{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/q23qv3dt24/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["LAPL Institutional Collection - Robert Anderson Pt 5"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/200/original/lapl_logo.png?1628076950","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Robert Anderson","Jim Sherman"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2024-02-07"]}},{"label":{"en":["Description"]},"value":{"en":["Robert Anderson, Subject Specialist in the Literature \u0026amp; Fiction Department is interviewed by Librarian II, Jim Sherman. This was the fifth interview session with Robert and Jim and was conducted on February 4, 2024 in the Octavia Lab at Central Library."]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["MPEG-4"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["TheirStory"]}}],"summary":{"en":["Robert Anderson, Subject Specialist in the Literature \u0026amp; Fiction Department is interviewed by Librarian II, Jim Sherman. This was the fifth interview session with Robert and Jim and was conducted on February 4, 2024 in the Octavia Lab at Central Library."]},"provider":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Los Angeles Public Library"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Los Angeles Public Library"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/200/original/lapl_logo.png?1628076950","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/233/262/small/Anderson_Sherman.jpg?1712855551","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - open-uri20240308-3918351-8ih9t5.mpga"]},"duration":4913.03192,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/233/262/small/Anderson_Sherman.jpg?1712855551","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-lapl.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/233/262/original/open-uri20240308-3918351-8ih9t5.mpga?1709911801","type":"Audio","format":"audio/mpeg","duration":4913.03192,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["TheirStory Transcript (Paragraphs with Speakers) [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, good morning. This is January 27th, 2024. My name is Jim Sherman. I'm with the Literature and Fiction Department. I'm a librarian there, and today I'm speaking with Robert Anderson, the Librarian III in the Literature and Fiction Department. This is the fifth interview we have with Robert, and we're conducting the interview from the Central Library's Octavia Lab. Good morning, Bob.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=12.576,39.626"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/2","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Good morning.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=40.08,40.381"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/3","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e So we've covered a lot of ground. One thing that we were talking about was, just most recently was, the return to Central Library, other than some of the changes that had occurred that you noted when you returned. Did you want to speak any more about that? I guess we were last talking chronologically about the Sunday hours when they were instituted, which we think was a couple years after the Library reopened, so maybe 1995. So situated basically at that point of the 90s, is there anything that you want to discuss about being back in the Library in the 90s?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=41.28,77.804"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/4","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e It is hard to remember exactly what I said in the previous interview and what I didn't say, but I think I don't remember whether I talked at all about the fact that we thought we were going to be able to get into the building a lot sooner than we did before the opening. We thought we were going to have two or three weeks, as I recall, a couple of weeks anyway, to be oriented and trained in the new building and to get all our things unpacked. And that didn't happen because they couldn't get an occupancy permit for the building. I mean, people could come in with hard hats and look around and so forth, but the staff was not supposed to be in the building on a regular basis up until just a few days, like two or three days, I think, before the opening. So there had been all these plans for having orientations and trainings, and none of it really happened because we came in and we were almost immediately open to the public, so there was no time for any of this and no time. We sort of had to unpack all our boxes and things while we were already open. So it was a kind of a hectic time, but it was also a busy time because there were so many people who were interested in the library and seeing the new building and happy to have it back. So it was a very positive time in many ways. I know that the weekends in particular were extremely busy at that time and we had a lot of use from people who would tell us about how much they had missed the libraries. Of course, it had been open on Spring Street, but a lot of people didn't go over there for various reasons. They didn't consider it to be the real library, even though it had most of the collection and so forth, but they were just happy to have it reopened. But you asked about the later, the next few years, I guess as far as the Sunday hours went, we had already talked about the fact that they were voluntary at first and then because the Library Foundation, who had been funding the volunteer time, decided that they wanted to spend their money on other things, they had to make room for it in the general library budget, which meant that it had to be part of the regular staff hours. So they eventually, after lengthy negotiations with the Librarians Guild and the clerical union, they came up with the plan that has been in existence ever since, which is that staff would work one Sunday out of four and get paid for a full day for working five hours. And for my purposes, it was not something that I really looked, I was happy about because I tend to like to go to concerts and plays on Sunday afternoons. And so I always had to work out a schedule where there would be one Sunday out of every four that I wouldn't be doing that. But fortunately, I've had supervisors over the years who were very accommodating. And the way our schedules have worked for many years now is that we submit them on an eight-week basis and ask for certain days off that we want off. And my supervisors have been very good about if I say, I want to work this Sunday and not these other three Sundays out of four in a row, they have almost always given me the one that I wanted. So I'm very grateful for that. And Sundays, I will say Sundays can be an interesting day to work because sometimes you do get people who only come in on Sundays and some of them have interesting questions. And so it's worked out OK for me to be working on Sundays. It just took a little getting used to after 15 years of working at the Library without working on Sundays.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=83.4,401.165"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/5","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right. What were some of the other things you had to adjust to when you came back to the Library? What were some things that were maybe tools, resources that were new or things that were supposed to work and didn't? I know with every new building, there's always new things that take getting used to. What was that like when you returned to Central Library? I mean, we discussed the OPAC some, and especially the whole effect of the holds.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=401.8,432.453"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/6","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah. And I think I talked before about all the problems we had with the catalog when we first reopened and all that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=433.886,442.346"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/7","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right. But","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=445.27,445.823"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/8","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I know that in the early days, we were dealing a lot with CD-ROM products in the Library because they didn't have, of course, it was still pre-internet days. And we had some computerized databases, but then there were certain ones that were specific to our department that the Oxford English Dictionary, I'm pretty sure at that time, rather than being as it is now, just a regular database that's accessible to the whole system. I think we just had a CD-ROM version of that Oxford English Dictionary database and a few other things like that that we had at our reference desk, these big stacks of CD-ROMs that would be there. And those machines could be kind of clunky. They would have periodic problems. And of course, you would get the new set of CD-ROMs and have to take out the old ones. So it was a good thing when we didn't have to deal with the CD-ROMs anymore, I would say.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=446.803,530.575"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/9","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e So how would it work, if I were a patron coming in to look up a word on the Oxford English Dictionary? I would have to go up, maybe give my ID or something, and then take it to a computer that had a CD-ROM player? Is that how it would work?