Spotlight on SLA Members: An Interview with Paul O'Pecko

Background
Mystic Seaport, the Museum of America and the Sea, is located in Mystic, Connecticut, just off Route 95 and approximately two hoursfrom both New York City and Boston. Since the Museum first opened in 1929, Mystic Seaport has sought to reconnect the American people with their maritime heritage. The museum's collections cover topics such as maritime commerce and industry, ship and boat building, recreational boating, fishing, historic preservation, gardening, architecture, meteorology, marine sciences, maritime literature, art, music, culture, political thought, foodways, navigation, and immigration. We use these materials to create exhibitions, educational programs, publications, videos, and computer multimedia productions; and to offer both the scholarly community and the general public a multitude of opportunities to undertake their own explorations of the subject of America and the Sea. The museum sits on nearly forty acres of land along the Mystic River which leads directly to the Atlantic Ocean. The museum's collections include such things as the the Charles W. Morgan, the last wooden whaleship in existence, built in 1841; nearly 500 boats, the largest collection of its type in the world; over a million feet of videotape; nearly 1.5 million photographs; over sixty historic buildings and, of course, the library's collection.

Information Outlook: What is the mission and role of your library?
Paul O'Pecko: The G.W. Blunt White Library is one department within the bigger entity that is Mystic Seaport Museum, Inc. The museum's mission is to create a broad, public understanding of the relationship of America and the sea. The library's mission, in support of the museum, is to collect, preserve, and make materials available to staff, our resident students, and anyone with a general interest in maritime history.

IO: Who are your patrons?
PO: As our mission statement points out, we serve the museum staff (which includes, during the peak season, 500 regular staff and as many volunteer staff); resident students (we act as classroom and research facility for two unique maritime studies programs, one undergraduate and one graduate); and anyone with a general interest in maritime studies, whether they are genealogists, academics, artists, craftsmen, or enthusiasts.

IO: Can you give an example of a typical request?
PO: One of the most typical requests we receive concerns ship genealogy, or the birth, death, and identification of particular ships. Our collection is particularly strong on nineteenth and early twentieth century shipping matters, so we receive requests from genealogists looking for the ship that brought their ancestor to this country; from archeologists trying to identify a shipwreck that they've discovered or from art dealers or buyers trying to determine the exact ship that appears in a painting that interests them.

IO: What is the most interesting request you ever received?
PO: In my time here I've written to more than 6,000 people, and responded in person and via phone to countless more, so choosing one is very difficult. We get questions on anchors, boats, motors, flags, boatbuilding, navies, artists, archeological digs, explorers, food, music, geography, and hundreds of other topics. One researcher that visits us occasionally studies penguins in the Antarctic. She and her husband take their children on a sailboat each summer and sail from their home in the Falkland Islands to study and photograph penguins in their natural habitat. On one of her visits here she found a sailor's journal from the early 1800's that described the flora and fauna of a particular island in the Falklands. Apparently there is no such description in print anywhere, so she plans on publishing a paper on it. Another frequent visitor uses our chart and pilot guide collection to plan her sea kayaking trips into such territories as Baffin Bay and Greenland. The inquiries that we receive that would be most recognizable to the general public have to do with the AMISTAD, a schooner made famous by Steven Spielberg in his movie of the same name. It's a fascinating story about which I've answered questions on a regular basis since I arrived here in 1984, and about which my predecessors answered questions for a couple decades before that.

IO: Are requests time sensitive?
PO: Many of the internal requests we receive are indeed time sensitive as they are needed by staff for upcoming exhibits or to answer questions staff get from visitors in the galleries. Our professors and students require immediate attention for classes, tests, papers, etc. Externally, we get many requests from the media that always seem to be urgent. We answer a lot of general inquiries through the mail and ask the initiator to be patient and allow four to six weeks for reply.

IO: Do you do research for the Mystic Seaport Museum? If so, what kind?
PO: I joined the staff of Mystic Seaport as the readers' services librarian and performed a lot of the general research and reference work for staff needs. Currently, as director of the library, my research efforts seem to be geared more towards the needs of running the collection, e.g., bibliographic, systems and equipment research, and the like.

