Academia to Think Tank ... and Back Again
AS SOMEONE WHO HIRES LIBRARIANS, DORIS HELFER IS ALWAYS MUCH MORE PREDISPOSED TO APPLICANTS WHO ARE ACTIVELY INVOLVED IN THEIR PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
BY FORREST GLENN SPENCER
Joined SLA: 1974 |
In 2004, Doris Helfer was bestowed The Rose L. Vormeker Award for her "exceptional services in area of mentoring students and/or working professionals." It's more than a recognition given to those individuals who do more than show up for work daily. It's an extraordinary honor given to those who have had a long career as information specialists, and then share their knowledge with those entering the field--encouraging them to find their own specialty in the profession. At the awards ceremony, Helfer was especially emotional. Six weeks prior her mother had died unexpectedly.
"My own mother was my first mentor," the California-based SLA member says. "She encouraged me to do whatever I set my mind upon doing, and encouraged me to read and learn about some famous women in history and their accomplishments, and instilled in me the importance of education in pursuing my own career goals."
Helfer was fortunate to have had many role models and mentors through her life--individuals who are known names in the profession and within SLA, such as Joe Becker, Vivian Arterbery and Joe Ann Clifton.
"I think those of us who serve as mentors often do so," Helfer explains, "because they were fortunate enough to have wonderful mentors themselves, and know how helpful and important they can be in influencing and developing their lives and careers."
She entered the library sciences profession more than 35 years ago and has built a remarkable name for herself within SLA and special librarianship. She is currently the Chair of Technical Services Department and Science Librarian at Oviatt Library, California State University, in Northridge, CA, which has a student population of 35,000. She oversees a staff 30 and an annual budget of $2 million. Her team is responsible for the library's databases, acquisitions, collection development and cataloging. Oviatt Library is an impressive five-story building with tall, imposing pillars, and serves as the center of student's activities. Movie audiences will see more of it next year, in fact, in the upcoming Star Trek film.
"Some of our students come from nearby community colleges," she notes. "Many are recent high school graduates, but many are also people who decided later in their lives to go to college and often many are the first in their families ever to attend college. We're a very large, diverse regional, comprehensive university in the research level hierarchy. We're in the education system right below a research Level I institution and part of the California State University system, which includes 22 other campuses across the state--not to be confused with the 10-campus University of California system. We're basically the workhorse; we have everything from anthropology to the hard sciences. We run the gamut."
Her Education
A Southern California native, Helfer grew up in West Hollywood and attended college at California State University, Northridge. She was an undergraduate in Political Science with a pre-law emphasis and later earned a Masters in Library Science from Western Michigan University. (That school's library degree program is now defunct.)
"With a friend, we decided to go to Western Michigan University together. I liked the program and having friends there. One of the reasons I wanted to be a librarian was because I wanted to be a lawyer first," Helfer says. "I was set to go to law school. I started taking pre-law courses at Northridge, but I decided I didn't want to be a lawyer. I didn't enjoy the study of the law. My advice is, if you're going to do something in your life, then you better like it. I had gone to the library and found a book, The Occupational Outlook Handbook, and when I got to the section about librarians I said, 'That's me!'--I am apparently the model for librarians, or at least the government's model for a librarian."
From Academia to Think Tank
Helfer entered the dismal job market of the 1970s--too many librarians, too few jobs. But, as the counselor at Western Michigan pointed out to student Helfer, she had one thing going for her: a law background. She was interning at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) library, when she heard of an opening at the academic law library at University of Southern California (USC).
"The woman with whom I was interning with at UCLA knew the woman I was going to interviewed by at USC," Helfer recalls. "She gave me a glowing reference--and she was one who never gave glowing references easily."
So Helfer started her career as a library cataloger at USC. But after three years she sought a change. "The downside of working in law librarianship, for me at least," she says, "was working with lawyers. I applied for a new position and got beat out for a law cataloging position by somebody with no cataloging experience but who did have a law degree. I decided I wasn't destined to stay ... if you wanted to get anywhere in academic law librarianship you needed the JD degree and I had already decided as an undergraduate that I didn't want to go to law school."
At the same time, she also applied for a job at RAND Corporation, one of the world's premiere think tanks, with its global headquarters in Santa Monica, CA. She began at RAND as a cataloger. "It's a very interesting place with incredibly smart people," she notes. "In a very short time, I was put in charge of technical services at RAND. My first boss was the local SLA chapter president. A couple of years after I started, a new Library Director, Vivian Arterbery, was hired and she was on the SLA Board of Directors. I helped Vivian with her SLA work. She became an important mentor of mine, and she became SLA President in 1983-1984. She was responsible for my involvement in SLA beyond the local chapter level by appointing me to SLA's Committee on Cataloging."