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=531.48,545.866"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/10","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Only the staff could use those. We had them as databases, but they were at the reference desk, so they were not the CD-ROMs. At least as I recall, there weren't any CD-ROMs out in the public area. So","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=547.16,562.383"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/11","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e you would use it to answer the question there?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=562.383,565.526"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/12","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e The librarians would use them to answer questions.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=566.76,570.151"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/13","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e So you'd put it into whatever computer you'd have at the desk and use that to look at it?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=570.82,578.255"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/14","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e We would have these. There would be sort of a stack of these machines with a stack of CD-ROMs for various products. I don't even remember all the details of how it all worked, because it's been a long time.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=578.62,603.294"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/15","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e But would it be on the same computer that you used for other reasons?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=604.581,608.451"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/16","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I think it was on our regular computer at the desk.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=609.72,613.13"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/17","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Do you remember any other CD-ROMs that people would ask besides the Oxford English Dictionary?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=614.52,621.074"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/18","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I'm trying to think of whatever, else we had that was on CD-ROM. It's difficult to remember. Maybe","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=621.32,628.74"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/19","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e some of the large indexes, like Ulrich's maybe?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=628.76,632.592"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/20","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e It could have been. Ulrich's might have been one of them. It was the ones that were of specific interest to our department. So there were not all that many, but there were a few that were like that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=632.96,647.37"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/21","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, and I think other departments probably had it more. I remember when I was looking -- on my first tour here, when we looked through the Business and Economics room, I think that they had probably the most. They weren't using them when I started, but they still had them, and there were, like, piles of them.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=649.68,666.812"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/22","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, other departments definitely had more than we did. It was a small part of our reference work. In those days, the early days back at Central Library, we were still using a lot of the, certainly the print sources a lot more than we do today because they were not available in database form. So things like, we were still subscribing to things like Book Review Digest and Book Review Index and all the Gale literature sources like Contemporary Authors and all the literature criticism. We were still using those multiple print volumes of literary criticism that you'd still have to direct people who were doing school reports about a book or an author to these volumes of Gale literature criticism that they could look through the index and find the volumes relating to their author or their book. It was a time-consuming process, and I know we have talked about the fact that a lot of that in any shape or form seems to have gone away in today's education system, and I'm not sure exactly how that is handled today in high schools, but it seems like we hardly ever get people coming in and saying, I have to do a report on this book or this author the way that we used to. So I'm not sure whether it's just that they're not being assigned that or whether they can just go and look online themselves and they don't need to look in the library sources as much.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=667.741,805.442"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/23","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Maybe they go to the Teen'scape. Even so, I know that we had Notre Dame High School and also Saugus High School would have every year bring down—there were teachers that were dedicated to bringing their students to Central Library even in the time that I worked here, certainly not since the pandemic. I haven't seen them back. But LA, even Los Angeles Community College, they'd always have a Heart of Darkness question. Don't see them anymore either. Maybe they're using the databases that they're—","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=806.281,834.287"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/24","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, they had that annual Heart of Darkness question at the community college for many years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=834.62,840.062"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/25","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e But I don't remember that recently.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=841.904,843.27"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/26","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e No, it all seems to have gone away. In the old days, we had not only the reference volumes that I've talked about, those multiple set reference volumes, but we also had—which are still, I think, some of them at the reference desk just because there's nothing that's replaced them -- but there's individual book publications that deal with, say, short story criticism or drama criticism or major works of literature. You could look in there and get a bibliography of 10 or 12 articles, which you then had to look up in the individual journals, assuming that the Library had them. It was a complex system and it required a lot of work on the students' part. You would think that it would have been replaced by the online databases like Literature Resource Center Center in our case, which has a lot of that information in a form that's pretty easily accessible today, but it doesn't—we hardly ever seem to get students who need to be pointed to that. I don't think it's because they—I mean, maybe in a few cases it's because they already know about it, but I think that it doesn't seem like they're doing their assignments in that particular kind of way anymore. Maybe they just have to write more general assignments about their take on a particular book and it doesn't have to include references to scholarly opinion about the book, so that could be.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=843.72,956.001"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/27","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Is that why they were in the Fiction department right behind the reference desk? There's a room reference that is primarily literary criticism. Was that why that was located there? Was that for—?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=957.66,970.923"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/28","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, that was—and I think when we moved back into Central Library and we had—back into Central Library from Spring Street and we had more space in our room reference area behind—just in back of the reference desk. I know at that time it was one of our librarians, Chris Bocek, who was in charge of the reference collection and I feel that it was her idea mainly to place a lot of the individual books about the most studied authors, the reference copies of those books back there, so books about Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway—not so much biographical, but critical about Ernest Hemingway's writing or Charles Dickens' writing or a lot of authors that get assigned frequently—putting the reference copies of the books out in the reading room but in a reference section there where when all the circulating material was checked out, which sometimes happened because it tended to be in those days that the teachers would—a whole bunch of people in one class would be assigned by their teacher the same book, so they would all come running in to grab all the circulating material, so it was good to have out in the reading room, rather up in the closed stacks upstairs, reference copies of these books that if everything else had been checked out, the students could at least refer to the reference copies of the books, so that's why we had them right behind the reference desk there.