Oral History Project
Oral History Project presentation at the Association's 20th anniversary, October 2013.
Pictured are Beth Wladis, Ma'lis Wendt, Deborah Trepp, Jane Kunstler, and Mary K. Conwell.
Pictured are Beth Wladis, Ma'lis Wendt, Deborah Trepp, Jane Kunstler, and Mary K. Conwell.
The Mission
The mission of the New York Public Library Retirees Association Oral History Project is to collect and preserve unique and valuable information about The New York Public Library that exists only in the memories of those who worked for the Library. Through recorded interviews, as well as written reminiscences, we seek to supplement the Library's rich history with information that would otherwise be lost and to honor the contributions of the staff to that history.
The NYPLRA Oral History Project is now comprised of 118 recorded interviews of salaried staff who served in professional and paraprofessional positions in the Branch Libraries and the Research Libraries, plus support staff (human resources, security, maintenance, IT, etc.). They represent service at The New York Public Library from the 1940s to the present by staff with unique talents, perspectives and personalities.
When the NYPLRA Oral History Project was restarted in 2013, Columbia University’s oral history program was consulted. There were many options and many resources. As librarians, we chose a fairly rigorous approach, hoping to make the archive as complete and ready-to-use as possible, leaving minimal processing work to be done when it is finally handed over to a research institution.
Standards of practice:
Process followed:
The complete file for each narrator includes the:
The potential value of the archive:
Complements archival material already held at NYPL through first-person narratives
Illustrates public library history & trends, emerging needs of users, and the impact and evolution of technology on library services
Includes social and political history of NYC and the U.S., including labor history, fiscal crisis of 1975, 9/11 attacks, NYPL’s response to the AIDS crisis, etc.
The individual and collective experiences represented in the oral histories are interesting, inspiring, and multi-dimensional, and they reflect the breadth of the Library’s collections, services, and history. The Library would not be the institution it is without those who worked there.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NYPL's Retirees Record Their Oral Histories
By Beth Wladis and Jane Kunstler
“That story just knocked me out.”
The New York Public Library Retirees Association is conducting an Oral History Project to collect and preserve unique and valuable information about The New York Public Library that exists only in the memories of those who worked for the Library. Through recorded interviews, as well as written reminiscences, we seek to supplement the Library's rich history with information that would otherwise be lost and to honor the contributions of the staff to that history.
Because of its location and its strong training program, NYPL has attracted staff from all over the United States and the world. They bring with them their diverse interests and strengths. The various neighborhoods have their own particular characteristics, and branch collections and programs are tailored to each area. Staff become part of the neighborhood fabric and participate in community events and community boards. They are strong advocates for their populations.
The Retirees Association was formed in 1993 and is independent of the Library. Its members are staff from all areas of the Library, clerical, professional, and support. The association advocates in areas of common concern for retirees, supports library services, and provides recreational and educational programs for members. It maintains a Facebook page and a website, publishes a semi-annual newsletter and an annual membership directory, arranges tours to cultural and literary sites, and holds an annual luncheon. Its membership numbers several hundred.
The New York Public Library was established in 1895 with the combining of the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries with the Tilden Trust. The main library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, opened to the public in 1911. The building is a landmark in New York City; its two lions, named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, guard the entrance to the stately building.
The circulating department was established in 1901 when the Library consolidated with The New York Free Circulating Library. In that same year, Andrew Carnegie offered the city $5.2 million dollars to establish a branch library system. NYPL is currently made up of eighty-nine neighborhood branches in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and three research libraries all located in Manhattan. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, as its name indicates, collects material in all the performing arts—dance, theater, film, music, and recorded sound and image. It is unique in that it also contains a circulating collection. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, located on Fifth Avenue, contains a vast array of material in the humanities and social sciences and includes works in over three hundred eighty languages. Its special collections divisions are filled with rarities. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem, is a renowned institution devoted to the preservation of materials concerning the Black experience—African American, African Diaspora, and African.
Our interviewees were drawn from the retired staff of The New York Public Library, whether or not they were members of the association. Some are fairly recent retirees; others have been retired for decades, and some of the latter had worked with staff who had been with NYPL in its earliest years. They have served in all types of positions throughout the institution as librarians, paraprofessionals, and clerks, as well as support staff from an array of departments including human resources, security, maintenance, and information technology. Some were native New Yorkers, others came from across the United States and abroad; some made their careers in the neighborhood branch libraries, others in the more specialized research libraries, and a few were hybrids with careers that spanned both sides of the house.
