In August 1973 Ruth bought her first and only home. Built in 1937, it was a three-bedroom row house at 117 Third Street NE, just

two blocks from the library’s Annex Building. She paid $31,500 for it ($178,776 in 2018 dollars). While many residents of DC were moving out to the rapidly expanding suburbs, Ruth chose to live as close as possible to her job. This may have been because by the time she left Vietnam, she preferred not to drive, owing to her eyesight problems. Not only did she have a lazy eye, but her eyesight got worse as she aged as well. She never owned a car when she lived on Capitol Hill, and it seems to have never affected her quality of life—the neighborhood was very walkable, full of shops and corner stores and just blocks away from two stops on the city’s new metro system that would open in 1976.

Just five years earlier, in April 1968, riots had broken out across the city after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The commercial strip on H Street NE, the boundary of the north side of Capitol Hill and a historic black neighborhood, was decimated. The area developed a reputation for muggings, drug dealing, and murders. Eastern Market was a known site for picking up prostitutes. The fact that so much crime was so close to the Capitol was an embarrassment to the city, and many people who worked there or came to visit refused to walk around the neighborhood after dark. But Ruth was not deterred from buying a house in a neighborhood with such a reputation. After living in two war zones, she was not fazed by a high crime rate. Her house, with a wide front porch and ample room for her books and worldly possessions, would suit her for the next thirty-seven years. She soon got to know her neighbors, many of whom were also federal employees or Capitol Hill staffers, and joined several neighborhood organizations. Many of these residents bonded over their refusal to give up on this historic, interracial neighborhood, no matter how blighted it was or its souring reputation.

In the fall of 1973, Ruth’s coworker Gabe Horchler, a Vietnam veteran and a social sciences cataloger, decided to take a position as a United Nations volunteer librarian.1 He moved to Niamey, Niger, to establish a library at the École nationale d’administration, a school for civil servants. He wrote to Ruth for advice about building a library in a developing country and jokingly asked if she wanted a new job. She responded, “The answer is definitely NO, NO, No . . . A job I have . . . What I’m looking for is a POSITION and this doesn’t exactly include remote control library construction and administration!”2 (Whether she was actually looking for a new position outside LC is unclear from this letter.) Upon Gabe’s request, Ruth sprang into action, circulating his letter around the library and searching for any resource that might help him. She listed helpful cataloging manuals and guides on the construction of libraries, promising to find them and mail them to him. She answered his questions on library management in detail, reminisced about the difficulties of her work in Vietnam, and admitted what she would have done differently in hindsight. She closed with some good advice: “There is nothing, nothing, nothing that can ever substitute for personal observation and creative thinking . . . no authority in the world can tell you what you need . . . They can only help you think.”3 The four long letters that Ruth wrote to Gabe over two years at the beginning of her career at the Library of Congress, along with another letter she wrote after her retirement, are the only surviving documentation, in her own words, of what she really thought about working there.

In 1974 she wrote to Gabe that she was renting a room to an army chaplain, making minor renovations on her house, and busily attending meetings of the Bicentennial Commission. In her characteristic run-on sentences full of ellipses, Ruth described some of her frustrations with her coworkers and supervisors:

Lately I’ve been letting loose at both David Remington and Ed Blume about their being totally disorganized… unsupportive of their staff; misusing their employee time, etc. etc. At least they’ve started to listen! No, not do anything about it, but used to be they didn’t even listen…. Now, after I make my comments I get feedback which at least tells me they’ve understood […] Nick’s been behaving like Nick…sometimes missing his points when he could make them because he blows up at the wrong time… Powell hasn’t been quite the same since I insisted on setting up Group Sex with a see ref. from “Swinging (Sex)” and gets all shook up every time the Sunday supplement refers to Kissinger or the King of Sweden as “Swingers”…4

