What a Cumberland County Library Director Did 40 Years Ago

On Wednesday, as I was combing through meeting minutes of the Cumberland County Library System (CCLS) from the 1980s, I uncovered an intriguing document titled “What Do You Do All Day?,” which was written by Margaret Dewey, CCLS’s Director, for the benefit of the Board of Trustees. They had recently upgraded her position from a part-time “coordinator” role to full-time “director,” and perhaps she felt a need to validate the decision. Noting that her children sometimes asked the question, and “perhaps you [the board] do too,” she listed all the work she performed over a two-week period in February 1988. Amounting to 2 full pages, single-spaced, it is a fascinating window into the daily activities of a colleague who was operating at important junctures in CCLS’s and our profession’s history. 

"What Do You Do All Day,"
an account of CCLS Director
Margaret Dewey's activities, February 1988

Dewey was an interesting character in herself. According to newsclippings in CCLS’s scrapbooks, she was originally from Wisconsin and earned an MLS at the University of Minnesota. In the mid-1970s, she was a library consultant in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Then, for 5-6 years, she administered a library at an American school in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The articles vaguely mention other posts in California, Minnesota, and Missouri. Just before she started at CCLS, Dewey was working at Penn State Harrisburg’s Heindel Library—the predecessor of the much-enlarged campus library where I work today. I haven’t found any information about what motivated her to globe-trot as she did, but the fact that she traded a position at an established academic library for a leading role in a small-but-growing county system suggests that she may have been the type of person who liked to build new things. Or, perhaps, she valued community diversity and relationships which a public library may have offered more readily than a commuter college campus could. 

Margaret Dewey, CCLS Director, ca. 1987.
Image from unattributed, undated news article
 in CCLS Scrapbook, 1975-1988.

As a fellow practitioner, I can’t help but compare Dewey’s responsibilities to mine. Considering that she was an administrator who oversaw more than a half-dozen libraries, one thing that struck me is how hands-on she was. As I would expect of a leader of a library system, she attended many meetings. She also organized committees, gathered statistics, and took the reins when several member libraries seemed to be having the same difficulty. Yet Dewey also did things that, today, are usually assigned to rank-and-filers like me (or that I would reassign to an assistant). For instance, she placed a standing order for large-print books, and she inventoried her office’s clip-art collection. For the Plainfield “mini-library”—a lean outpost within a church building that had been started with a federal grant in the 1970s—Dewey ordered new materials, withdrew outdated titles, and followed up with patrons about overdue items. At first, I raised my eyebrows in disbelief—what system administrator does this stuff? But then I reminded myself that CCLS had only just secured a dedicated, countywide property tax levy a year earlier, and that this tax was being relitigated as Dewey was writing. In other words, she had nothing close to the $6 million in county funds (and $8 million overall budget) that her library system has today. Thus, she did some work that was more quotidian, even clerical, in nature. 

“What Do You Do” also provides some insights into public libraries’ transition from print-centered resources and services to an increasingly technological environment. Allusions to Access PA are a case in point. Consisting in part of an effort to develop a computerized catalog that enabled users to search  libraries across the state, it was originally provided on CD-ROM and delivered via hardware and networks that were just beginning to appear in Pennsylvania’s public libraries. Another case in point is the Technology Committee, one of the working groups that Dewey was convening. During the 1980s, CCLS had completed a project that converted member libraries’ card catalogs to microfiche, and it had also developed an innovative “Dial-a-Story" service that enabled county children to listen to recorded storytellers over the telephone. But a computerized check-out system for all CCLS libraries was in the future. Given how rapidly computers were evolving and how expensive they were, Dewey relied on the hive mind to help her investigate options as new possibilities emerged. Finally, Dewey's mention of inventorying her office’s clip art collection is a quaint reminder of how she had long functioned in an analog world where images weren’t findable, copyable, and editable with just a few keystrokes as they are today.

In more than 20 years of researching Pennsylvania library history, I’ve uncovered only a handful of librarians’ diaries or daily calendars, so the question of “What [Did] [They] Do All Day” is hard for me  to answer. Although Margaret Dewey’s account only records two weeks in February 1988, she did us all a favor in educating us about what library work involved in rural systems at the cusp of the electronic age.