Only three narrations into the editing phase of the project, we found that our extraordinary colleagues exceeded our expectations. The experience, backgrounds, skills and interests they brought were richer, more diverse, and, sometimes, even more exciting than we could have imagined. The narrators all had NYPL in common, but like the Library itself, they covered the breadth of the intellectual and practical universe, and in New York City, they were part of a large urban melting pot.
Here are highlights from their oral histories:
The children’s librarian in Chinatown who met one of her former young patrons, now a sanitation worker, while he was driving his garbage truck on the streets of the Lower East Side. He recognized her and joined her in reciting the opening lines of the classic children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers.
The respected senior clerk who retired at age fifty-five after twenty-six years at NYPL and went on to a distinguished seventeen-year career at New York's private Mercantile Library.
The fiery union local president who helped bring down a corrupt municipal union.
The expert benefits manager, appreciated for her superb counseling of pre-retirees, who also set up the Library’s first retirement annuity plans. She went on to an unexpected post-retirement career working closely with I.M. Pei.
The correctional services librarian who, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, arranged for blankets and other essentials for neglected and shunned prisoners with AIDS and HIV at Rikers Island Correctional Facility.
The Black children's and branch librarian, an outstanding staff trainer, who spent summers in the segregated South where the doors of the local public library were closed to her. She could only visit a public library when she was in New York.
The Holocaust survivor who endured a death march, earned her high school equivalency and MLS in the U.S. while raising two young children, worked in the Jewish Division, and earned a PhD in history “on her way home from work.”
The daughter of one of the Library’s live-in custodians, Sharon Washington, who grew up in an apartment on the top floor of a neighborhood branch on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. An actor and playwright, she wrote about the experience in her play Feeding the Dragon.
A former deputy director of the Branch Libraries who fondly remembers an early supervisor relating how she had told one serious, young reader about the suspension of bookmobile service—essential to those who had no neighborhood branch—because gas and tires were needed during World War II. “She took special care at that last Tuesday stop to explain to the young girl that the bookmobile would not come back until after the war. The little girl asked, ‘Will it come back the Tuesday after the war?’ That story just knocked me out.”
The archive provides a picture of life in the library from the late 1930s to the 2010s. It also reflects the historical and cultural life and times of New York City and the United States.
One narrator’s first day of work in 1939 coincided with Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
Another tells of a staff member’s relative who was in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans.
Fascism, National Socialism, Communism, and war led many refugees with their diverse language skills to the Research Library as valuable employees in the Acquisitions, Cataloging, and specialized language divisions. Some narrate their own stories, others are remembered by their colleagues.
A respected, long-time children’s librarian recalls being chided for her “unreliable” work history. She had been forced to resign from the Library during her pregnancies and was criticized for her absences when she was rehired. She started at NYPL as a page when she was a schoolgirl, and at her retirement had worked for the Library for over forty-five years.
An important recollection for many of the staff was how they were affected by New York City’s fiscal collapse in 1975. Library funds were cut, staff were laid off, demoted, and transferred, with lasting effects that cascaded through the subsequent years. For some narrators, the Library was where they were on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963; and for many, it was where they were on September 11, 2001.
There are moments of humor, warmth, and tradition. The Branch libraries’ long-held custom of daily afternoon high tea is a thread that runs through many of our narratives. In the old days, staff didn’t have a choice about attending, and even into the seventies in many locations, the table in the staff room was set with silverware and china, and a delegated staff member provided coffee or tea and refreshments. The formality may have disappeared, but vestiges of high tea lasted into the 21st century.
The fabled tradition of the monthly children’s story hour also recurs through the narrations. No one who has read or listened to the oral history of one of our master storytellers will forget the moment when one of her young troublemakers was so engrossed in her ghost story that he literally jumped out of his chair.
Our oral histories have provided a place to remember good friends, strong mentors, and memorable interactions with the public. In one instance, a music librarian met her future husband, a conductor, when he came to the Library for the Performing Arts to do research, and several other staff members found their future spouses while working at the Library.
A particular pleasure of our oral histories is to run across the name of someone you worked with but haven’t thought of for a while. Each oral history is accompanied by a list of names and terms—under authority control!—useful as a finding aid for the archive, but also meaningful as a reminder of the colleagues, personalities and stories that formed the fabric of our work lives.