The main problem of the broader Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate, which had been an endless source of conflict for decades, was the growing backlog of books that the staff simply could not keep up with. Ruth complained, “At work we have been hellishly busy . . . even with an average of 25 (and over) books per day, my backlog is building at the rate of 20 to 25 books a day! Even more on days I devote to my schedule. Oh yes . . . schedule . . .”5 Ruth was referring to the Library of Congress Classification schedule, a manual published by the library for the assignment of call numbers. LCC, as it is known, is a system used by most academic libraries, and it is more in depth than the Dewey decimal system, which is commonly used by public libraries. Broad fields of knowledge are assigned a letter or two letters, with each subtopic (which could branch into many levels) assigned a number. A Cutter number, named for the librarian Charles Cutter and designed to alphabetize books primarily by last name of the author, is then added on to the class number. Subject catalogers at LC were assigned the onerous task of revising the schedules for new editions of the LCC.

Ruth’s area of expertise, sociology, fell under the letters HM. She described to Gabe how time-consuming and tedious this job was:

Have expanded the Soc. part and practically redone all of Soc. Psych….from 4 pages I now have 19, and from 1 through 291, numbering will probably go from one (1) to 3500 plus (of course I’m leaving plenty of room for someone else to expand!) It’s been going in typical LC fashion…“no major changes.”…well, yes, maybe you better move this too….OK shift that…yes, cancel that….Too bad I had to do it all so piecemeal and literally fight for every new number, but even I feel it’s now beginning to take on some shape…though I’m getting a little saturated with it all…in the long run it’s probably been a hell of a good review for me in the fields of social. & soc. psych.6

The schedule for sociology had not been revised since 1967, and the revision that Ruth was working on in 1974 would not be published until 1980. The preface for the publication, written by the chief of the Subject Cataloging Division, Mary K. D. Pietris, gave an explanation for the long delay:

For the past ten years, the Subject Cataloging Division has wanted to issue a revised edition of Class H. However, the desire has been continually frustrated by the shortage of staff time to review the existing schedule, to propose badly-needed changes, to review and approve those proposals, and to prepare the new edition editorially. In 1977 the decision was made to publish another edition of Class H without fail, and catalogers began to review and prepare extensive revisions . . . It was, therefore, decided to follow an unusual course of action. It was previously decided that Class H would be published in two parts: H–HJ and HM–HX. However, the first part would represent a completely revised edition, whereas the second part would be merely an unrevised cumulation, incorporating changes made since the third edition, without any necessarily time-consuming attempt to update concepts and terminology. As a result, this edition of HM–HX, an unrevised cumulation, reflects the basic outline, tone and terminology of the early twentieth century in which it was developed.7

Classes H through HJ cover economics, commerce, and finance, all straightforward fields of knowledge.8 While new theories arose occasionally over the twentieth century, such as Keynesian economics, classifying them in relationship to older, established areas of the field would not have been complicated. However, HM through HX covered the following fields, listed in the synopsis of the 1980 edition:

HM: Sociology.

HN: Social History and Conditions. Social Problems. Social Reform.

HQ: The Family. Marriage. Woman.

HS: Societies: Secret, Benevolent, etc.

HT: Communities. Classes. Races.

HV: Social Pathology. Social and

Public Welfare. Criminology.

HX: Socialism. Communism. Anarchism.

Over the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, debates raged among academics, professional experts, and the public about the above topics, especially concerning women, sexuality, race, and class. The civil rights and feminist movements had created entirely new academic departments and fields of study, such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and what would later be termed queer theory. Conservatives complained that these new fields were not serious lines of academic inquiry. The debates filtered down to the field of librarianship, and catalogers had to decide how to classify this new knowledge and what exactly was the correct terminology. Pietris did not explain that this was likely another reason that the publication of the HM–HX schedule was delayed for so long. Part of the staff time to “review and approve proposals” was surely spent debating what these new fields meant and how LC would appropriately deal with them in a way that would avoid criticism or backlash from the rest of the library community, which relied heavily on these manuals.

As Ruth had noted, her colleagues were uncomfortable with openly discussing topics like “swinging” at work. She may have been one of the only catalogers in her department who, quite frankly, didn’t mind these discussions or outright enjoyed the embarrassment of her more conservative colleagues. Ruth mentioned in 1974 that she was trying to expand the numbering system in the HMs from 291 to 3500, but six years later the schedule still only covered 291 numbers.9 Today the numbers range from 1 to 1281, a large expansion but nothing close to what Ruth had originally envisioned.

