Monica McAbee Interview

Monica McAbee Interview

PGCMLS Oral History

Interview with Monica McAbee about her experience as a Librarian III in the PGCMLS Selection Office, as well as her past experiences working in branches across the library system.

PGCMLS

Special Collections Staff

Jun 4, 2024

Mp3

English

Digital audio

200016

.wav

01:14:56 Min

Project:  PGCMLS Oral History Project
Chapter: Monica McAbee Interview
Date: June 4, 2024
Participants: 
Interviewer: Hannah Erickson 
Interviewee: Monica McAbee   

• 00:00 Hannah: Today is June 4, 2024 at the Hyattsville Branch Library of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System. My name is Hannah Erickson, Librarian II, and I'm here with Monica McAbee, Librarian III, from the Selection Office. We are recording an interview with Monica as part of the PGCMLS Oral History Project. Monica, thanks for being here with us today.
• 00:25 Monica: It’s a pleasure.
• 00:27 Hannah: Could you start by introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about yourself, whatever you'd like to share. Could be hobbies, preferred readings, really anything you'd like to do to tell us a little bit about yourself.
• 00:41 Monica: Sure. I'm Monica McAbee. I select adult fiction for our library collections and I love to read. I'm sure that comes as no surprise. I love reading. I love talking about what I'm reading. I love talking to other people about what they're reading. So I like to do what you call readers advisory, conversations about books. I don't just do it for the library. I don't just do it for the Maryland Library Association. I do it in my personal life because it's fun. And because I especially like science fiction, I belong to a club, the Potomac River Science Fiction Society. And what we do is get together once a month. And we basically do book talks for each other, we recommend books that we've read. So that is just a big part of my life, is just reading and talking about books. But I do have a few other hobbies I like too, I sing with a chorus. And I used to do folk dancing. And I do like to travel. And one of the best things I ever did that combined all three of those things, for a while, I belonged to the Swiss Folklore Group of Washington, DC.
• 01:57 Hannah: Very cool.
• 01:59 Monica: It was so fun because you could sing in all the languages they sing in Switzerland, so not just Swiss German, but Italian and French and Romance. And oh, I also like languages. So I can find another thing. And we would do the folk dances. And we would travel to Switzerland as a group and attend the Yodel Fests. And sing in competition and everything. And they basically treated us as the goofy American cousins. Which was very appropriate. So that's just a little bit about stuff I like to do.
• 02:35 Hannah: So unsurprisingly, very literary book-focused hobbies, but also an eclectic mixture of interests. And I'm a fellow science fiction enthusiast, which we've bonded over in the past.
• 02:50 Monica: We have indeed.
• 02:52 Hannah: It's fun. Side note, but I love that you were involved in a folklore-focused group. I was just looking at this book and we're recording in the Prince George's Room, a local history room right now. And I found this book on old Maryland lore*. And then in the back, there was a little note. Sorry, this is tangent. But there was a note about like a system of cataloging folklore motifs that had numbers, not Dewey Decimal, but similar to Dewey Decimal. And they had an example of number, letter, something, point, something. And the example they gave what this particular code meant was Headless Revenant.Which I just…
• 03:35 Monica: The name of my next band. Yeah, I love, I've never gone that deep into the study of folklore, but I know that there is that kind of cataloging system that exists. Just the fact that that exists is fascinating to me.
• 03:48 Hannah: Same.
• 03:48 Monica: I mean, you know, some of us will catalog anything. You know, those of us who are real nerds, we will organize anything we can.
• 03:57 Hannah: Who's gonna stop us? No one. So could you tell us about your early experiences working in libraries? Like what positions or positions have you held? Tell us a little about your career path.
• 04:12 Monica: Yeah, I'm actually gonna start by saying that I grew up here in Prince George's County. And the Hyattsville Library was my family's local branch. We used the Hyattsville Library when I was growing up. So I have very fond memories. You know, my reading addiction started early and Hyattsville Library was the enabler. And that was the case until the Beltsville Library was open. And I grew up in Calverton. So Beltsville then became the local library, and thanks to that, I got a part-time job at one point, high school or college, shelving books at the Beltsville Library. Back when it was in three trailers, it was not in a building yet. We had a little mice that would come to visit from time to time. It was close quarters, but this also made for a very nice, tight-knit staff. Not many people. You got to know the library users very well. And I was just a page. I wasn't supposed to do reference interviews or anything like that. But I did kind of get sucked into helping people find things from time to time. 