Most of the Oral History Project volunteers focus on a specific aspect of the project: interviewing, transcription, editing, or the glossary, although some contribute invaluably to more than one area. The number of active volunteers has varied over the years, but it currently numbers about sixteen and includes retirees, former NYPL employees, and friends and family of retirees. It helps to be familiar with the Library, but it isn’t essential. Sometimes the narrators are well-known to the volunteers, but everyone has had the experience of being impressed by staff members we wish we had known or had known better.
We see the potential for this archive of recorded and transcribed histories to aid in scholarly research. The history of New York City, labor history, women’s history, and public library history and trends in the U.S. can be found in our oral histories, complementing the history of NYPL itself.
The mission of the New York Public Library Retirees Association Oral History Project is to collect and preserve unique and valuable information about The New York Public Library that exists only in the memories of those who worked for the Library. Through recorded interviews, as well as written reminiscences, we seek to supplement the Library's rich history with information that would otherwise be lost and to honor the contributions of the staff to that history.
The NYPLRA Oral History Project is now comprised of 118 recorded interviews of salaried staff who served in professional and paraprofessional positions in the Branch Libraries and the Research Libraries, plus support staff (human resources, security, maintenance, IT, etc.). They represent service at The New York Public Library from the 1940s to the present by staff with unique talents, perspectives and personalities.
When the NYPLRA Oral History Project was restarted in 2013, Columbia University’s oral history program was consulted. There were many options and many resources. As librarians, we chose a fairly rigorous approach, hoping to make the archive as complete and ready-to-use as possible, leaving minimal processing work to be done when it is finally handed over to a research institution.
Standards of practice:
- Documentation includes the names of narrators, interviewers, transcribers, editors; dates; approvals; etc.
- File preparation and editing includes written editing guidelines using the Chicago Manual of Style; rigorous review process
- Extensive authority control for proper names of people, organizations, businesses, etc., including a master file of 13,000+ staff names covering 100 years; descriptive definitions of many proper names
- Glossary of NYPL-specific terms
Process followed:
- Recorded interviews: Most of the interviews were recorded on a Zoom H1 Handy Recorder. Even those initially recorded on cassette tape have been digitized and backed up. The recorded interview is the most basic and important component of each individual’s archived file.
- Transcription: After uploading the recording, the narration is transcribed by dedicated transcription volunteers who listen carefully and type exactly into a Word document everything the narrator and the interviewer say. Some of the later interviews were transcribed using TEMI audio-to-text automatic transcription software. A complete verbatim interview often runs to eighty or so pages and includes every repetition, verbal stumble, and fragmentary statement uttered. Each transcription is reviewed again and again to make sure all the dialog is captured correctly. Any places in the recording that are difficult to understand are time-stamped and noted as “unclear” in the verbatim document. Unclears can occur when the narrator and interviewer speak at the same time, if someone turns away from the microphone, or if there are competing sounds such as sirens and street noise.
- Review and research: The completed verbatim transcription is reviewed by the transcription editor— the head of the transcription team—who checks for accuracy, makes note of all proper names (Library and non-Library), and identifies any library terms that are unique to NYPL, for example: A-list, Budget Action, PCN. The names are compiled into a Names list that accompanies each narration, is part of the archived file, and serves as an archival finding aid to the narration. The terms are sent to the Glossary committee where they are defined and added to a comprehensive glossary of the Oral History Project. The transcription editor also identifies and defines non-library terms that may assist future researchers in understanding a narration.
- Editing: When review of the verbatim transcription is complete, it is ready for editing. The goal of editing is to create an easier-to-read document for a researcher, retaining what is spoken by the narrator minus the repetitions and any verbal stumbles. The editors don’t pretty up or correct the language, and they work very hard to make sure the flavor and texture of the unique manner of speaking is unaltered. (However, commonly elided words like “gonna,” “hadda,” and “wanna” are changed to “going to,” “had to,” and “want to.”) Two editors go over the narration, the first editor doing a thorough basic editing, with the second editor doing a quicker double check—two heads usually being better than one. The editors follow the Chicago Manual of Style and have also developed guidelines to cover frequently encountered NYPL-related concerns such as branch names and job titles.
