Reflections of a Nostalgic Librarian Sally Arway A few months ago, while working in the library reference area, I decided to make a photocopy of a literary article which appeared in a 1963 issue of the New York Times Book Review. Early in my library career, I stumbled onto the article and found it so impressive that I took meticulous handwritten notes in order to remember the ideas and the book titles that were included in the article. These often referred to notes were faded and tattered after 25 years. One of the young librarians who was working with me at the time watched me locate the needed roll of microfilm and then set it up on the microfilm reader-printer. With some curiosity she looked at my original two pages of notes and said, Why didnt you just photocopy the article when you first read it? A sort of time warp seemed to overtake me as I gazed around at the rows of microform cabinets, online catalog terminals, computerized laser-disc indexes, and copiers for microfiche, microfilm and film cartridges. I tried to picture myself back in the Weber College library of 1963, when I first came across the article in the New York Times Book Review and copied most of it out by hand. I clearly remember my first day as a librarian at Weber College. (It would not become Weber State College until 1964.) It was a Friday, early in November of 1962, and my first assignment was to type employment papers for Deanna Read (now Deanna Hall) who would begin working the following Monday as secretary to the library director. Jim Tolman, the director, then introduced me to Sally Johnston, the reference librarian, who would be my supervisor | for the next four years, and Wilma Grose, who had served as head librarian for many years but who had recently chosen to take over the Cataloging Department. Ramona Madsen, Barbara Buss, and LaRae King filled out the staff roster. During the year, Ramona left to take a position in Tennessee and George Tan-ner was hired to take her place. Soon afterwards, Ardell Carter and LaVon Love took positions in the library. Mr. Tolman spearheaded two massive projects during the early sixties. The first was to convert the entire book collection from the familiar Dewey Decimal Classification System to the more scholarly and technically adaptable Library of Congress Classification System. He and the catalog-ers thoroughly researched the situation and concluded that we would be far ahead if we took on the conversion project while we were relatively small. Consequently, for the next five years, each book was taken from the shelves, each card was removed from the card catalog and they were all redone. It was an enormous task but Ive often thought how grateful we should be to Mr. Tolman for making this difficult decision when he did. I remember that though the University of Utah also decided in favor of the Library of Congress System, they only applied it to their new books, and to this day they have a split collection. Both BYU and USU elected to continue with the Dewey Decimal System until technology forced them into making the change many years after our conversion to the Library of Congress Classification System was completed. Mr. Tolmans second project was to plan for a new library building. In 1962, library facilities were squeezed into the north end of the top floor of Building Four where the Mathematics offices are now located. Two classrooms on each side of the hall way served as study rooms. The east room, which was designated for quiet study, housed several sets of encyclopedias plus a small but extremely useful collection of reference books. Copies of currentmagazines and journals could be found across the hall in the group study room. Our card catalog still held reminders of those years before typewriters were widely in use. A number of the cards were hand written in beautiful script. (When the cataloging conversion took place a few years later, several of us saved examples of the hand-written cards as nostalgic reminders of quieter days. Little did we realize that in another 20 years the card catalog itself would be made obsolete by online computer technology.) Students of the early sixties who wanted to look at our books would find them listed in the card catalog, write down the call numbers on slips of paper, and bring the slips to us. We would then find the needed books for them in the stack area. Thus the students would call for the books, which explains why location numbers are referred to as call numbers, a term that continues to puzzle library users to this day. Only a few selected students were allowed stack passes those who worked for instructors or who maintained A averages. Browsing through the book stacks was a privilege that had to be earned. Although microfilm did exist at this time, several years would pass before we would purchase our first roll. Photocopiers and computers were tools that we associated only with NASA or the FBI. In fact, we were just growing accustomed to a marvelous advancement in library technology, the invention of the book truck, a set of book shelves on wheels that could hold dozens of books and be rolled throughout the library. We no longer had to carry six or seven books at arms length in order to move them back and forth from book shelves to the circulation desk. Sally has led three lives at Weber - as Sally Jeppsen, a student from September 1953 to May 1955 - as Sally Bradshaw, a jack-of-all-trades librarian during the growth years of the sixties and seventies, and as Sally Arway, a collection development and reference librarian in the technological eighties.