She further explained to Gabe the issues with a new program called Cataloging-in-Publication. Called CIP and pronounced “sip,” the new system allowed publishers to send in a form and, optionally, a galley copy of a book to LC well in advance of a new book’s publication. The catalogers made a temporary, brief catalog record (this information is also printed on the back of a book’s title page), which was revised later when the official copy of the book was sent to the library. Copies of the catalog card were sent out to libraries that had preordered the book, a practice that saved time and increased efficiency for libraries across the nation. Ruth explained how difficult the process was and how the target rate of books cataloged per day was impossible to achieve:

At a meeting in which “low cataloging productivity” was the subject[,] I finally let them have it about retyping my own schedule in clean form for each meeting and asked whether they really thought I got my pay for typing! […] [CIPs] are increasing by leaps and bounds[,] and without galleys it’s becoming more and more of a crystal ball game. Bill Goslin disagrees with me…he’s so anxious to sign up publishers that he’s willing to settle for anything he can get from them. Personally I’d play the game differently…if the books show top-notch cataloging then the receiving librarians will press for [CIPs] and since they are the “buying public” for many publications they can or could exert the clout on both the library and the publishers to provide [CIP] info. If we go slapping any old number and heading on the books and then redo the printed cards with the corrected numbers we’ll ultimately defeat the [CIP] program.10

Furthermore, she noted that when the upcoming presidential impeachment hearings would be broadcast live during the day, no one would get anything done. While Ruth knew that the expectations of management were absurd, she also recognized that the distractions and disgruntled feelings among staff didn’t improve anything. In February 1975 Ruth wrote again to Gabe, updating him on more LC news:

At the moment morale (as usual in subj. cat.) is fairly low…I just mind my own business and keep much busier away from work than at work! Since the new catalogers have started I’m getting only foreign language weirdo books and porno…they get the easy stuff and some days I wonder what ever made me become a cataloger…but that too will pass???11

In December 1974 Librarian of Congress Quincy Mumford retired. Mumford had been one of the only men to lead LC with past experience, having served as both the director of the Cleveland Public Library and the president of the American Library Association. He faced a Congress increasingly hostile to his efforts to expand the services of the library to the public (rather than focusing on serving Congress) and reluctant to supply it more funding. But Mumford had led the charge to fund the Madison Building construction and had increased the library’s yearly funding from $9.4 million to $96.7 million over his twenty years in office.12 The uncertainty of who would be nominated to replace Mumford surely was a cause for concern among the staff.

Ruth knew that Gabe Horchler was interested in coming back to LC sometime after November 1975, when his job in Niger would end. She kept an eye out for any position that might interest him and notified him of upcoming retirements. She sent him a vacancy posting that was essentially the same one he had before at LC. Ruth explained to him the confusing application process and how she had talked to a woman who worked in the Placement and Classification Office. She was a friend of one of Ruth’s employees in Vietnam, and Ruth told her who Gabe was and that he wanted to return to LC. When Ruth revealed what she had done to Ed Blume, her supervisor, Blume was very annoyed by her meddling. She explained to Gabe:

The trouble is, everyone is so afraid of equal opportunity employment that everyone is playing games and it takes a lot of guess work to figure out what people are really telling you… Personally I don’t see how they can possibly come up with a more qualified applicant since for all practical purposes you’ve had experience on the very job they are advertising. However, I’d follow the rules of the game and play it their silly way.13

Ruth was referring to the recent turmoil at LC concerning job discrimination. Although libraries may appear to be democratic institutions rooted in equality and opportunity, there is an ugly history of discrimination at many of them. Several investigations and court cases emerged in the 1970s and ’80s that exposed the fact that the world’s largest library had been systematically discriminating against women and minorities for decades.

Tags: Kate Stewart Historical
Source: readsnovelonline.net