So, Kathy, as we start, can you tell me a
little bit about how you came to UNT, what your
role here was originally, and, you know, how
your role evolved over time?
Okay. I came to UNT in 1995. I had been a
librarian for about four years working at
Austin College in Sherman, but I really wanted
to specialize a lot more. And that's a very
small library, a small academic library, and
UNT posted a job for a government documents
Librarian. And I thought that would be great.
And so I came to UNT and I applied for that
job and got the job and came as the documents
librarian here. But that was right also about
the time that U.S. government information was
moving to digital. And I found that fascinating
and interesting and so much was being put on
the web. They began publishing more and more because
it was cheap. They didn't have to print things
and distribute it out to the depository library. So
they were actually, you know, putting things
out on the web and hoping people, I guess,
would find them, but they never then came to
depository libraries. So, you know, that got
us thinking in terms of how do we preserve that
content as depository library community and
government documents librarians in general and
you know I wanted to be a part of that and also
especially capturing websites for agencies that
were closing and you know it's like there was
one that was called the Advisory Council of
Intergovernmental Relations that agency had
been around for 50 plus years and they had tons
of publishing and then they put these last few
publications online and yet they were defunded
by Congress they had a year to close down and
so what
do they do they they wanted to preserve that
website and I was contacted by gpo government
printing office saying, you know, would you be
interested in capturing this and putting it
online? And I said, yeah, I think so. Let me
talk up the line here. So I talked to my boss,
it was Molly Kelly, and then we talked to Don
Gross, and he was the dean at the time. And
so they gave me permission to do that. So it
was a small site. We captured it. We made it available.
However, when we made it available online, then
everybody started coming to us and saying,
where about all those back publications do you
have them well yes we had most of them but not
all of them however one of the things that I
went to I met someone who was one of the
researchers at at the acir and he said we're
trying to figure out what to do with the Acr
library would you like to have it and I said
yes so we ended up with their library so we had then
a full run. And my first experiment then with
digitization was how do we digitize this content
and make it available online along with what
they had put online on their website. So I
got some very small funding, external funding.
It was like $2,500 or something. And I did
an experiment. I sent some stuff out to scan,
and we tried scanning some internally, and we looked
at all the costs that were involved, and then
how to get it online. And we did put it online
as PDF
files, but it was not a terribly effective way
of doing it. It was less expensive to send it out,
But still, we ended up with these gigantic PDF
files that were harder to access than what we wanted.
Clearly, we needed a lot more technology
support for that.
And so, you know, that was sort of the
beginning of not only web archiving,
but also digital library content and how we
build digital library content
And, you know, try to manage it and really make
it effectively available for the public to find
and use as well.
That's our beginning.
And then that evolved into Dean Gross deciding
at one point to switch all the web and digital
work into one department.
So IT, web archiving, web work, all into one
department, and he put me in charge of it.
and there were a lot of people who were not
happy about that who disagreed with that move
and yet I think it was key to us building the
digital library that we have now because what
we got was IT and digital library people
working for the same person and you know it
took time it
probably took us a couple years to really get
those two groups understanding each other
and learning to respect what each of them each
does and their strengths and I can't tell you
still I hear from people that you know what
they would they're trying to do in in library
and digital library work is all stymied by IT
people who don't report to the same person.
And so they have no incentive to really work
with them well.
And so I think it was an incredibly smart move
on Don Gross' part to actually do that
because what we got was IT people actually
beginning to get excited
about the content that they were putting online
and supporting that and the digital Library people
and web people beginning to understand that
those IT people knew a lot about infrastructure
they knew a lot about hardware and would be
able to support them and you know that made all the
difference in the world I think in our in our
growth then as a digital library yeah so yeah
That was a key moment in my opinion.
I didn't know any of that. Yeah.
Thank you.
