Chapter 07: First Steps to Develop the Research Medical Library
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Description
In this chapter, Ms. Hoffman explains the situation she inherited from the previous director, Marie Harvin. She discusses two challenges that she first addressed: first, helping the staff address difficulties stemming from a staff members alcohol problems and, second, limitations places on the Library due to physical space in its location at that time in the Bates Freeman Building. She notes that originally library use was restricted to physicians and researchers only.
Identifier
HoffmanKJ_01_20180319_C07
Publication Date
3-19-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS, Oral History Interview, March 19, 2018
Topics Covered
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center - Building the Institution; Overview; Leadership; On Leadership; Career and Accomplishments; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Building/Transforming the Institution
Transcript
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. So, you arrive.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I arrive.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. So...? (laughter) And then you see the real story.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah, the real struggle really was a staffing issue, and one of the employees—I don’t know if we need to turn this off or not, but we don’t have to—he was an alcoholic. And I think Sara Jean had been a support person for him, and when she was gone he pretty much hit rock bottom. And he ended up having to resign, because he returned to alcohol in a very bad, serious way. So that was the first thing.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And let me just ask you, because—and I’m not asking about this particular individual, but really, I mean, that is a leadership issue. It’s a challenge. And an individual who has this kind of struggle has an effect on coworkers and environment, and you as a leader have to deal with that. So, I mean, what was your strategy in managing that challenge?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
For me, it was acknowledging to the staff this person is an alcoholic. He has a disease. We can’t enable him. We need him to seek help. And we did get help here on campus, but it was more than that he could bear at the time, and he—all his support system was falling apart. But it was getting the staff to acknowledge that this is the issue here. He’s an alcoholic.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So the staff was kind of not identifying it quite as strongly.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
They wouldn’t come right out and say those words.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
No, and that can happen. Yeah, yeah. Welcome to MD Anderson.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Right.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, I mean, (laughs) welcome to your new job. Yikes. So after you’ve kind of put that issue to bed, and I imagine you had lots of brain cells also thinking about your vision and what you wanted to do here, I mean, what was the priority list? How did you set yourself a plan for making the changes here that you wanted to make?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
One of the things was improving the physical space. Just like at Southwestern, the physical space had been neglected, and it needed updating. The staff work areas, just like in Dallas, were not good. So I actually did a number of small renovation projects. I was able to get funding, usually through permanent university funds, to make these changes. And I can’t remember how many things we did, but we created a classroom where we could teach online classes. We took—I’m sorry, go ahead.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, no, I was just—it just occurred to me that we should actually identify where the library was at the time, (laughter) because it was not located where it is now.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Oh, right. It wasn’t in—not in this private spot. Oh, I can’t wait to talk about that.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s good, yes. (laughs) So where—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I guess it was, I want to say, the Bates Freeman Building, if that rings a bell. It was what’s now—what used to be the blue zone, I think. It was at the end of a long hallway. It’s where, after the library vacated that space and moved here, the School of Health Sciences moved into that space. Underneath us was the place where they kept all the animals, and it smelled bad most of the time.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, did it? Oh, how nasty.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
And above us were labs, and we were—the library—way before my time, even—suffered from serious leaks coming from the pipes in the lab. And it was always over the journal stacks. (laughter) It’s like... (sighs) Same thing has happened here. It’s like, this is the worst nightmare for libraries: water. And they actually built a trough up in the ceiling underneath these pipes that ran right over the journal stacks, to try to catch water when they had leaks. And this happened often. It wasn’t... Yeah, just... It was sad.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, gosh. Now, do you know why the library was located in that research building at the time? I mean, I don’t know anything really about the history of—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I’m not sure why it got located there, but it was there for a long time. I mean, I remember Marie Harvin was director when it was there. So it moved to that location many years ago. Originally, it was on the same floor as the president’s office, I think. It was just down the hall.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Which was in the Main Building?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah. And then it got moved there, I think because of the research labs in that part of the building, because it was—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So they wanted it close to the researchers.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
It was the... And that name is deliberate: it’s the Research Medical Library. Originally, it was the library for physicians and researchers only, not for nurses, or other—anybody else. And I remember when—was it Marie, or...? It was either Marie—I think it was Marie—opened the doors to everyone.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. Now, was it always called the Research Medical Library?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I’m not sure. I think it was. I’d have to go back and look in the—that—one of those histories. I think it was.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And when did that change to nurses and other practitioners within the institution? When did that happen? I’m wondering how it was timed with the interest in research nurses and all of that.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
That I really don’t know.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, I’m just curious.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
That really predates me. Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I’m just curious about that. Okay.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I just remember somebody saying that. (laughs)