• 05:30 Hannah: Sure.
• 05:31 Monica: Because you're there, you're on the spot. The branch manager was Micki Freeney. Now, she's kind of a legend in Prince George's library history.
• 05:41 Hannah: She is.
• 05:41 Monica: At one point, she became the director for a while. But she was such a good role model. Enthusiastic, dedicated, knowledgeable, and fun. She just had a great sense of humor and everything. So when it came time for me to figure out what kind of career I wanted to go into I looked back on my days shelving books at the Beltsville Library and realized, oh, this is a perfect fit for me. Because I'm working with people, helping them find books and information, working with other people who enjoy the same kind of thing. So at that point, I finished my bachelor's degree and went right on to library school. Didn't skip anything. I just said, okay, I'm just gonna get the degree. This is going to be my career. I've never regretted it. So I started at Laurel, the Laurel Branch, in the Young Adult Services, what we now call teen. But a lot of people still say YA. And it was an interesting situation because at that time, they had what they called job share. And I was in, I was part-time. I was half-time with another person in the same position as me. And she was half-time. So it basically added up to one full position and we shared that position.
• 07:14 Hannah: Oh, interesting. I didn't believe that was something the system did.
• 07:17 Monica: At one point, you know, you just try all different things and see what works for the situation.
• 07:22 Hannah: So were you both part-time or were you full-time and did different jobs?
• 07:27 Monica: We were both part-time, so just 20 hours a week. And that worked for me at the time because I was in library school. So I needed time to go to classes and stuff.
• 07:37 Hannah: Sure, working full-time and going to school is brutal.
• 07:39 Monica: Yeah, but once I got my degree, I stayed in Young Adult for a while. And then at one point, I had an opportunity to move to children's services because we were going through a budget crunch in the 1990s. And staff were leaving, they were taking incentives to retire or to leave. And so of course, there had to be a lot of moving people around. And I was invited to move into children's services at Laurel. And I said, oh, something new sounds fun. Sure. So I went ahead and did that for a little while and then moved up at one point. I got a promotion and became a generalist where you're doing all age levels, usually in a smaller branch. So I've worked in big branches like New Carrollton and Laurel. I've worked in small branches like Glen Arden. And I worked in Beltsville, the branch where I…
• 08:35 Hannah: The branch that didn't have a building yet.
• 08:38 Monica: Yeah, they finally had a building, walls and everything. And after all of that, working in teen, children's, generalist, I then ended up working in selection,  selecting adult materials. So it's funny how it kind of spans the age ranges that way. But also I've done, just working in the branches for 18 years, I did a lot of different things. We started providing computers for the public to use when I was at the New Carrollton branch. So I got to learn about computers.
• 09:18 Hannah: What was that transition like?
• 09:19 Monica:  It was interesting, we had three computers. So we had a separate room where we kept them. And there was an Apple and a Mac and probably an IBM PC.
• 09:32 Hannah: Oh, so we had different, we didn't just have PCs.
• 09:35 Monica: Right.
• 09:36 Hannah: Oh, interesting.
• 09:37 Monica: Yeah, and there were staff and customers who were Mac fanatics. It's like, I only do Mac, you know, it's the Mac versus IBM silly thing. But it was interesting to see the different personalities that would come in to use the computers because this was a new thing for a lot of people. And you were limited in how much time you could use the computer. So one of my jobs was to manage people when they would refuse to leave the computer. I was like, I just want one more thing to do. Oh, no, yeah, it was fun. So yeah, a lot of working with people, a lot of people's skills, you either learn on the job or if you don't, you're in trouble.
• 10:25 Hannah: Trial by fire. So you've done a little bit of everything. Worked with many different age groups, different types of branches.
• 10:33 Monica: Yeah, children's story time, adult book discussions, all sorts of fun stuff.
• 10:39 Hannah: And yeah, I was thinking about how we don't, I think, divide up children's and teens the way we used to, when it was young adults. I've been, this is long enough to remember when it was more of a children's, young adult, adult. So now it's youth services and 18 and up for the most part.
• 11:05 Monica: Right, you can go granular or you can lump things.As long as the age levels are getting served, then that's what's important.