Do you think that in the future people will
look back on that period of time when
electronic information was sort of surging and
print information was, you know, not being
utilized as much?
you know to me that seems like as important as
like the industrial revolution or something
do you think people really understand the
significance of what happened during that time
I don't know I I've always said if you work in
libraries you had better be a person who
understands and likes change because we live in
a changing environment when you're talking about
the provision of information. It's a changing
environment. You have to be comfortable with
it. If you don't like change, you're probably
in the wrong profession. And I think that
was a very significant moment. And any time you
have something that's that big of a change,
it takes time to get past it but I think we're
getting there now I think people especially now
college students as they come into to college
they're better prepared to understand basic
technology they still may not have the research
skills that they need but those are things that
they can be taught they can learn those but it
sure does help if they have a better understanding
of the technology whereas like you know people
my age we didn't get that for the most part
so it helped me that I sort of learned it as I
went along in my job but a lot of people didn't
get that but the younger people do have that
pretty much anybody under 40 I think
really really has that in their growing up and
you know I imagine most of them
don't understand what a change it was. It's the
older people who are still
struggling with that change that understand
what a change it was. You know,
remember all those indexes? Do you remember all
those bibliographic indexes
where you had to look everything up and then
you had to go and try to find the
journals in print? And you know, oh my
goodness, oh my, the time that took to do
research and you know I have to have
researchers now who say oh boy you know all the microfilm
that they went through trying to find if there
was going to be an article in a historical newspaper
on a topic you know you could spend a whole day
looking through newspaper microfilm and not find
a single article whereas with one search you
found that article that you were looking for
It's a whole different world.
It's a different world for researchers, and
it's a wonderful, I think, a wonderful world in
most ways.
I'm not so sure sometimes that social media has
been that good for our culture and society.
But finding information, if you're a researcher
and you need to find information, it's opened
up all kinds of possibilities.
Yeah. I'm curious if you know of any, you know,
during that early time of the web, when things
were very ephemeral, before web archiving
really took off, you know, has anyone or are
you aware of any, you know, major losses of
information that happened during that time?
Oh, yes, there were definitely losses. There
have been some articles published about it
during certain times, so maybe 20 years ago, of
how often things were just deleted from websites.
You know, people put things online, and so
you've got an IT person over here who goes,
what is that?
You know, nobody's using it. Delete.
Or just whole websites just went away, and
nobody preserved them at all.
That happened a lot.
The Internet Archive was a private kind of unit
that Brewster Kahle, you've probably heard of him,
He tried to build this institution that would
capture the web, and they're still trying to do that.
And now they work with a lot of academic and
national libraries, international, there's an
international group,
the International Internet Preservation
Consortium that UNT has been a member of since 2008.
We were very early members of that.
At that time, it was mainly the National
Libraries of Europe, the Library of Congress,
and then
some of the Asian National Libraries,
Singapore, China, Japan.
But now it's grown even more into some other
countries like Africa.
Egypt, I think, is a member.
And it was always a fascinating group to me.
national libraries have a very different kind
of a mission than academic libraries do and so
it was interesting to see how how they
approached web archiving and how academia
approached it as
well we think in terms of selecting material
based on what our research needs are to support our
community and they look at a more complete kind
of can we capture the
whole web which if you live in Slovenia you
might be able to capture the whole
Slovenian web but if you live in the U.S.
that's a completely different prospect
to try to capture the web in the U.S. that's
web produced you know any content
in the U.S. because it's massive so we we
worked with the Library of Congress
very early on because the National Archives had
captured the U.S. government web presence
at the beginning of, at the 2004 time frame, at
the end of the first Bush administration.
But then they said they were not going to at
the end of the second Bush administration
leading into Obama years.
And so we were all in Australia at one of our
annual IPC meetings,
and the U.S. people got together and said,
we have to do something that's unacceptable.
And so we as a group, it was Internet Archive, Us,
the Library of Congress, I think that's about it.
There were some sort of partners like GPO, Et
Cetera, who didn't do any of the actual capture.
I think the three of us were the people who did
all the capture.
And, you know, that content still exists now
because we did that capture.
And, you know, lately a lot of work has gone on
with how do we make all that content truly available
because it's many, many, many, many terabytes
of content for researchers to use.
