Information science at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s: a memoir of student days

ABSTRACT

The author's experiences as a master's and doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Library and Information Studies during a formative period in the history of information science, 1966-71, are described. The relationship between documentation and information science as experienced in that program is discussed, as well as the various influences, both social and intellectual, that shaped the author's understanding of information science at that time.

INTRODUCTION

I am writing this article not to claim myself as a pioneer of information science but rather to describe what it was like to be a student in the pioneering days of information science. There is much discussion nowadays of the history of information science, and in some instances it is argued that the early twentieth-century documentation theories of Paul Otlet (1990) and Suzanne Briet (n.d./1951) were the intellectual antecedents of information science. I am not a historian of the field, and I make no claim one way or the other about its historical roots. The understanding I developed of information science as a doctoral student in the 1960s at the University of California at Berkeley (U.C. Berkeley), however, had little to do with Otlet, Briet, or documentation in general. We saw information science as something brand new that was drawing on a range of earlier ideas, to be sure, but those sources were from realms very different from documentation. I believe that some of these sources are being lost sight of in the current discussion of the history of information science. In what follows, I present a memoir of my experience as a student at a formative moment in information science and describe the effort, as I saw it, to develop the field as a meaningful, distinctive discipline in one large doctoral program in a major university.

BECOMING A MASTER IN LIBRARY SCIENCE STUDENT

Sometimes in life we fall into where we were meant to be all along. Upon returning from Peace Corps service in Thailand, where I had taught English as a foreign language in two Thai high schools, I was confronted with the same question I had had as a fresh college graduate before I left: What should I do with the rest of my life? While sorting this out, I went to live with my parents in Lafayette, California, just over the hills from the University of California at Berkeley. I went down to Berkeley to take aptitude tests and get career counseling. It must be remembered that this was 1965, and women did not routinely get career guidance. Most female life-models for me in those years were homemakers. In fact, despite having attended Pomona College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country, I did not personally know a female Ph.D. in a tenure-track position until a high school girlfriend got her doctorate and an academic position.

The woman counselor was blunt: With my Phi Beta Kappa key and B.A. from a good college, about all that was available to me was to "type or teach." In those days, that meant working as a secretary or teaching in elementary or high school. In fact, at that time, the University of California required its secretaries to have bachelor's degrees. Other, more remunerative jobs for B.A.'s at the university went to men. The counselor said I would have to do graduate work of some kind if I wanted an interesting job of any other type. The high school children I had taught in Thailand had been far better behaved than typical American high school students, yet I disliked the little disciplining I had had to do there. I knew I did not want to teach in U.S. high schools.

I sensed that this was the first straight talk I had ever heard about careers and knew that she was right. The trouble was that I did not feel like going back to school. My undergraduate schooling had been very intense, and I wanted to play for awhile. What was worse, in the aptitude tests I scored right down the middle on everything--interested in everything and nothing. What was I to do? I went to the career information center and looked through the brochures for graduate programs. I looked for the program with the shortest time to attain a degree--maybe if the schooling did not last too long, I could stand it. The library program at Berkeley took just one calendar year. I applied.

The admissions officer at the library school asked me if I had ever read anything by Theodore Dreiser. I had not, which worried me a bit, but I was admitted anyway. I needed money, however, as the arrangement with my parents had always been that they would support me through college but not beyond. I applied at the newly founded Institute for Library Research (ILR), which was associated with the library school, and was hired as a graduate assistant by Ralph Shoffner.

In the first semester in the master in library science (M.L.S.) program, I studied book selection, cataloging, reference services, and the history of the book. Leroy Merritt, who later founded the short-lived library program at the University of Oregon in Eugene, taught book selection with a strong academic library orientation. I became expert at consulting book auction catalogs for out-of-print books. Roger Levinson, a fine printer by trade, conveyed his deep love of books as physical objects as he expounded on them in class in the Rare Book Room of the library.