• 11:13 Hannah: Definitely.
• 11:15 Monica: However you define the divisions.
• 11:21 Hannah: So can you tell us about the role of materials management and selection in the library system?
• 11:28 Monica: Yeah, so I'm in the selection office, but it's part of a big department called materials management. And just as the name says, we manage the materials. The role of materials management in general is just to make sure that the materials get to the branches.
• 11:47 Hannah: We appreciate that.
• 11:48 Monica: I'm sure you do. And it consists of different departments. So there's selection, the people who decide what materials are needed. And then there's acquisitions. And they are receiving the materials as they come in, making sure that the invoices are taken care of and that everything that was supposed to be in the order has come in. And then you've got the cataloging department and those folks get the book records into the catalog so that customers can search for books and information and find it. And then the last stop for the materials before they go out to the branches is the processing department. And they just slap on any labels or stickers or whatever that the books need before they get sent out to the branches. So all those different departments work together to make sure that the materials get out to the branches the way they should. And we also take care of materials that have to be discarded for whatever reason. And I do wanna give special mention to interlibrary loan, because they're kind of also under the umbrella of materials management in that they handle sending books out to other library systems when they wanna borrow from us and bringing books in when we, our customers want to borrow something that we don't happen to have in our collection. So interlibrary loan is also a really important part of the materials management for the system.
• 13:29 Hannah: Yeah, and it's a wonderful service.
• 13:33 Monica: Yeah, they're good, good, good people.
• 13:36 Hannah: I remember when I started working the library system, I don't know if they still do this for new employees. I hope they do, but we got a tour of materials management.
• 13:44 Monica: Yeah!
• 13:44 Hannah: Got to see, you know, this department does X, it's very cool. It's kind of see the, I don't know, I don't mean to say this in a dehumanizing way, but sort of the machine of here's how the materials, here's how they're chosen, here's how, here's how they're entered in the, you know, all the things that get them from a possibility to a library book or other material that is accessible.
• 14:09 Monica: I wish more people would take advantage of that. Yeah, the last couple onboardings we've done where we had new staff being introduced to all our policies and everything, we didn't, we, materials management, did not have time to give them a tour.
• 14:24 Hannah: Oh, that's a shame.
• 14:25 Monica: Basically, my boss, Blaine Holliday, says, hey, we don't have time to show you around, but please come any time, just give me a call ahead of time and we'll show you around and give you a personal tour. So as far as I know, nobody's taken advantage of that, so I wish they would.
• 14:41 Hannah: Oh yeah, I think it's really, I mean, I think we all get caught up to the day-to-day and what our specific duties are, but I think it's really wonderful to be able to understand the other departments, the other aspects that, because one of us couldn't exist or function without the other, it's all part of the same mission.
• 15:01 Monica: Absolutely, and a lot of materials management staff like to get out to the branches from time to time. Some of them work in the branches, part-time, they'll fill in, some of them. I don't go physically to the branches, but I belong to the Greenbelt Book Discussion Group, which is a virtual thing.
• 15:20 Hannah: Oh, very cool.
• 15:21 Monica: So that's one way that I keep my hand in, interacting with customers. So yeah, I would invite staff to ask Blaine for a tour of materials management.
• 15:37 Well, it's been a long time since I had a tour, maybe I should ask for a fresh tour.
• 15:41 Monica: Yeah, why not? 
• 15:44 Hannah: So can you talk about any changes to the selection process or materials management, if you like, over time, both in-house and PGCMLS, and also, if you wish, in the broader landscape of public library collections, technology, and publishing?
• 16:04 Monica: Yeah, a lot of people talk about formats, and I'll talk about that in a second, but I would say one of the biggest changes is the selection philosophy. It used to be, we were up in an ivory tower, and we were saying, we librarians know what you should be reading, and we will recommend it to you, and we will only purchase quality materials that will stand the test of time. We don't do that. Now we get stuff that people actually wanna read, because people are different, and there are many, many, many reading tastes, and needs, and reading levels, and for heaven's sake. So I really admire a former director of Baltimore County's library system, Charlie Robinson. He's the one that made a big push in the early 90s to give them what they want. 
