I started working back at Tufts in March 1979 and was there for eight years. The job I got after one interview was Library Assistant I at around $11K/year, which didn't knock me over, but was still enough money for that time of my life. By the time I left in 1987 I'd been promoted to Library Assistant III and was making around $16K/year. Sarah and I lived in North Cambridge for most of my time there, and I'd either walk to campus, take the 96 bus, or drive to work in my brown 1969 Volkswagen Fastback. Dress for the library staff was informal, but that meant slacks (not blue jeans) and collared shirts, skirts or dresses for the women. That's what "informal" meant in the late 70s and 80s.
For a long time I really enjoyed working in the Cataloging Department at Wessell. I wasn't that far from having been a student there when I started, and I still had friends who hadn't graduated yet. I immediately started on the plan of getting another degree, taking art history courses to get enough credits to apply for graduate school, and taking German and Spanish to enable me to read more sources. Immersing oneself in the academic world can be captivating: being entitled to use the University's facilities and programs, going to the catered events they held for everything, getting great health and vacation benefits, etc. I knew people there who are still working there, it gets harder and harder to leave the longer you work in an academic environment.
I dropped the ambition to pursue an Art History degree though, after a couple of years. I realized what an exclusive world art history study was and how only a few could make a living from it. I'll always remember one professor in particular as exemplifying elitism and ignorance of any other kind of life. And though some types of art really spoke to me and were worth studying, others moved very slowly between iconic examples, and studying this was plodding.
Working in the library opened my mind in other ways. You can’t do the same thing day in and day out without seeing patterns in the work and wondering how to do things easier and better. Why were some books harder to catalog than others? What was the point of cataloging, and what distinguished good cataloging from bad? What kinds of aids did we have and how best to use them? This wasn’t just intellectualism, we were trying to do our jobs better and serve our users better. As engaging as the big questions were (how should knowledge be classified? what user behaviors do we want to encourage?), the tactical questions were fascinating too. Like, how do we best prioritize the crush of books we get every day? What’s the most efficient way to work with other departments? Lots of stimulation there, and a form of education I’d never had in school. I wasn’t just learning facts and methods and how to draw conclusions from them, I was learning how to think better.
We used dumb terminals to search for cataloging information for library materials and to enter cataloging data in OCLC. I was doing "copy cataloging" and got very good at it. This was the start of my becoming a knowledge worker. I was able to understand what the point was of what we were doing (making academic materials accessible to those who needed the facts or the art in them), and learned how to do it.
Two of the most significant life events that happened during that time were marriage (July 1979) and brain surgery (December 1981). And they helped me become even more settled into the job. I was a young guy with long hair and Bohemian habits, and my getting married helped several older co-workers realize that I was a normal person; I was one of them, not an outsider. And undergoing emergency brain surgery meant that I suddenly became even closer with my co-workers.
I made some very good friends there. We had a surprisingly good softball team that played in the Tufts staff league, against University Police, Dining Services, etc. I almost always brought my lunch and ate in the staff lounge down in the basement. We went out as a group once in a while and I remember a great Chinese restaurant over on Beacon Street in Somerville, also Rudy’s in Teele Square, which is still around
Tufts was a large, liberal, multi-faceted employer, but merit and status there were tied to academic credentials. This meant impenetrable walls, and for me the glass ceiling of not having a graduate degree. I was doing the work of a degreed librarian, but couldn’t get paid for it. So I determined to get a degree, and enrolled in the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. Getting a graduate degree in the next state while working full-time was tough, but I got great support from my bosses at Tufts and people I met at URI.
So by early 1987 I was soon to get my MLIS degree and was getting rave reviews at Wessell for filling in as quasi-Serials Librarian. I assumed that they'd be offering me that job, and I would have taken it and continued to work there. I might still be there. But an older friend at Wessell advised me that maybe they would offer me that job, but that I should move on instead of taking it. By his experience, whenever someone moved past a glass ceiling, they were still not treated as they should have been. Instead people still considered them as belonging to their lower-level job, and didn't respect their new credentials. People will always see you as what you were before; they won't see you as a new person even if you change.
Well, that sure made me think. I hadn't considered actually leaving the academic bubble! At just about that time I saw a hand-lettered ad on the bulletin board at the Library School down in Kingston. Some small computer (i.e. cutting edge) company wanted a person with a library degree to work with their clients and to be their library programmer. That sounded like an interesting move. I could still be in the library world but do something outside of the box, then maybe go back to being an academic librarian after I’d picked up a few more skills.
I got the job in early 1987 and announced that I was moving on. Tufts gave me a nice, catered, going away party and I didn't realize how sad I was to leave there. I'd had the fortune of stretching out my young adulthood and my nurturing college experience for 14 years in all! But I'd grown way beyond that and it was time to leave.
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