Helfer was employed by RAND for 14 years, from 1978 until 1992. It was during this period that her career expanded professionally, and also within SLA. She lauded the association for giving her the tools to develop her professional skills. "RAND was an incredibly good place to develop my skills," she says. "I think I did one of the very first applications on the Internet any librarian has ever done. It was 1983, and I worked with a developer-programmer at RAND. He did the technical content and I provided the library content, in those days. In RAND's UNIX-based system, if you typed in the command LIBORDER, the library request form would come up and everyone in the corporation could fill it out and send us a request for any book they wanted to us order via e-mail. In those days, we had a Library Catalog computer system that was home-grown by RAND programmers working in conjunction with the librarians, and we developed our system because we had some special needs, such as handling classified government information. It had to be really secure and able to handle and identify what level of classification each document had in order to inventory it on an annual basis."
At RAND, she further developed an incredible network of colleagues and friends, including Joe Ann Clifton, Joe Becker, both past presidents of SLA and, as mentioned earlier, Vivian Arterbery. They were all encouraging of her career and supportive and generous with their advice.
As an interesting aside was RAND's involvement in the development of the Internet by one of their researchers. "It came from the days of the Cold War," she recounts. "Paul Baran wrote a report describing the best way to protect your data from an attack was to be able to transfer your data to another computer. If one computer went down, then the other computer was able to still function in its place. The Internet wasn't about sharing information for all mankind. It was about the preservation of computer data in case of nuclear attack. It was a limited vision based on a real cold war threat and fear at the time." RAND shared Node 2 with UCLA of the early Internet.
Back to Academia
After 12 years at RAND, Helfer's next challenge was starting-up a technical computer library for a company then-known as NCR Teradata, which later was absorbed and became AT&T Global Information Solutions.
"The most memorable moment in my career, I would have to say, is starting the library at Teradata," she recalls. "I was given five months to design, plan, order journals and books, have all the shelving installed, and have a grand opening party at the Teradata Library in El Segundo, California. We opened the library on time and on budget and we had a very successful party to celebrate its opening. I really enjoyed the people and corporate culture of Teradata, but it was changing because of their being bought by NCR and, in turn, NCR was bought by AT&T. I really enjoyed being a part of the AT&T library network but in 1996 AT&T announced it was spinning off NCR, and the Teradata Division was staying as part of NCR, so we would no longer be part of the AT&T Library network." That news coincided with an opening for a Science Librarian position at Oviatt Library. Helfer sought to return to the academic world and applied for the job at her alma mater.
She credits her good fortune to her affiliation with SLA: "I believe that if a special librarian wants to transition from corporate to academic libraries, one of the best ways is demonstrating you know the importance of professional involvement. It is a very positive message to the academic employer that you remain active and you keep abreast of current trends and developments in the profession by involvement in SLA and SLA leadership roles. When recruited to apply for other positions, it has always been because of my active involvement in SLA. As someone who hires librarians, I am always much more predisposed to applicants who maintain active involvement in their professional associations as it is one of the ways to measure and ensure one is keeping up with trends and developments for academic librarians."
Involvement in SLA
Helfer joined SLA in 1974, but it wasn't until 10 years later that her very active involvement commenced in the association--from being the chairperson of the West Los Angeles Area Meetings for the Southern California Chapter to serving as co-chair of Professional Development a few years ago. On the committee and division level, her involvement has been extensive--from the Cataloging and Access Committee to Nominations Committee, SLA Board of Directors, and currently as Student Liaison and Mentoring Committee, SLA Knowledge Management Division. Twenty-five years of involvement has benefitted her, and the membership has been enriched by her participation and leadership.
"I recently chaired CI Division," she says. "I became involved because I really wanted to learn more about it. I'm also involved in the KM division. My interest in recent years in KM grows out of the fact that I taught the introductory course in the Knowledge Management Master's degree program here at California State University, Northridge. I also have a personal belief in the importance of KM in organizational success, and wanted to stay up on new trends and techniques to facilitate KM in an organization."
Eyeing the Future Talent
Aside from her work at SLA, she writes regularly for Searcher Magazine: The Magazine of the Database Professional, and frequently conducts presentations. All the while, Helfer has her eyes on the future talent in the field.
"Because I was well mentored," Helfer explained, "you have an obligation of sharing what you know to the next generation, especially when you see bright talented individuals you want to encourage in the profession--and I'm always looking for new blood and have capable people to hire working around me.
Helfer points out that she still too young to consider retirement--she's only 55, and there's still a lot more to do. "I enjoy what I am doing. If I get to the point where I don't want to make any more changes, then it's time for me to retire. Right now, I don't feel that way." SLA
| FORREST GLENN SPENCER is President of SpencerConnects LLC, an information service and public relations company based in the Washington, D.C., area. He can be reached at fgspencer@gmail.com. |
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