• 16:57 Hannah: I mean, people don't really know what they want to read.
• 17:00 Monica: Yeah, and so, you know, paperbacks, series like Sweet Valley High, there was a time when our selection librarians would not purchase the Sweet Valley High series.
• 17:14 Hannah: Seriously?
• 17:15 Monica: Seriously, because, oh, that's just trash. It doesn't get professional reviews. We don't need to be putting that in our collection. 
• 17:28 Hannah: This is, if you'll pardon me, and let me go on another brief…
• 17:31 Monica: Please. 
• 17:32 Hannah: But I was just, so the library system produces a podcast where we reread young adult literature, and we were reading the Babysitter's Club, and we all had a moment of horror when, in the book we were reading, the parent of one of the Babysitter's Club, Claudia, was a librarian who, she was described as the head of a local public library, and she both told her daughter that she didn't want her to read Nancy Drew, and that the library did not hold Nancy Drew, and we were all like, what? This is that in the 80s, what library wouldn't have Nancy Drew? But we thought it was horribly implausible, and now I'm wondering if maybe it was possible.
• 18:12 Monica: Oh, Nancy Drew is the classic example of a series that libraries would not carry. At one time, libraries wouldn't carry the Wizard of Oz series.
• 18:22 Hannah: That is shocking. 
• 18:24 Monica: This goes way back to this very snooty attitude about literature and your clientele. So I am very happy to be in a situation where we are actually getting fun books. We are getting what some people might call trashy books. Hey, reading tastes are reading tastes, and let’s let people enjoy what they enjoy. Romance books, science fiction, you name it. I don't know to what extent Street Lit existed before I moved into selection, but I think we were already getting a little bit of it, especially like The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah. That was the big one that really started the modern Street Lit boom. But once I was a selector, I'm very fortunate that I was not required to only purchase materials that had professional reviews, because then we'd hardly have any Street Lit in our collection. And that is one of our best circulating genres.
• 19:32 Hannah: People love it. They ask for it all the time.
• 19:34 Monica: They want that drama. They want characters they can relate to in various ways. And why would we not want that?
• 19:44 Hannah: Well, it seems maybe possibly part of the sort of that, there seems to be a tendency to look down on genre in general, which Street Lit is maybe another example of that.
• 19:57 Monica: The great Mary Kay Shelton, I believe she used to work for Baltimore County, but I was once at a dinner table with her and overheard her say, I don't read li-fi. She doesn't do literary fiction. She was all about the genres. So, you know, it goes both ways, but it's all very silly. 
• 20:24 Hannah: Make literary fiction a genre by itself. I love it.
• 20:28 Monica: But also other things that have changed, of course, just the big format change. The rise  of audio books and digital books and now streaming books and videos. So that's another big change in selection that has happened over the years because we're no longer always ordering discrete titles one by one. Adam Wall, our online resources selector, he's dealing with subscriptions to materials where you have online databases of all these magazines and periodicals and newspapers and you name it and reference books. So you're often buying a whole bundle of books at the same time. That's a big change from before.
• 21:23 Hannah: Definitely. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it used to be that when a print book came out, the audiobook on cassette or CD would follow like six months or more later.
• 21:35 Monica: It would take awhile.
• 21:36 Hannah: And now it comes out, if it's gonna come out pretty much simultaneously and it's often in, maybe it's in CD, maybe it's in a downloadable audio version, it's very different.
• 21:48 Monica: Right. And we've seen formats disappear. I mean, I remember phono discs.
• 21:54 Hannah: Did we purchase those?
• 21:57 Monica: We had them when I was growing up and I listened to opera on these records I would borrow from the library. It was great. Because who could afford to go to the opera? Give me a break.
• 22:08 Hannah: Yeah, not your average person.
• 22:11 Monica:  Right, so that's why libraries are so great. Exactly. But yeah, so from vinyl to cassettes to CD, and now CDs are starting to go away and it's just gonna be all digital and you can think what you will about that, but this is where the customers are going. So the selection office has to follow where the chief use is.
• 22:41 Hannah: Yeah, we don't have, for example, music CDs anymore. We do have, still have audio books on CD, but it's shrinking and I believe the circulation numbers are not what they used to be.