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=971.74,1086.585"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/29","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e All right, and so a lot of these changes have probably taken place because of the internet and the availability, and since that was coming online in the 1990s, do you want to—would you like to discuss how the online computers or online searching was introduced to the Library for both librarians and patrons? Because -- did you used to use the programs like Dialog and things like that at the Library, and then was there—do you remember the transition to more web-based resources?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1087.561,1124.232"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/30","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, we definitely—in the earlier days, we had all gone to training for Dialog and other online resources. It was—using them at the beginning was always kind of a nerve-wracking experience because we had to—it was all based on how long you used it, and they charged you by the number of searches and the number of results and the number—amount of time you spent on there, so if you—so you always had to think a lot ahead of time about what you were going, the search you were going to put in there, and would this—does this seem like it would be a reasonable search, and really sort of plan out all your Boolean searching with AND and OR and NOT and well maybe I should put this word in, maybe I should put this word in, and so in the early days, it was—it was a lot more complicated than it is now. A lot of it involved the fact that it was—that there was this charge that would—that could go up pretty rapidly while you were using it, so it was something that you only used when you really, really needed—needed it, when you really thought that it was going to answer a question. And I don't remember whether we've talked about the—when we had the fee-for-service data search. Have we—have we talked—I know you and I have talked about it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1125.842,1239.294"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/31","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, we haven't talked about that here. That would be good to talk about.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1239.4,1241.971"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/32","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, that began before the Fire, actually. So that was in the days when in the earlier '80s, when it was all searching these different Dialog databases, but we had a few computers in the building at that time, and not in every department. There was certainly not one in Literature that I could use. I always had to—if I did those searches, I always had to go over to the Science department or one of the other departments that had them. The Business department, I think, had one, but Central Library decided in during that period that they were going to institute a fee-for-searching service, and it would all just be based on how much money the company had charged us to do the search, plus a little—I think there was a little bit tacked on. I can't remember. It wasn't a whole—maybe a $10 fee for it, or I can't—plus whatever the costs were, but people could come in and ask to have a search done. I was one of the people on the initial team for that. As I recall, the first—when they first put it together, it was run by Joan Bartel, who was—I think she was—I'm trying to remember whether she had become the assistant Central Library director then, or whether she was still just the principal librarian. She may still have been the principal librarian in the Business department at that point. Dan Strehl, who was the senior librarian in—well, these people changed jobs over the years, so I forget whether he was still the senior librarian in Science, or whether he had become the senior librarian in General Library Services at that point. Then Ken Jones, who was a librarian in the Business department, and I was sort of the fourth one who was supposed to be covering the arts and humanities, whatever questions we would get on that. When a question came in, Dan was usually the one who would be given the question, and then he would—either he would do it himself, or he would give it to Ken, or to me. Joan was kind of in charge of running the operation. Either among the three of us, one of us would take the question, so he would give us a question that either was in our subject area, or if it didn't seem to fit in any of our subject areas, it would go to the person who had had the least questions up to that time. We weren't inundated with questions, but every now and then we would get—as often happens in reference work, we often comment about it—that sometimes you have a slow time, and then all of a sudden there's several things that happen at once, so sometimes we would get several questions all around the same time. We did this for the last few years before the Library Fire. We did a little of it at Spring Street, and I think by the time they came back to Central Library, more and more companies and so forth were getting their own systems where they could do this, because in the early days, even some small law firms were coming to us and having us do their searches for them, which is kind of hard to believe, but that we had the money to do it, and they somehow didn't. But I think by the time that the Library—in the early, in the 90s, when the Library reopened, it was—we were getting fewer and fewer people who were coming in for that, because there were more and more places where they could—or certainly companies were getting their own, even smaller companies. So it was sort of an interesting little space of years there in the 80s and very beginning of the 90s, where we were trying to do a fee-for-service operation. We got some interesting questions, but it couldn't last. It's probably a good thing, because people now can do their own searching of that kind.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1242.601,1550.347"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/33","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Because of the cost, were most of the patrons commercial business patrons, or was it a mix?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1551.15,1560.053"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/34","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e It was kind of a mixture of things. There were actually a few students who came in and asked questions that we searched online. I remember there was something somebody was doing about grandchild incest that we did a search on, and I somehow got into that one. And that was just a student who was doing it for a school project, so who was obviously having trouble finding things in the print sources and didn't have other access to online databases, but had the wherewithal to pay for this search. I can remember—I think this one was for some company or something. There was a question about—they wanted celebrities born in Texas, for some Texan-related program that somebody was doing. They were trying to raise money or something for some Texas-related entertainment thing, and they wanted to contact people who had roots in Texas who were in the entertainment industry, so they had us do a search in the Who's Who in America database for people. We put in things like actor, singer, writer, and with a birthplace in Texas, and got a pretty good list, actually, for that person. So that was the kind of questions we would be asked, but as I say, you always have to be super careful of them because of the money factor. So it was really nice when we—as the internet came in and everybody could do some of their own searching, and also we got these databases that we didn't have to be thinking about every second that we were using them. It didn't matter if you stayed on it forever. That was not the way it was being paid for anymore. That was a big step forward, definitely.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1560.674,1711.15"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/35","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Were there any expensive mishaps, that were notable or memorable?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1711.711,1717.244"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/36","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I can remember a couple of times that I did searches where I did go back and talk to the other two, probably Joan or Dan, about, well, I screwed this one up because it produced a lot more results than I thought it was going to, and it took a lot longer to print them all out than I thought it was going to, and so it's going to cost a lot of money, and this person—I think that they could limit what they wanted to pay, and I think sometimes I had gone over the amount that they wanted to pay. Because it was really hard to gauge how it was going to come out because you never knew exactly how many results you were going to have. So I think we had to—I mean, it wasn't like thousands of dollars or anything, but it was a significant amount, and I think we are—for whatever cash they were using, we sort of had to eat some of those mistakes along the way. I know it happened to me at least a couple of times. I've probably blocked it out of my memory, what the terrible details were.