IO: What is exciting about working at the Mystic Seaport Museum? What is a typical day like for you? What kinds of current trends do you need to stay abreast of?
PO: The library at Mystic Seaport is an unusual special library in that we are a real hybrid of many types of libraries. We are an institutional library whose main thrust is serving our staff. However, we also act as an academic library to serve our undergraduate and graduate programs. Add our research library element, and the fact that we function in some ways as a public library, serving anyone who wishes to enter our doorway, and we have a unique situation in which to work. Also, our collections are not something you'll find in any other library. The founders of the museum had enough foresight seventy years ago to begin collecting materials related to the history of ships and shipping that give us one of the strongest collections of its type in the world. Because we are part of a non-profit corporation, we need to be creative in finding funds for projects that we want to do above and beyond our "normal" duties, especially when it comes to promoting the collections. We are very involved in trying to give as much access to our collections as possible, so we try to keep up to date on digital technology. Preservation and access are the two main areas where we feel scanning and web technology can best benefit us. We recently received one of six National Digital Library Competition awards given out by the Library of Congress and Ameritech. Our project, "Maritime Westward Expansion", will deliver images of documents relating to such things as the California Gold Rush to thousands of users with access through the Library of Congress web site as well as our own.

IO: How much time do you spend reading newspapers or doing other kinds of current research?
PO: Most of the newspapers that we read were published over a hundred years ago, although we do keep up with current news especially in areas that pertain to our undergraduate population. Their courses include maritime history, marine biology, marine policy, and literature of the sea. Mystic Seaport is called "The Museum of America and the Sea," so we try to keep current on anything happening in the maritime environment from oil spills like the EXXON VALDEZ to Native American whaling practices to all the discoveries that Robert Ballard seems to make from the TITANIC to 2,500 year-old Phoenician cargo ships in the Mediterranean.

IO: To whom do you report in the hierarchy at the Mystic Seaport Museum?
PO: My immediate superior is the vice president of curatorial and education. She reports directly to our president.

IO: What kind of budget do you control?
PO: Because all of our physical plant expenses fall under an operating budget other than the library's, our budget is relatively small for a library of our size. Our budget mainly consists of salaries, supplies, purchases of monographs, periodicals and manuscripts, and other assorted necessities. While our budget for purchases of books, periodicals, and manuscripts is not as large as it could be, we are supplemented by grants, endowments, and gifts. Nearly half of the books and manuscripts we take in come from individual gifts. People with journals, letters, logbooks, or old books pertaining to life on the sea often give their personal collections to us because they know we will care for them and make them accessible to people for study.

IO: What type of staff do you have?
How many are on the staff?
PO: Our staff is a mix of professionals and very proficient non-professionals. The position of library director is a professional position as are the technical services librarian, manuscripts and archives librarian, and ships plans collection manager. There are seven non-professional support staff and two grant-funded project personnel at the moment.

IO: Do you outsource any projects?
If so, which ones and why?
PO: The only outsourcing we do at the moment is with our periodical subscriptions. We have about 350 current periodical titles (900 total, including nineteenth century titles), most of which are handled through EBSCO. All other services are handled in house.

IO: What is the size of your library? Have you been downsized/upsized/remained the same?
PO: Our library was built in 1965 to house a collection that has grown much faster than the planners anticipated. In our 11,000 square feet (plus some additional space in another building) we house about 75,000 books; a million pieces of manuscript material; 1,300 logbooks and journals from mostly nineteenth century ships; 900 periodical titles; over 600 oral history tapes; 10,000 maps and nautical charts; and 100,000 sheets of ships plans.

IO: How do you get involved in international affairs? Do you do international research?
PO: We did a survey a few years back in which we found that over ten percent of the library's requests came from an international audience, with a bulk of the questions coming from England, France, Germany, and Australia. As I mentioned before, we have one of the most encompassing collections of its kind in the world, and people interested in the history of things maritime seem to make their way here one way or another. Our Ships Plans division sells plans of boats and ships, basically at cost, to a wide range of researchers and enthusiasts all over the world. Many of the plans sold are of vessels that we have in our collection, such as the CHARLES W. MORGAN, our wooden sailing whaleship, built in 1841. Model makers and artists utilize these particular plans to a great degree. However, we have plans of all kinds of boats and yachts representing hundreds of designers, and many people buy plans from us if they want to build a boat or restore a yacht that they have purchased.