• 22:51 Monica: Exactly, and it's just following the general trend country-wide, you know, cars are no longer made with audio, CD, disc slots and all of that stuff.
• 23:04 Hannah: So, like when they stopped making cars with cassette players.
• 23:08 Monica: Exactly, you have to pay attention to the trends and put your money where it'll do the most good for your community.
• 23:15 Hannah: Yeah. What is the most challenging aspect of working in selection?
• 23:20 Monica: That was a challenging question and it was hard to think of what's the most challenging.
• 23:25 Hannah: If you have more than one, we're not gonna cut you off.
• 23:27 Monica: Yeah, I would say though that the most challenging is the fact that there's no crystal ball to tell the selector what books are really gonna take off and which ones will just sit there on the shelf like duds. It's the same problem publishers have, you know, they don't know. They'll put a lot of money on something that might just go nowhere. So it's always a guessing game and you make the best educated guess that you can. I'll talk later about resources we use. But we like to say there's no crystal ball, do the best you can based on customer requests and usage patterns and all of that. But other challenges, one of them is just time management because there's always more coming out. Keeping up with the titles is a never ending journey. And you really have to be comfortable with never feeling caught up. And for me, that's fine. I like knowing that I've always got more to do. But it is a challenge. And I would also say it would be a challenge trying to defend our materials, except that we are lucky here in Prince George's. So far we have not had the kinds of censorship attacks that other library systems in other areas are getting. It may yet come. And we'll talk about that later too when we talk about intellectual freedom. But so far we have not had organized political groups inundate us with hundreds of titles that they want us to remove from the system. So fingers crossed that this is gonna die down sooner rather than later and that the Freedom to Read Act here in Maryland will also help.
• 25:32 Hannah: Yes, that just got passed which was great news.
• 25:35 Monica: Yes.
• 25:40 Hannah: So in your perspective, what makes the PGCMLS collection stand out from other library systems? If it does, I shouldn’t assume.
• 25:50 Monica: Yeah, I think it does in some ways based on some things I've heard from people who use other library systems. Partly the fact that we do purchase popular materials and we don't always worry about if it's self-published, if it has reviews or not, especially for adult fiction. It's less so for nonfiction because you wanna make sure that it's authoritative information, less so for children's. You really do wanna be more careful with what you're purchasing for the children's collection. But my philosophy for adult fiction is this is recreation for adults. They can read what they want.
• 26:24 Hannah: They are grown-ups. They can make their own choices.
• 26:25 Monica: Exactly. If someone requests something that doesn't have any reviews and I have to buy it from Amazon because it's not even carried by our distributor, that's okay, we can do that. And I have had colleagues thank me for that because they will use interlibrary loan to get materials from us, from our collection because we have these odd little things.
• 26:50 Hannah: But colleagues from other counties.
• 26:52 Monica: Yeah, exactly. Like Calvert County, an avid reader has told me, you have the best stuff. Another thing that I think might distinguish us from some of the other counties, although not all, is our early emphasis on Black authors as our population changed. And our African-American population grew and became the majority in the county. Again, the selectors pay attention to who is in the community. And so going certainly back before I was a selector and who knows how far back, we've been purchasing a lot of Black authors to the extent where some of the branches would make displays and say, come on, look what we've got here. And these days, it's just almost a given that if you come across something that's coming out by a Black author, unless it's something that nobody would be interested in, we're definitely gonna consider it. So I would say that is another thing that distinguishes us, again, less so these days, as people put more emphasis on diversity in their collections. And publishers actually pay attention to diversity in what they're putting out.
• 28:13 Hannah: It's about time that they did that, for sure.
• 28:19 Hannah: Can you tell us what the PGCMLS policy about banned and challenged books is and how the system is defending books from censorship?