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1717.845,1800.595"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/37","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah. About that, there were only three of you, right? It wasn't something that everybody—so all the librarians were doing, so it was basically like you guys were the specialists.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1801.081,1812.113"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/38","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e At the beginning, yeah.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1812.482,1813.368"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/39","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e So they would have to come to you even if they didn't fall within the purview of the department, you were still doing searches.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1813.58,1820.087"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/40","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah. Generally, they were having—there may have been one or two other people who got added in the later—I kind of have this memory of the four of us having a lot of staff meetings and so forth together, but there may have been a couple of other people who got added at different times. But yeah, if it didn't fall into any of our particular subject expertise areas, I think once in a while they would ask—I know for some of the legal things, they asked Lee Ridgeway, who was the subject specialist in the Social Science department at that time, they asked him to do some of the law questions. As I say, it was—but one time he wasn't there, and I had to do a search for a lawyer, which I was pretty nervous about. Fortunately, I knew the Dialog protocols and everything, and he knew what he wanted and could spell it out, the lawyer who wanted this. So between the two of us, we figured it all out. But yeah, so sometimes we did end up doing searches for areas that really were not our specialty.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1821.321,1908.803"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/41","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right. And then that kind of half-answers my next question, which is, were these while-you-wait services, or did sometimes they have to return? How would that work? Would they sit there and wait for the answer, or in that case you say the lawyer was assisting you, or sometimes they come back?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1909.585,1924.824"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/42","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e No, it wasn't usually the same day. You would try to do it in the next couple of days, but it was—I don't remember it ever being that, oh, somebody's here and they want it right now, because they had to fill out a form.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1925.184,1942.328"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/43","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1942.81,1943.05"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/44","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e And so I think the understanding was always, it's not going to be today, it's going to be a couple of days down the road.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1943.331,1949.941"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/45","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e And because it would take more time and was somewhat more formalized, did you get people from the branches who would be directed, say, patrons would be directed from branches, down either downtown, or would they provide the branch librarian the search they were interested in, then that would get forwarded to you all? Or how did that work with the people in the outlying areas?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1950.623,1969.18"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/46","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I don't really remember how exactly, whether we got questions forwarded from branches, or I don't know. It's possible that maybe they even had people like the Librarian III's at the regional branches were doing their own searching for their regions. I don't remember. Or it could be that they were forwarding them. I just, it always, it seemed to me that most of the questions were submitted at Central Library.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1970.082,2003.526"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/47","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay. And so, tell me about what you remember about the internet becoming more common. I think, was it Netscape was one of the first browser companies? Did you, how did the internet get introduced into the public library? What do you remember of that?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2003.606,2017.934"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/48","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, I think that there was Netscape at the beginning. It's so long ago, it's hard to remember. It was definitely something that, it was a big advance for everybody. I know that. Suddenly we had all these capabilities that we could look for online. And as I say, we didn't have to, we didn't have to worry anymore about the minute-by-minute costs. And I know that, of course, pre-Google, there were all these different companies that were trying to harness that market of certain, you know, lassoing all the information on the internet. So there were, I...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2018.942,2074.744"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/49","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e They called them crawlers, web crawlers.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2075.143,2077.328"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/50","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Web crawlers, yeah. When we did classes for the public, which they still do today, I'm not involved in those anymore, but we did a lot of classes on, during the early internet days for the public on searching the web. And we would talk about, oh, there's all these different choices you have, and you should try several of them, because the first one might not get what you wanted. And yeah, there was, I know one was Lycos, L-Y-C-O-S. And there was, and AskJeeves was one that people liked the name of it, so they would use that one sometimes. So, and there were several other ones like that, that have gradually disappeared, or are there somewhere, but nobody's using them anymore. I'm not sure which. But there was a whole raft of things like that, that you could try for your search, or you could do the meta search engines. I remember Virginia Loe, who was running a lot of the training things for the public, she was really into meta search engines, and she always wanted us to talk about those those at the classes, because you could search multiple search engines at once. And so we would talk about MetaCrawler, and so forth. But it all kind of, Google gradually took over. Yeah, well, Yahoo, of course, was another one that people used in those days. Now, it's mainly mostly a mail thing, and people don't do Yahoo searches on a regular basis. But Google kind of came to dominate the market, and so everything changed there. But for a while, there was this whole focus on making people aware of all the different possible ways that they could search the internet. And so that went on for quite a few years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2077.368,2221.011"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/51","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Back then, they were talking about portals, like AOL wanted to be your portal for how you worked on the internet.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2221.532,2227.711"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/52","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Right.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2228.533,2228.873"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/53","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e And so we were talking about educating the public. So how it was introduced? I would think that, as opposed to the computer classes we have today, which talk about very specific things, and some basics, there was a lot more to cover, and you must have had a much larger audience, because people were not yet familiarized with these new systems. So was that a big part of your job, or at least the big part of the Library's mission, was really trying to help people learn about these things? And also, how did it affect your job on reference, other than the fact that you mentioned that it was much simpler and less expensive to use than the Dialog systems?