And Mark has been doing, Mark Phillips has been
doing a lot of work with Internet Archive
people, moving it into the cloud and putting it
there in accessible ways for researchers to
actually use it, which has not been a small task.
well you had so many accomplishments and you've
you know been given recognitions and awards
internationally for your work but what is
something that you are particularly
particularly proud of
that maybe most people don't know about oh
that's a tough one
I guess one of the things that I really get
excited about is how many people
around the library have really bought into the
idea of digitization like you
and have understood the strength of it and you
know to have special collections
involved in making this content available,
adding it to, you know, the
databases, the digital library content, the
portal of Texas history, you know,
that's invaluable when you get an institutional
level kind of buy-in to it.
that has been super rewarding to me because at
first we had some resistance
from it was like they thought of it as a
departmental thing and not as a whole
library thing so sometimes we had to sort of
give it time and get new people
in who think of it as you know it's all going
into this infrastructure it's
it's special collection content but it's going
into this infrastructure that
supports anyone who can put content in there
and making it available then for
researchers wherever they may be yeah and I
think that is just so exciting to
me that people now think of that you know as an
infrastructure that all kinds
of collections belong in whether it's music
collection special collections
whatever you know to have them in that in that
infrastructure and make them
available out there to the world and try to
preserve that but you know that's
that's the digital library groups
responsibility is preserving it for the
future keeping the search engines working
keeping the hardware working
with you know working with the IT people you
know all of that becomes their job
your job is to get the get the content that you
want added maybe scan some of
it yourself do some metadata but you don't have
to worry about the
infrastructure and you don't have to worry
about the search engines you don't
have to worry about the second copy and
preserving all of this so that's the way it
should be.
That's why I can never leave I'm spoiled I can
never go anywhere else because they don't
have what we have here. Well, and, you know,
and I heard someone ask Mark once, you know,
after he got his Ph.D.., would you consider,
you know, going out and being a faculty member,
you know, in a library information science
program? And he said, why would I do that?
I've got all of this at my fingertips in this
library that I would never have as a faculty
member this is like an incredible lab to him
just like it is to you to have all of this
being there and available and the fun that you
know you have making this content available and
going out to a conference and showing it off
and see you know what we can do at UNT
libraries and
And I think that's really wonderful and I'm
really excited about that part of it.
We used to talk about hidden collections as
those collections that we have but for whatever
reason they haven't been catalogued or we
haven't created a finding aid.
But how far away are we, do you think, from
recognizing, you know, even if a collection
is cataloged, if it's not digitized, could that
be considered a hidden collection?
Well, you know, it puts it off-limits to the
vast majority of the people in this world,
let's put it that way. You know, there may be
some researcher at some, you know, university
France for example who discovers that we have
something here by searching the
catalog or finding a finding aid and they may
be able to request that you
send something through interlibrary loan
however it may be something that you are
uncomfortable sending all the way to France
it's the only thing only one of
this that exists so your chance of shipping it
off to France is probably not going to happen
even to maybe like Austin um you know because
you can't risk it it's too it's too precious an item
to ship off like that so if you can't then get
here to see it then it might as well not exist
so by digitizing it you can share a copy of it
without risking your original
at all, and that's the wonderful thing about
digitization is the original can be kept in
pristine condition, and most researchers don't
have to see it.
There may be the occasional one who, for some
reason, needs to see the original, and they
would need to come here to see it, and you
could deal with that, but, you know, digitization
makes it available to the world, basically.
What is something that we haven't talked about yet
and that you didn't cover in your previous oral history?
Oh, that's been like five or six years ago now,
so who can say?
I'm not sure I even looked at it afterward.