• 28:29 Monica: Yeah, basically our policy is we're gonna uphold the First Amendment rights of our customers. Free speech has a corollary, which is the right to receive information. So that's why the First Amendment comes into play in library service. Customers have a right to access information. They do not have a right to restrict access for other people, and that includes other people's children. And our policy is that we will purchase a wide variety of materials with different viewpoints, representation of many different kinds of people, and we're not going to remove them just based on the viewpoints of the author. So you can't say, well, I disapprove of this author's viewpoint, therefore, this book must go, or I disapprove of the way this author expressed themselves. Therefore, this book should not be here. Free speech, freedom of expression. So we are defending the collection, partly by being prepared. We have written policies and procedures, that is so important. I can't believe there's still some library systems or even school systems that still don't have a written policy of how they're going to respond to challenges, and that kind of leaves you floundering if you're not ready for that. And of course, another very important way is we train the staff. At one point, I put together an intellectual freedom page on Connect, which is our intranet for the staff to access so they can go online to this particular page and read about intellectual freedom, policies, philosophy, procedures, all of that, if they need a refresher. So we train, we make sure we update our policy as needed, we at least revisit it every now and then based on changing circumstances.
• 30:45 Hannah: Let's give it a look over.
• 30:47 Monica: Oh yeah. And also, the selectors are always ready to defend what we've selected because there's always a reason that we bought these things. So we're ready to respond. And we respond in a way that is consistent and thoughtful and respectful of the people who are challenging the books because some of these challenges, even these days, still are earnest, genuine concerns that the person has. We've seen a lot in this country in the last few years of very politically motivated challenges, but there are still individuals who have their own outlook on things  and they have the right to express their concerns.
• 31:36 Hannah: Sure. It might be a good faith concern.
• 31:45 Monica: Rather than a performative outrage.
• 31:47 Hannah: Yes, thank you. Those are the words I was reaching for. Have you done any other work related to intellectual freedom and censorship?
• 31:57 Monica: Yeah, so several years ago, before I was in selection even, I went to a program that was sponsored by the Maryland Library Association and it was about filters, internet filters in libraries, and whether libraries should use these things because isn't that censorship if you are filtering information that the public can see. So there was this big argument. The MLA, Maryland Library Association, the group that was sponsoring the program was the Intellectual Freedom Panel and they had a panel of people from all different viewpoints on this subject. So they had people who were pro-filter who said this is just responsible librarianship, making sure that only appropriate material on the internet gets accessed and then there were other people pointing out that filters were way too broad.They kept locking information that was perfectly valid, constitutionally protected expression. You can't do this. So I was fascinated by this.
• 33:10 Hannah: It is a tricky debate.
• 33:11 Monica: It is, it really is. And a lot of librarians, the libraries finally came down on the side of having the filters. Partly the filters did get a little bit better. Partly legislation came along, which pretty much forced libraries into doing this. There aren't too many ways you can get around it. But anyway, that was my introduction to the Intellectual Freedom Panel. So I joined because I was always very anti-censorship and I served as their secretary for several years. I was the Intellectual Freedom Officer for a few years, kind of like the chair of the committee, but I've been on the, in the group for a long, long time. And we do things like, we do training for library staff on responding to challenges and a lot of other things that deal with intellectual freedom, whether it's privacy, the privacy rights of your customers, or equity of access, copyright, is that a censorship issue or no, depending on how you're wielding it, just all sorts of topics that are fascinating and can kind of get beyond the day-to-day library service. So we've done, we've written statements supporting libraries and authors when they were being challenged. I remember at one point we wrote a letter to a school out in the Midwest somewhere that was banning John Green's book, Looking for Alaska Very, very popular book for teens.
• 35:01 Hannah: John Green's very popular…
• 35:02 Monica: I support John Green and his right to write books for teens and their right to read it. So we've done a lot of stuff like that. 
• 35:10 Hannah: Going back to the internet filters, yeah, without taking a particular stance on them, I think the classic debate is, well, they block, you mentioned they block legitimate information. A classic example would say somebody's looked up information on breast cancer and blocked a website with information about that, but so let's take an inappropriate website through.
