major: The university archives, which we have in the library, were very important, very useful. There are library records there; there are presidential papers there; records of the Senate Library Committee. I used all of those extensively. I did interviews. The most interesting interviews to me were the ones with the people who had worked in the library, you know, in its earliest times. And I interviewed some other people who had been at the university for a long time. And then I had my work reviewed by some people who had been here for a long time. It was an enjoyable, interesting project, and I’m glad I did it.
Pettingill: What did you think about your interview with Dorothy Ladd?
Major: I was really interested that, when she was here, she was very young, very junior, and yet for some reason she understood a lot of the steps she needed to take to increase her own professional preparation, her professional visibility, to just develop a professionalism when she was young and … and also at a very--much earlier time in academic librarianship. That really interested me. That probably has something to do with how her career progressed so that she ended her career as the deputy at a big ARL library.
Pettingill: I know you’re interested in local history. Tell me what projects or ideas have come from this particular interest.
Major: I have just finished a two-year project to prepare the 90th anniversary history of the Rotary Club I belong to. It was organized in 1914. It is--it was the original Rotary club in this area and has spawned maybe 40 or 50 Rotary clubs around this region. And it’s still one of the biggest Rotary clubs in Virginia. Along the way in documenting the club’s progress, I got a great deal of information about local developments, local history. It was really an interesting project, and I was very glad to have the opportunity to work on it.
Working with the special collections here particularly, I have seen some opportunities for developing a series of oral histories on various topics. And that’s the next thing I have planned, now that I have the Rotary history finished – it took me two years. But now I have some of these others planned … I hope.
Pettingill: Do you have particular themes in mind for local history that you’re … you’re particularly interested in?
Major: I’m … I’m very interested in talking with women in this community who had a good deal of participation and influence in the way mid-20th century history in Norfolk developed.
Pettingill: And other than research, what about other post-retirement activities?
Major: I have been surprised how much writing I’m doing. And I like to write and so, I’m glad to be doing it. Other things that I’m doing, I--after … the last time that I had a singing teacher, a vocal teacher was when I was in college, and I just started studying with a teacher again. I’m doing a good deal of singing and looking for opportunities to do more. I have my research plans, my writing plans, and I have, sort of belatedly I guess, become very interested in fitness – this really all stemmed from my rehabilitation after my two hip replacements. As I went through the physical therapy and then went back to the … the rehabilitation process at the Y [YMCA], I got to be more and more interested, and amazingly now I enjoy it. I’ve often thought that if--if it had been popular for young girls to be interested in athletics and fitness and stuff when I was growing up, maybe I would have. But it wasn’t, and I wasn’t.
[Laugh]
Pettingill: It’s nice to get these opportunities at some point.
Major: It certainly is. It’s wonderful.
Pettingill: And you’re also a member of the board of the Norfolk Law Library?
Major: Yes. The law librarian at the Norfolk Law Library has been a wonderful colleague to us here and to the Friends of the Library here, and so when she invited me to be- -to serve on her board, I accepted readily.
Pettingill: Is there anything else you’d like to … to tell us about?
Major: I can’t think of a thing.
Pettingill: Well, I really want to thank you for coming today. It’s been wonderful to talk to you and hear about some of the things you were involved in here. It’s very interesting to hear your thoughts about them. Thank you very much.
Major: You’re welcome. It’s been my pleasure.
[End of interview]
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