IO: What are your financial priorities?
Do you spend more money on electronic resources than print resources? Why?
PO: We still concentrate mostly on print resources mainly because of the subject matter. Most of what is being published in our fields of interest (except for the marine sciences) is still only being published in paper. It will be great once they begin going to electronic format because many of the titles we receive are not indexed anywhere, making comprehensive literature searches difficult at best.

IO: What is the nature of your relationship with vendors? Have they tailored services to meet your needs? What challenges have you had to face in getting research systems in place?
PO: Our main business concern among vendors is with the provider of our library information management system, Voyager. Voyager, produced by Endeavor Information Systems, has been in place here for two years and has lived up to our expectations. It is an extremely flexible system that will be able to keep up with our changing needs. Being a non-profit was the major obstacle in purchasing the system, because the cost was prohibitive for us without outside help. We were able to obtain funding for the purchase of the system, the hardware to go with it, and the ethernet cabling of our building from the Gladys Brooks Foundation in New York whose purpose is "to provide for the intellectual, moral and physical welfare of the people of this country by establishing and supporting non-profit libraries, educational institutions, hospitals and clinics." Our friends group, the Fellows of the G.W. Blunt White Library, provided the funding for the retrospective conversion of our imprints catalog, allowing us to get up and running in a relatively short amount of time. We are still converting our manuscript records, but hope to receive additional funding to help us move forward with that project.

IO: Is your library becoming more virtual? Do you have an Intranet? What role do you play in maintaining it? How was it set up? Were there teams/focus groups? What challenges did you encounter when working on this project? What suggestions do you have for other librarians involved in this process?
PO: The library has been one of the leaders in our institution in having a bigger virtual presence. Members of the library staff are permanent members of a museum-wide committee called CollComm (short for Collections Access Committee), which was established over five years ago to help the collecting departments of the Museum (including the library) establish a logical information management system. One of our goals is to allow a researcher to enter our system and do a single search across all collecting division databases to retrieve a coordinated result set. There are over a dozen sites in the museum that house such information and finding a COMPLETE answer to a query can often be an arduous task. The main problem we faced in making this a workable project was the lack of communication and trust among collecting areas. We needed to allay fears that we were going to impose a library system on our curatorial departments, but at the same time let it be known that our library records could not be swallowed by a museum collections information management system. Representatives from many areas meet on a weekly basis to ensure that we are moving in the right direction. Understanding the needs of each group and incorporating those needs into the final product has driven us to become better managers of people as well as information. If you visit Mystic Seaport's web page at www.mysticseaport.org and look at the "Collections and Research" link, you will find a section on "Mystic Seaport in the Information Age" which goes into much greater detail about this subject.

IO: How much time or how much involvement do you have with the museum's web site? How is the information on the site coordinated, kept up to date, and where does it come from?
PO: Each department within the museum is responsible for the content that goes into our web pages. Currently the site is overseen by the museum's IS department, but editing and maintaining the web site will probably become the responsibility of an independent division in the near future. I am currently a member of the Museum's Web Committee which is establishing more defined goals and protocols that have not existed to this point. While our site is very informative, we feel it can be greatly improved. The library's pages can also be accessed through the "Collections and Research" link.

IO: Are queries from your web site directed to the library staff? What kinds of questions do you typically get from the web site?
PO: Many of the questions that come into the site are directed to the library. If, however, the questions deal with such things as visiting the museum, etc., they are routed to the appropriate department. The library handles mainly research and reference questions.

IO: Do you get involved in training library patrons on library services? The Internet? How does your staff get involved?
PO: While we do not train patrons on internet use, we do walk them through procedures involving our OPACs and the internet links they can make from them. Museum staff receive computer/applications/internet training from our Information Services department. In addition to the information that users are able to garner from the brochures that we produce listing our services, we do both group and individual tours of the library as needed to familiarize our users with our layout and procedures. Also, the museum has a weekly newsletter that goes to all staff. We are able to update staff and students via this newsletter or at anytime using our institutional e-mail, which reaches most individuals and all departments.