- Formatting and narrator review: After editing, the narration goes to the formatter who makes sure the document’s overall format is correct for archiving. BUT – before a narration can be archived it is sent to the narrator for approval. Any small errors or misunderstandings are corrected
The complete file for each narrator includes the:
- Recorded interview
- Narrator’s work history
- Signed release
- Verbatim transcription
- Enhanced verbatim (including notes, definitions, etc., not always included in the edited version)
- Edited transcription
- Names list
- Glossary of terms
- Photos, when available
The potential value of the archive:
Complements archival material already held at NYPL through first-person narratives
Illustrates public library history & trends, emerging needs of users, and the impact and evolution of technology on library services
Includes social and political history of NYC and the U.S., including labor history, fiscal crisis of 1975, 9/11 attacks, NYPL’s response to the AIDS crisis, etc.
The individual and collective experiences represented in the oral histories are interesting, inspiring, and multi-dimensional, and they reflect the breadth of the Library’s collections, services, and history. The Library would not be the institution it is without those who worked there.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NYPL's Retirees Record Their Oral Histories
By Beth Wladis and Jane Kunstler
“That story just knocked me out.”
The New York Public Library Retirees Association is conducting an Oral History Project to collect and preserve unique and valuable information about The New York Public Library that exists only in the memories of those who worked for the Library. Through recorded interviews, as well as written reminiscences, we seek to supplement the Library's rich history with information that would otherwise be lost and to honor the contributions of the staff to that history.
Because of its location and its strong training program, NYPL has attracted staff from all over the United States and the world. They bring with them their diverse interests and strengths. The various neighborhoods have their own particular characteristics, and branch collections and programs are tailored to each area. Staff become part of the neighborhood fabric and participate in community events and community boards. They are strong advocates for their populations.
The Retirees Association was formed in 1993 and is independent of the Library. Its members are staff from all areas of the Library, clerical, professional, and support. The association advocates in areas of common concern for retirees, supports library services, and provides recreational and educational programs for members. It maintains a Facebook page and a website, publishes a semi-annual newsletter and an annual membership directory, arranges tours to cultural and literary sites, and holds an annual luncheon. Its membership numbers several hundred.
The New York Public Library was established in 1895 with the combining of the resources of the Astor and Lenox libraries with the Tilden Trust. The main library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, opened to the public in 1911. The building is a landmark in New York City; its two lions, named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, guard the entrance to the stately building.
The circulating department was established in 1901 when the Library consolidated with The New York Free Circulating Library. In that same year, Andrew Carnegie offered the city $5.2 million dollars to establish a branch library system. NYPL is currently made up of eighty-nine neighborhood branches in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, and three research libraries all located in Manhattan. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, as its name indicates, collects material in all the performing arts—dance, theater, film, music, and recorded sound and image. It is unique in that it also contains a circulating collection. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, located on Fifth Avenue, contains a vast array of material in the humanities and social sciences and includes works in over three hundred eighty languages. Its special collections divisions are filled with rarities. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, located in Harlem, is a renowned institution devoted to the preservation of materials concerning the Black experience—African American, African Diaspora, and African.
Our interviewees were drawn from the retired staff of The New York Public Library, whether or not they were members of the association. Some are fairly recent retirees; others have been retired for decades, and some of the latter had worked with staff who had been with NYPL in its earliest years. They have served in all types of positions throughout the institution as librarians, paraprofessionals, and clerks, as well as support staff from an array of departments including human resources, security, maintenance, and information technology. Some were native New Yorkers, others came from across the United States and abroad; some made their careers in the neighborhood branch libraries, others in the more specialized research libraries, and a few were hybrids with careers that spanned both sides of the house.
Only three narrations into the editing phase of the project, we found that our extraordinary colleagues exceeded our expectations. The experience, backgrounds, skills and interests they brought were richer, more diverse, and, sometimes, even more exciting than we could have imagined. The narrators all had NYPL in common, but like the Library itself, they covered the breadth of the intellectual and practical universe, and in New York City, they were part of a large urban melting pot.
Here are highlights from their oral histories:
The children’s librarian in Chinatown who met one of her former young patrons, now a sanitation worker, while he was driving his garbage truck on the streets of the Lower East Side. He recognized her and joined her in reciting the opening lines of the classic children’s book The Five Chinese Brothers.