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. All right, so here you are, deeply invested in renovating the physical space that’s leaky and old. (laughs) Goodness. So that was a priority.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah. And we were only able to do it in chunks, little chunks. One of the things that we did is—which hadn’t been done—we re-carpeted the entire space, and that was fun. We had a company that moves libraries and stuff. They came in with these—this equipment that hooked on to the end of the bookshelves and actually lifted them up and moved them on wheels.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh my gosh.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
And books weigh a lot. (laughs) They moved whole ranges of shelving so we could re-carpet. It had never been re-carpeted. The carpet was so filthy.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, god.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
So that was a big, big deal. We got it re-carpeted. We got new bookshelves. We got new study tables. We got a real conference room for staff meetings. We didn’t have one before. Everybody just sat around in the director’s office. That’s how they had staff meetings.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, were there changes in how the library here was actually used? I mean, so was it... You mentioned putting in a classroom where you could take online courses. I mean, so the traditional use, somebody comes, they look through the journals, they check out some books, maybe they get on a computer and do a little research. But clearly there were different requests now. Users wanted a wider palette of things they could do in the library, and services they wanted offered.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah. The big thing was bringing in computers that they could do anything. They could create a Word document, create an Excel document. They didn’t have to just do—be searching in a library database. They had access to the whole internet now. That change came while I was here, so we were—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, why did patrons want that?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Many of them didn’t have office space. We had really state-of-the-art computers, and we had a lot of the resources that they sometimes didn’t have in their office.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. So people would come to do what kind of work? I mean, write an article? Do—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. I had no idea.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
In addition to searching for—doing a database search for the research topic or whatever. We had some users who came in every day, had their favorite little study carrel, and that was their office. And I’m sure that still goes on. A lot of times—the labs are not the most conducive places for research and study. And so this was a place they could go and do that kind of work, whether it be reading or doing something at a computer. They didn’t have that in the lab, or the clinic for that matter.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well—yeah, or the clinic. I mean, uninterrupted time and space that’s calm, no distractions.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Right, yes. Right. Or, in the case—even back then, but certainly now—collaborative space, where a group could come together and work things—work as a group—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And as teamwork has become increasingly important in the library. I mean, a question or a theme that I didn’t explicitly introduce but is certainly really important is the enormous changes in services that library patrons want, and that’s certainly an explosion that you saw over the course of your career. I mean, really. And that idea of what experiences and possibilities should the space of the library present is a huge one that you had to address, as well.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
And so we’ve just—they’ve just undergone another renovation here.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, I know. It’s so beautiful.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
It’s gorgeous. It was gorgeous before, but it’s even more gorgeous. But that needs to happen about every ten years, because services, things change, and the space has to change with it. And that’s what hadn’t happened before, in Dallas or here.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Well, and I think—I mean, now that we’re speaking about it in this way, I’ve had this conversation with people in the Zayed Building and people in the [Scrub?] Buildings, and they say, “Well, these buildings were designed with such-and-such a space so that people could come together, because work here is increasingly collaborative. We rely on teams. There’s no central place at MD Anderson where people run into each other, and the hope is that now people will run into each other, and it doesn’t happen.” I mean, they’re complaining about this at Zayed. The spaces that they wanted to create to do this in SCRB [South Campus Research Buildings] are not really working. And I’m thinking the library here, it is a community space. I mean, you were mentioning the people who have their carrell they sit in. It’s the creatures of habit who come, and they begin to establish a kind of community. And I think the library does have an opportunity—it is an opportunity to create a very hospitable environment where people can come together and start to know one another in a different way. It was quite lovely to see—we had a soft opening before the holidays here, the new renovation. I mean, the energy, and the people were so excited, and they wanted their picture taken in the library, and—I mean, it was really neat to see these people feel like it’s their library. I mean, that was very nifty. And I hope that really continues and translates into a good community vibe.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, but anyway. That’s sort of me adding my little piece and observations. But you were certainly beginning to think about setting that into place in ’95, when you first came.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
I think so, yeah.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so no more dirty carpet—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
And in ’95 I had no idea we would be moving.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. And when did the move happen? That was 2000, or—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Around then, I guess.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
—2001, when they built the Academic Tower?
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
No, no, because I retired in 2011, and I worked here for about two years, maybe, after we moved into this space, so... Well, and then there were a few years of planning and building. So maybe mid—
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay, right, so it was much later. Well, I don’t want to jump the gun either, yeah.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Huh?
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So 2009, 2008 was maybe—
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Somewhere in there. I can’t remember exactly.
Tacey A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, okay, before when I came.
Kathryn Jones Hoffman, MSLS:
Yeah.
Recommended Citation
Hoffman, Kathryn Jones MSLS and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 07: First Steps to Develop the Research Medical Library" (2018). Interview Chapters. 1068.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1068
Conditions Governing Access
Open