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2229.274,2274.441"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/54","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e For a while, the training classes were quite a big part of my work. And we had a lot of specialized classes. We would have classes in -- as all the different databases developed online, and we had access to them, we would have classes in all the different subject areas, such as we would have a class about literature databases, and we would have a class about social science databases, and so on. So we did that for a while. They never got huge numbers of turnouts. They generalized the classes after a couple of years, I think, because they found that they just weren't getting... There were not the quantity of people who wanted to go on after they learned the basics of searching, and the more general databases. We would have periodicals databases and that sort of thing, and people were interested in those to some extent, but the general periodicals searching. But they found out that there just weren't the number of people who, when they learned about those, really wanted to get into all the specialized databases, that there were not enough of them who would show up to take classes on that. But we did have a lot of different scripts that we put together for all of the more specialized databases, and we worked on that for at least a few years in, say, the late 90s, early 2000s.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2277.144,2403.149"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/55","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, and of course your job was a lot easier once the internet was on your reference desk.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2403.349,2412.747"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/56","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, definitely. It made things a lot simpler, and as we've talked about before, the other side of it was that people could do their own searching as people got computers at home and also had access to public computers at the Library. They could search for things on their own pretty easily, and so the number of short answer reference questions has dropped off pretty dramatically over the years since the internet came into existence. We get far, far fewer phone calls than we used to get, although part of that is because Central Library has InfoNow that answers the general reference questions, but even there, it's not anywhere near the quantity that it used to be, and it's because those questions can be answered now by people on their own in a lot of cases.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2414.31,2482.251"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/57","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right, I think we spoke about the days before the internet, where there was a lot more phone calls and people were a lot more patient back then. You were saying people would be on hold for longer periods of time because you'd have more people calling in, and generally people were-- I got the impression that generally people were more patient back then on the phone than they are now. I wonder if the accessibility of the internet affects people's patience or expectations. Are they more demanding now than they used to be, or is it more impatient or anything, the way people's behaviors have changed?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2483.914,2528.082"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/58","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I think it's true that people have become more impatient about getting answers to their questions, and they tend to think that everything should be answered right away in a couple of seconds. It used to be that, as I've said before, in the Literature department and most of the other subject departments, we had four phone lines. Sometimes we would have people on all four lines because we had messenger clerks running to get the book that we needed to answer somebody's question on each line. We would take another call, and so we would keep these notebooks where we would write down the different extensions and what question was on what line to keep track of them. People were, they had to be patient. I think for the most part, I'm sure that we had people yell at us for how long it took in those days, but I think in general people were more patient. Now, sometimes they ask you something, and there's a few seconds while you're looking it up online, and they say, hello, hello, are you still there? We've all experienced that, where they sort of feel like you're going to have the answer in five seconds for something that isn't necessarily that easy to answer. It has changed in that respect.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2529.344,2626.051"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/59","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Or that they think that everything is available. Sometimes we've realized that people expect that everything is going to be on the internet, that you should be able to find it immediately, and they can't believe it when it's not only immediately available, but sometimes not even on the internet at all, depending.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2627.394,2651.101"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/60","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e That happens a lot too, yes.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2651.342,2654.187"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/61","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, thank you for answering that. So, I don't know if I'd asked you when you, I think I might have, so forgive me if I did, but when did you actually become the L3? Was it before we, before the Fire? Because it seems like you were already doing that kind of specialist subject stuff on the Dialog searches.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2654.989,2673.448"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/62","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I think we already went through that.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2673.668,2675.607"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/63","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e I think so too.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2676.321,2676.923"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/64","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e So I will just say, just briefly, I'll just say that it was at the time, it was in 1991 when, while we were at the Spring Street location, and it involved the fact that the staff was, that a lot of staff positions were cut, including the Senior Librarian position in Fiction.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2677.063,2697.049"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/65","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, forgive me. So you were already doing-- what reminded me of it was that you were doing a lot of highly specialized searches and stuff, but you were not the subject specialist.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2697.421,2708.281"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/66","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I was not the subject specialist in the pre-Fire days or the early days...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2709.042,2715.973"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/67","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e The Dialog days.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2718.32,2719.776"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/68","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e The Dialog days and the early days at Spring Street, either.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2719.803,2723.17"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/69","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Thank you. Okay, so one of the questions we haven't addressed yet is for those people, you were employed during the financial downturns that occurred after the 2008 financial crisis. And at that time, in 2009, the Library froze the sub time, there was a lot of retirements through the ERIP program, which was in response to the financial downturn. There was also a cutting back of public hours, which I think we talked about Mondays. Or do you recall how your position or job function was affected due to those, either due to the shortage in--if any resources were cut, and also during any staff shortages?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2723.431,2763.714"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/70","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I know that we had some budget cuts. It's happened so often over the years, it's sort of hard to remember when. When did the materials budget get cut? When did it get restored? When did it get cut again? When did it get restored again? And that was definitely one of the times when it happened. I've mainly ordered the Fiction books over the years, and so there's been all these times when I first started ordering fiction in the 80s, we ordered a reference and circulating copy of everything, and then things that we thought were going to be of particular interest, like some major publishers and mysteries that were so popular and still are, we would order a reference and two circulating. And eventually, we gradually, we decided, okay, we don't have the money to order reference copies anymore, except we'll keep on ordering California fiction in reference, but we'll just limit it to that because we have the special California fiction collection in the department. So then we did that for a while, then, well, we don't really have money to keep on ordering the reference copies of California fiction, so we'll drop that. And we don't have money to order two copies of all the ... circulating things we were ordering, so we'll have to order one copy of more books. But it has gone up and down with the years, except we gradually phased out the reference copies completely for the newer fiction