Well, is there anything that we haven't talked about
that you would like to to add you know I I
people will give me a lot of credit
but I have to say you know that I may have come
up with the idea and I
remember sitting in my office trying to find
something that someone told me that
they had digitized and put online and can't
find out why don't we have a better way of finding
stuff that people are what about something like
this and you know and then trying to put that
idea together and sell it up the chain of
command here in the library and um but you know
there have
been an awful lot of people who have worked to
make it successful to make it what it is today
I mean you just have to look at all the people
that are involved in adding content you know
Jake mangums who's the that person who goes out
to see all the partners who you know helps bring
in that content manage this process through
here here you know back to them and um and
Diana who has spent so much time and effort
writing grant proposals and meeting with people
in foundations and you know working with our
our advancement people and then you know you who
you know you're looking at how you can get
funding to get more things digitized and you
know and sue
gets involved in that and and everybody gets
involved so you know it's it's like
um the growth is just it's just remarkable it
just feels so good to watch that whole process happen
and everybody needs to get the recognition for
everything that's happened thank you I always
just feel like like no you have to understand
that's why I said that you are my people you
are my people people in this library are my
people I really feel that too so you mentioned change
um would you be willing to um just sort of
imagine 10 years in the future you walk into
willis library what's going to be different
than it is today it's already changing you know when
I walk in now as opposed to when I left even oh
yeah it's changed a lot more people spaces
that's really important I think fewer spaces
for book collections because the
books are useless and if they haven't been used
then they get moved off campus
they can be retrieved you know fairly quickly
but if you want a book but you
know for the most part it's technology that you
see laptops to check out to
use for a semester, trying to support students
who can't afford their own laptop, and then
helping people who need help with learning how
to search, who need some instruction.
It's great to teach them a little bit about how
to search the catalog and how to maybe
even like browse books in the catalog like they
would shelves, you know.
I think there are a lot of things that you can
teach them because they're not going to be here,
and they're not going to be able, for the most
part, to walk through the shelves
and look at books organized by subject area and
just browse through them so much.
There's not space, and library buildings, as
you know, are hugely expensive to build,
And so they're always down the list, unless we
find a donor who has, you know, 50, 100 million
dollars to donate.
Well, if you find that person, let me know.
I'd love to meet them.
If I win the lottery, hey.
No kidding.
It would be nice that, you know, people spaces
will be primary, I think, just as we're already
seeing that happen.
and people like to study in different ways so
you need places where they can study together
you need places where they can study on their
own you just you know you have to design it to
meet the needs of the people who are going to
be here so I think that's already happening though
and I can't imagine what it'll be like I I
interested to see that people are still
coming to the library though that there are
still people sitting in the library still
working in the
library you know it was like I think it was in
the 90s there weren't that many people in the library
and then there was a surge and then they just
filled the building and it's just like we can't
it's like how on earth do we accommodate all
these people and that's when we started moving
you know the books out and making more room for
the people and you know I think
those were wise decisions many people objected
if you remember we had faculty
who really really unhappy but the students need
the spaces to work
together to study on their own and and if they
find the library a good
environment to do that and we need to
accommodate that so yeah I I can't say that
that I'm that
forward looking as far as maybe it will be like
night and day difference who knows
I don't know I'm I'm putting my money on the
helipad on the roof
you're gonna fly away so that would be fun
that's how I'm gonna get my new collection
They'll just be dropped off by a helicopter.
And the helicopter will be unmanned probably, right?
Of course.
Collections, it's so great to see all the new
collections you're getting in special collections.
You know, it's like once you start something,
it's like with the portal to special
collections the same,
then people start approaching you.
and that is such a good feeling I totally agree
it's just you know it's like oh my goodness how
are we going to take all of these and yet I
want to take them all so how do we do it
that becomes the big question how do we do it
yeah will somebody give us some money to do it
hey we've been pretty successful so far yes I
know and that's good I'm really happy to see
lots of people thinking in terms of external
funding and how we go about getting external
funding. That was unheard of when I was trying
to do it, and they didn't quite know, and I had
nobody to mentor me at all. I made some big
blunders at research services. I still remember
Nelda was this woman over there saying, well,
Kathy, we'll figure it out. I was like, thank you,
nailed up and it was you know you learn though
and you have to learn it's really
helpful if you have someone who's been there
who can mentor you through that
process and I see that now you know more and
more people in the library getting
that kind of experience and can help others do
the same and get them through
that process as well.