IO: How do you market your library? Do you print publications, brochures, internal newsletters? What has been a successful marketing tactic for you? Why?
PO: We market ourselves in a number of ways, including the printing of brochures about our collections and services. We have two friends of the library groups that help us raise money and awareness and sponsor a number of prizes. We have a prize article competition each year that is worth $1,000 to the winner. Sponsored by the Fellows of the G.W. Blunt White Library, the winning article in the field of maritime history is published in the museum's quarterly publication, the Log of Mystic Seaport. The Fellows also sponsor a $500 award for ongoing research in the field of maritime history. Our combined membership for our Friends and Fellows groups stands at about seventy-five with annual dues ranging from $20, $35, or $125 depending on category to $2,500 for a life membership. Compared to the museum's 25,000 annual members this may seem a pittance, but these are people that are primarily interested in, and very devoted to, the library. I think the tactic that has worked best for us has been to overcome the typical stereotypes people associate with libraries. We have made great strides in making the library a welcoming place to enter and use.

IO: Tell us about a recent project you've completed? What challenges did you encounter? What advice could you offer to readers who were to undertake a similar project?
PO: It seems that a lot of recent projects that have required a good chunk of time have been grant related. I work closely with people in the Museum's Development department to identify granting sources and then to develop applications for grants. We have been fortunate to receive a number of interesting grants recently. I think this is because of a number of reasons: the scope and unique quality of our library collections; the willingness of our Development department to take the time to work with the library; a very capable and passionate library staff and the fact that we have spent a lot of time promoting and understanding what is in our collections. We received a Maritime Heritage grant from the National Parks Service to develop a web-accessible database of information about all ships registered in Connecticut between 1789 and 1939. The WPA did a project in the late 1930's and early 1940's transcribing information about nearly 15,000 Connecticut vessels from original records. Our library ended up with the transcriptions years ago and now we are attempting to make the material available to as many people as possible. Connecticut's records were one of the few sets that were transcribed but never published, so this is a project that will be very valuable to historians that have been unable to access this information in the past.
Working on a project like this stresses for me the necessity to be able to work as a team; to be able to identify the critical staff to become team members; to be enthusiastic about your collections and to be as communicative and cooperative as possible with the people that can help make it happen for you.

IO: What future projects are coming up in which you are directly involved?
PO: Over twenty years ago the museum purchased an old mill building with over 100,000 square feet under one roof. The past couple years have been spent renovating a section of the building to house the American Maritime Education and Research Center. All the research collections, e.g., photographs, film, paintings, objects, etc., will be housed in this area. The library will become a component of this center in the near future, so we have begun planning the layout of the new facility and I expect that once we get started in earnest I will be spending the vast majority of my time working on the details of the new library.

IO: How do you feel about the word librarian? Do you think SLA's name accurately reflects the membership?
PO: Unlike a lot of other special libraries, where the librarians' entire duties have become those of information managers or brokers, I consider myself a librarian. While I do manage information to a certain extent, I spend more time managing the actual collection and the environment in which it lives. While the term librarian may connote a negative image to some, I'm proud to say that that is what I am and what I intend to call myself as long as I perform the duties of a librarian. My alma mater is no longer called a library school, but a college of information science. I understand that the profession needs to progress and to attract new blood and in the current atmosphere in which everyone is becoming computer savvy, it makes more sense to project a new image with new terminology describing what many members now do. So maybe the name does need to change to accurately reflect what the majority of the association perceives itself as being.

IO: As an active SLA member, how has the association helped you advance your career?
PO: The association has helped me keep abreast of current trends which has allowed me to communicate effectively with my superiors about avenues that we should consider pursuing. No institution can expect to advance in today's world if it remains static, so knowing what is going on in the wider world is a prerequisite for change and advancement, and SLA helps to provide that knowledge.

IO: Where do you think SLA should be heading in the future?
PO: I think that SLA has its feet planted firmly on the ground. Mentoring and distance learning programs for people just entering the field could add to a collective knowledge that seems to be currently lacking. So many people are so interested in the technological aspects of the profession that they tend not to be versed in the human and bibliographic portions of it as well. Teaching the reasons for why our profession exists, and giving entrants a firm grounding in the basics will not only help those individual but the organization that is fortunate enough to employ them. $