books. But it's definitely, at that time of the economic downturn, we definitely had to cut back again, which usually I've managed to make it work by cutting out a lot of the bulk of the second copies, which is not a great thing to do, but sometimes we end up getting gift copies, or we can use copies that we get from other sources like the Popular Library department when they're done with them. So sometimes it works out, but I know there was that that happened during the downturn. There was also, I sort of had the question at the time of, should I retire, because I had the -- there was, yeah, the retirement incentive program that they had at the time was for people who had had a certain number of years in the system, and they were offering, and I was just coming up on 30 years at that time, and they had the thing, the deal that they had for the people who had, I think, for between 30 and 33 years was that they, you could get three extra years tacked on to your retirement pay. You would get credit for three years that you hadn't worked if you left at that point, and with the people who had worked more than 33 years, I think it was that they got $1,000, a flat rate of $1,000 for every year they had worked. So if somebody had worked 39 years, and they retired then, they didn't get any more years, but they got a $39,000 payout, as I recall. That's the way I remember it working. So I did debate for a little while, but I was, I thought, well, I'm not that old at that point, and I shouldn't, I'm not really ready to retire, and I was debating it because at that time, my mother was still alive. My brother, who had health problems, was not doing well, and I had been spending a lot of time with both of them, and I felt like, well, would it be, should I really just leave, and at that time, but I talked myself out of it, I guess. So I didn't, I did not take it myself, though a lot of other people did. I do remember that we were closed on Mondays for a while. It doesn't seem like it was a huge span of time, but for a while, we were closed on Mondays, I think. So we--but they would have the Library open to the staff, and a certain number of people would come in on those days, just to search the router, because they knew it would really pile up if they didn't do it, to search those and get them on their way. So a few of us would come in on the Mondays. That was sort of a weird experience being in the building with just a few staff members, and we kind of spent our day either searching the router, or when we were done with that, then we could do other things like book ordering, and so forth, that we had time for. But it was not a very happy period in the system. There were some layoffs, and a lot of people had to switch, they got transferred out of places where they were into other vacancies here and there. So it was a difficult time for the system.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=2766.344,3146.081"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/71","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Yes, that's true. Okay, yes, so speaking of difficult times of the system, then there was the more recent March 2020, or the lockdown that began due to COVID-19 in March 2020. In March, the Library system shut down, the staff was sent home. Tell me, you can first of all discuss the last few days at the Library before staff was sent home, and then may talk about their early days of telecommuting. How did you adapt and adjust working from home, and how to affect your job duties?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=3147.925,3184.705"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/72","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Okay, yeah. I don't remember too much about the last days that we were open, except that there was a lot of anxiety going around about the pandemic, and what was going to happen, were we going to have to close all the buildings, the Library buildings, and it was kind of going from day to day about what would happen. I think that the last day that the Library was open before that was actually my day off, if I'm remembering correctly, and I so I don't think I was actually in the building on that last day. And then I think I got the word from from home that that we wouldn't be going in the next day, and and we weren't sure when we would be going in again, and it turned out to be for not for quite a long time, and then only on a part-time basis. So we all had to figure out how this was going to work, continuing to work, but obviously not not doing a lot of the things that that we had been doing before, and what could we keep on doing that would be of benefit to the Library, and that we could do during our hours at home. I also had to buy myself a new computer, because I had a computer at home, but it was not in the greatest of shape, and I had been relying on my time at the Library to do a lot of computer-related things. If I had to do something online, I would often do it in my off time, like before I went home after work, I would do it at the Library. So it it motivated me to buy to buy a new computer, and so I could communicate with everybody. We all learned how to do Zoom meetings, and in those days that was that was an interesting experience I hadn't had before. But as far as figuring out what we were going to do, we a lot normally I would have been able to do some ordering at home, although it's always more difficult to do it outside the Library than in the Library, just because it's easiest when we have the staff catalog. The staff catalog is much easier to use for ordering purposes than the public catalog and of course at home we only had the public catalog that we could use. So at the time they had -- the City Librarian moved the remainder of our book funds for it, well that was March, so there were a few months left in the fiscal year which ends in June, had moved all the money into e-materials for obvious reasons, feeling that we would need a lot more e-materials, and the book collection would not be used for a while. So we weren't doing any new order lists being produced for a while there for for a few months, so we couldn't we couldn't do that either. It was another on the list of many things that we couldn't do, all the things that involve interactions with the public pretty much. So we came up with other things, like in my case, we wrote blogs sometimes. We came up with topics for the Library's website for blogs, and put those together. And we would spend some of our time working with doing our own little projects with Library databases. We were allowed to take classes on Library databases that were relevant, so a lot of other people, myself included, I took the Library Spanish class and a couple of Spanish classes in from one of the Library databases, so we spent a lot of time doing things like that. I added, I went back and added a lot of things to the California Fiction Database, I remember that. I've spent time on that because it's been it's difficult to keep up with the California Fiction just because a lot of the bestseller-type books we don't see when they first come into the department. They go off to fill holds on them, so we don't always grab on to those right when they come in, which when which is normally when we would add them to the California Fiction Database. So I went back and did updates for for several best-selling authors like Jonathan Kellerman and Michael Connolly, putting their books into the California Fiction Database. So ...that's what I remember doing in the early days, and I think it was around June or July, probably around the new fiscal year, that they they started letting us order again, so they put together these huge order lists of all the things that we hadn't had access to order in the previous three months, and so that various people throughout the Central Library system in the different departments had to go through these lists. I went through the one for Fiction, which took quite a while, and put in orders for what we everything that we that we needed the backlog of what we hadn't been able to order for several months. And I remember doing that, and then the initial return to the building was mainly for the program where the people could pick up their books outside the Library if they put holds on them, they could get them outside the Library, so we had to have staff come in to do the searches for the books that they were able they were allowed to place on hold again. And we were all told that we should come in, or people were given the option, especially people in my age range were given the option of not coming back if they didn't want to, but I decided to come back. It was three days out of ten for quite a while that that we were working. We started working in the building again, and so we did that for quite a few months. We had two different... there were there were alternate weeks. Our department was divided, the Literature and Fiction staff was divided in half, where half of us worked one week, the five days of one week, Monday through Friday, and the other half worked the next week. And each person within that worked three days out of the five, so I might have been working Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and somebody else might have been working Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, or Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. So we all saw the people in our half of the department on some of the one or two days every other week, and we didn't see the other people at all. Or it was or very rarely if they switched their schedule for some reason, but there were people that I didn't see for months and months and months after the Fire, except in Zoom.