The respected senior clerk who retired at age fifty-five after twenty-six years at NYPL and went on to a distinguished seventeen-year career at New York's private Mercantile Library.
The fiery union local president who helped bring down a corrupt municipal union.
The expert benefits manager, appreciated for her superb counseling of pre-retirees, who also set up the Library’s first retirement annuity plans. She went on to an unexpected post-retirement career working closely with I.M. Pei.
The correctional services librarian who, during the height of the AIDS epidemic, arranged for blankets and other essentials for neglected and shunned prisoners with AIDS and HIV at Rikers Island Correctional Facility.
The Black children's and branch librarian, an outstanding staff trainer, who spent summers in the segregated South where the doors of the local public library were closed to her. She could only visit a public library when she was in New York.
The Holocaust survivor who endured a death march, earned her high school equivalency and MLS in the U.S. while raising two young children, worked in the Jewish Division, and earned a PhD in history “on her way home from work.”
The daughter of one of the Library’s live-in custodians, Sharon Washington, who grew up in an apartment on the top floor of a neighborhood branch on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. An actor and playwright, she wrote about the experience in her play Feeding the Dragon.
A former deputy director of the Branch Libraries who fondly remembers an early supervisor relating how she had told one serious, young reader about the suspension of bookmobile service—essential to those who had no neighborhood branch—because gas and tires were needed during World War II. “She took special care at that last Tuesday stop to explain to the young girl that the bookmobile would not come back until after the war. The little girl asked, ‘Will it come back the Tuesday after the war?’ That story just knocked me out.”
The archive provides a picture of life in the library from the late 1930s to the 2010s. It also reflects the historical and cultural life and times of New York City and the United States.
One narrator’s first day of work in 1939 coincided with Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
Another tells of a staff member’s relative who was in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans.
Fascism, National Socialism, Communism, and war led many refugees with their diverse language skills to the Research Library as valuable employees in the Acquisitions, Cataloging, and specialized language divisions. Some narrate their own stories, others are remembered by their colleagues.
A respected, long-time children’s librarian recalls being chided for her “unreliable” work history. She had been forced to resign from the Library during her pregnancies and was criticized for her absences when she was rehired. She started at NYPL as a page when she was a schoolgirl, and at her retirement had worked for the Library for over forty-five years.
An important recollection for many of the staff was how they were affected by New York City’s fiscal collapse in 1975. Library funds were cut, staff were laid off, demoted, and transferred, with lasting effects that cascaded through the subsequent years. For some narrators, the Library was where they were on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963; and for many, it was where they were on September 11, 2001.
There are moments of humor, warmth, and tradition. The Branch libraries’ long-held custom of daily afternoon high tea is a thread that runs through many of our narratives. In the old days, staff didn’t have a choice about attending, and even into the seventies in many locations, the table in the staff room was set with silverware and china, and a delegated staff member provided coffee or tea and refreshments. The formality may have disappeared, but vestiges of high tea lasted into the 21st century.
The fabled tradition of the monthly children’s story hour also recurs through the narrations. No one who has read or listened to the oral history of one of our master storytellers will forget the moment when one of her young troublemakers was so engrossed in her ghost story that he literally jumped out of his chair.
Our oral histories have provided a place to remember good friends, strong mentors, and memorable interactions with the public. In one instance, a music librarian met her future husband, a conductor, when he came to the Library for the Performing Arts to do research, and several other staff members found their future spouses while working at the Library.
A particular pleasure of our oral histories is to run across the name of someone you worked with but haven’t thought of for a while. Each oral history is accompanied by a list of names and terms—under authority control!—useful as a finding aid for the archive, but also meaningful as a reminder of the colleagues, personalities and stories that formed the fabric of our work lives.
Most of the Oral History Project volunteers focus on a specific aspect of the project: interviewing, transcription, editing, or the glossary, although some contribute invaluably to more than one area. The number of active volunteers has varied over the years, but it currently numbers about sixteen and includes retirees, former NYPL employees, and friends and family of retirees. It helps to be familiar with the Library, but it isn’t essential. Sometimes the narrators are well-known to the volunteers, but everyone has had the experience of being impressed by staff members we wish we had known or had known better.
We see the potential for this archive of recorded and transcribed histories to aid in scholarly research. The history of New York City, labor history, women’s history, and public library history and trends in the U.S. can be found in our oral histories, complementing the history of NYPL itself.