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=3186.528,3749.927"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/73","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right, yeah, that's that's my vague memory of it, too. Then when we came back, like it was, do you have any thoughts about how when you came back it was any relief or still fear? I think -- was it was it July? I was trying to think of when we came back on a regular schedule, I think it was July, it was like the following year, so July maybe or June of 2021?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=3751.389,3773.187"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/74","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, it seems like it all it all got phased in gradually at Central Library, I know that. I guess I had some apprehensions about it, but I had been working the three days in the building all along, and so I was kind of used to it. And I come downtown on the train. So I was used to riding the train back and forth and there was not as much traffic on the train as there had been before, of course, because people were urged to only take public transportation and to be out at all if they if they had to be. But then, yeah, I think it was the following year that they it seems like it was maybe in spring that we that we started gradually phasing it in. That first, for a little while they only had the lobby area open and then they were or the first floor and then they gradually started opening other floors. So it was ... a process that took place over a number of weeks before the whole building was open again to the public and of course it's been slow getting everybody, getting people to come back. It was pretty quiet at the beginning for a long time and it's never come back to the level that it was before and I don't know whether it will at this point. I guess it's still going up a little bit. We just had David Kelly in our department giving us new statistics that showed that our circulation increased about 6% in the over a six-month period from the those six months in the previous year. So I guess maybe we're getting a little bit of the public back gradually still. But it was a pretty traumatic thing for everybody but working here in a public building of course it you do worry about exposure to a lot of different possible ailments not just COVID but other things. So that's been the case for many years that we knew that there were things going around among our library users that were not things that we we'd want to get ourselves, so in some ways I guess we were sort of it was it was just one more thing to think about on that score.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=3773.302,3990.445"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/75","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Well, that's true. I mean I think before COVID-19 in 2020 I remember in one of the years prior there was -- custodians were regularly wiping down surfaces, I think, was there a bout of hepatitis?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=3990.625,4003.264"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/76","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I think there was a hepatitis one time and and whenever there was a bad flu season you always would worry about all the people that would be sitting at desks coughing, coughing, coughing and and I feel like that doesn't happen as much as it used to. It's like there's been, all the admonitions about if you're not feeling good stay home, I noticed that both at work and also as I say I go to a lot of a lot of concerts and I've noticed that at concerts, that I mean sure there's still people who come in and cough, but it used to be that at say at a concert during the winter season they they'd finish a movement and like it seemed like half the audience would burst out coughing until before they started the next movement of their piece. Their","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4004.045,4057.62"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/77","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e form of applause.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4057.62,4058.49"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/78","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e And it doesn't seem like that happens as much both in the library and in the concert hall as it used to. So I think that the pandemic changed things in that way which is probably a good thing that people if they're really coughing, coughing every few minutes they're they're staying at home as much as they can, so that's a plus for them.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4058.982,4092.532"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/79","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e I wanted to ask... did your duties actually change when you returned? Have any of the new changes been long lasting? It it seems to me that they probably haven't but...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4093.914,4110.272"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/80","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I don't think there was much, I think we pretty much what, gradually went back to what we had been doing before. I don't think there was a great deal of change in terms of the the things we, the duties of the position or anything, other than I feel like I used to spend more time down on lower level one in Acquisitions and so forth. I used to go down there and they would have me look at the new fiction books and say which ones should be on the list. But they seem to have decided that they just want to pick out the books for the branch list, that I should have said the branch list, the books that would come in for the Fiction department from our orders then they would use those to some extent to put together the lists for the branches. But I think that they decided that Acquisitions is happy with putting together their own list, so I don't I don't spend the time on that anymore. ..This was not entirely the pandemic, although I think some of it was that they used to get a lot more, there was quite a while there where the Los Angeles Times gave the Library a lot of gift books from their book review people. Because they would get all these books that would come in that the publishers would submit for a review and obviously the Times didn't have the space to review all of these books so they would pass on the books to the Library and probably some of the ones that they did review as well. And so we have we got some really nice gifts from the Library over the years and I would spend a lot of time down there going through those. And even before the pandemic they were they were kind of fading away because the Times has had to diminish its services and its staff over the years. And also the Times moved from downtown to their main headquarters is now in El Segundo, so it wasn't like they were just down the street from us anymore and then we could go and pick up cartloads of books easily. So I do kind of miss that part of the job of looking through those LA Times gifts that would come in.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4110.345,4286.092"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/81","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah they've curtailed their book section so much it's like...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4286.64,4289.712"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/82","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e Yeah, they still do some book reviews but not the way they used to.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4291.243,4295.657"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/83","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right. There's a tendency I think for people to look back and say times were better in the old days, one of the things that I wanted to just get your general idea on how, maybe criminal or disruptive behavior of people in the Library. Whether that's gotten worse or better from the times or like I guess I could say, you'd call them euphemistically, just security situations. Is it better now than it used to be? Is it about the same? Is it the sort of thing because -- it's the sort of thing where we discussed some about the old library in this regard but we didn't get too far into it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4295.792,4342.692"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/84","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e It is hard to say but nowadays we get all these incident reports from branches so you kind of get this feeling like, wow, all this stuff is happening out there and did that happen before? And obviously it happened when we didn't always hear about it. And some people would complain sometimes when something really bad happened at, say, a branch or somewhere else in the building and then nobody knew about it and the word gradually got out. So we do find out more about these things now, I feel like, bad things happened certainly in the building during the early years that I worked there. There were a large number of people who had mental issues that came into the library in those days, they were in the library day after day after day and the staff and the security had to deal with them. So has it gone up? Maybe but maybe it's not all that different. There certainly were, I know we hear that the homeless situation has gotten worse but there were people who were sleeping in the bushes outside the Library back in the 80's. So it was happening then and we had people who would come in and exhibit strange behavior and they would be there, you'd see them day after day after day and as long as they didn't do anything horrendous they were allowed to come back in and be in the building. So my personal feeling is that it may be that it's a little more severe now but not that much more. I feel like it was was happening then and it's still happening unfortunately.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4344.883,4499.149"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/85","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e One of the reasons why I thought about it is because I remember when we returned into the Library after lockdown, it seemed to me that people were a lot more erratic and there was a lot more security issues, in the maybe about the year following the reopening to the public, but it seems like that's gotten better. That","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4500.5,4516.443"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/86","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e could be that the people who are in the situation where they're homeless or at least have major financial problems. That they went through a time and people who have mental issues, to one degree or another, they went through a time that even was very difficult for people who had home security and had jobs that they were still able to be getting paid for and so forth. So those people went through this really rough time that obviously had even more of an impact on them than it did on the rest of us. So I'm sure that was probably part of the reason that initially there there was a lot more erratic behavior right at the return after the pandemic.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4516.964,4589.475"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/87","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Well I don't really have any more questions, I'm really grateful to have your witness of the long period of time that you've worked here. Is there anything else you feel like you'd like to mention or anything about your job and your experience that we haven't touched upon, that you'd like to mention?","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4590.702,4613.177"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/88","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I'd just like to say that I'm very grateful to have had this job, for well going on 43 years, so most of it has been a pleasure and it's something that was kind of the job that I always envisioned would be the perfect kind of job for me to have, so I'm very lucky that I ended up getting into this job early in my career. I've often thought about what were the times when was I the happiest in the job. And it's sort of hard to say because in some, I know that the early years that I was in the library system I was extremely happy just because it was, it seemed like such a great job for me. And I think part of it was just relief out of being out of school too. I never cared too much for my two years in library school, so it was nice to not to have to write any more papers. But some of it was just that it was just a great work environment. I mean, aside from the physical environment having its problems ,but working with such a great group of people and so forth, the subject matter was of great interest to me so I really enjoyed the beginning of my career, like the first 10 or 15 years. I feel like in some ways I miss some of the more interesting questions we would get in those days that now people can easily answer on their own. I miss that kind of environment where every day you would answer a whole lot of questions where you would learn new information and it still happens but it doesn't happen quite as often as as it used to. But on the other hand it's good to have experienced the post-internet library where we can answer some questions that we never could have answered in the past and sometimes fairly easily. With the databases and putting a search in Google Books or that kind of thing where we can come up with an answer that we just wouldn't have been able to formulate in the past. So it's really hard to say which part of it I've enjoyed the most. They both had their advantages and their disadvantages, the early days, the early pre-internet days and the more recent days with more technology. I'm glad that I got to experience both, let's put it that way. I sort of feel like I'm glad that I started when I did and that I got to experience that change over that period of years. And it's been a complete and total pleasure for me. As I've said before it was pretty much my dream job so I'm very grateful to have been able to do it for all these years.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4617.27,4860.864"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/89","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e Right and thank you. And of course you've been such an incredible asset to the Library I'm really glad you chose this profession and I've always enjoyed working with you. But really I want to thank you the most for spending this amount of time talking about Library, your career and your experiences here. So thank you very much for your time. And it's hard to believe it's over after we've spent so much time on it but...","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4862.428,4891.933"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/90","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e I don't know whether anybody's going to have the patience to read or listen through all these hours of it but maybe they'll learn a few things if they can -- if they want to listen to it, at least part of it.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4892.449,4905.993"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/91","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eJim Sherman:\u003c/strong\u003e I think they certainly will. Well thank you again Bob.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4906.474,4908.523"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/transcript/65444/annotation/92","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"\u003cstrong\u003eRobert Anderson:\u003c/strong\u003e You're very welcome.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=4909.765,4910.507"}]},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["BOB [Index]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/93","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Central Library in the 1990s -- moving back","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Title"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=83.0,445.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/94","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert talks about moving back into the library, and  getting used to both  the new building and Sunday hours. ","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Synopsis"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=83.0,445.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/95","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"CD-ROMS","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Title"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=445.0,667.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/96","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"The introduction and implementation of new and now superseded technologies  ","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Synopsis"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=445.0,667.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/97","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"CD-ROM","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Keywords"]}},{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Dialog","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Keywords"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=445.0,667.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/98","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Use of Print Indexes by Students","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Title"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=667.0,1087.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/99","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert describes the way Literature department reference titles were used and how they're not anymore","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Synopsis"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=667.0,1087.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/100","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Introduction of Online Search Technologies","format":"text/plain","label":{"en":["Title"]}}],"target":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262#t=1087.0,2723.0"},{"id":"https://lapl.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2368/collection_resources/125752/file/233262/index/82731/annotation/101","type":"Annotation","motivation":"supplementing","body":[{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Robert discusses the early days of online searching using the Dialog software system,  followed by the eventual introduction of databases and the internet.  As part of that, Robert remembers attempts to teach the public how to use the tools of the information superhighway. 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