• 35:37 Monica: And yeah, that's the other thing about filters is they did not block everything that you would want them to block if you were saying what we should only allow, what we would select deliberately. They're not, they can't get everything.
• 35:52 Hannah: No, I can tell you as someone who works in a branch, they do not get everything you might hope that they do.And they do sometimes get things that you hope that they would not block, but…
• 36:03 Monica: I always thought that the real answer would be privacy screens that you can put on each computer.
• 36:09 Hannah: That's an interesting idea.
• 36:10 Monica: Yeah, some libraries want that route because if you can't see what the person's looking at, and probably you shouldn't be able to see what somebody's looking at, it's their privacy, as long as their behavior is acceptable in the library, they're sitting there looking at the computer, why should we know what they're looking at?
• 36:29 Hannah: I do think some of our customers would like that in general, just even for things like banking information or their social security number.
• 36:39: Yeah, so it's a tricky one. I was gonna say something else, but no, I forgot, but… You can cut that part out.
• 36:53 Hannah: I derailed you with the internet filter.
• 36:57 Monica: That's fine.
• 37:00 Hannah: But, yes, as a branch staff member, I can say I appreciate the training on how to respond to calls for removing a book from the collection or other challenges.
• 37:09 Monica: Yeah, and we're gonna do that training again later this year. We're gonna try to keep doing it at least every other year, if not every year, because people need refreshers, but also lots of new people come in.
• 37:18 Hannah: Definitely, I know I could use a refresher. And like you said, we have a lot of new staff.
• 37:23 Monica: Yeah, and I remember what I was gonna say when we were talking about blocking medical information. And now this is happening with books, with these goofy groups that keep trying to challenge books in schools that deal with sexuality in any way whatsoever. Some of the groups and legislation try to make an exception for health and medical information. Some of them don't, and it just gets ridiculous.
• 37:51 Hannah: And you could argue that books on sexuality is health and medical information.
• 37:57 Monica: Yes.
• 37:58 Hannah: Pretty much most of the time, if not all the time. Yeah. It’s information people need.
• 38:05: For sure. Including young people.
• 38:07 Hannah: Yeah.
• 38:08 Monica: You know, as appropriate, but they're using the word age-appropriate way wrong.
• 38:14 Hannah: Yeah, it seems like it's a weaponized term.
• 38:16 Monica: Yeah.
• 38:17 Hannah: But yeah, young people desperately need that information.
• 38:21 Monica: Yeah.
• 38: 24 Hannah: So what sort of professional tools and source of information do you use to keep informed on what to select to purchase?
• 38:31 Monica: Yeah, all sorts of stuff. One of the major tools that the selectors use are professional review journals. So things like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews. We look at those to get an idea of what's coming out and what the appeal might be to our library users. So especially Library Journal and Booklist, which are library-oriented, they're very good about saying, oh, you know, this is for people who like to read, da, da, da, da, da, whatever. This will be good for book clubs. This is good because… Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, though, also help because they just, they'll cover, they might cover some titles that the other two didn't, so we can pick up more titles. All of these review journals do starred reviews, so you can really look for those and make sure you're not missing something special.
• 39:30 Hannah: Does that mean that they recommend it to an extra degree or tell me what a starred review will mean?
• 39:34 Monica: Yeah, a starred review just means that we think this is worthy of attention and has merit. Okay, this is a well-told story, a well-put-together biography, whatever, so it has to do with the quality. And you will see it, one of the reasons we read all these different review journals is you will see different reviews have different opinions on the same book. One reviewer will give it a starred review, the next reviewer will pan it and say, this was terrible. So we do have to do some triangulating when we're making decisions, but that's just one resource we use. We also look at publisher emails. They will spam us with all sorts of emails and we welcome that. Publishers do webinars now where they will promote books that are coming out. And I love watching those things. It's fun to just get an idea of what's coming out in the future. And we also get advanced reader copies, not so much for children's or teen books, but we get a lot of adult advanced reader copies sent to us from publishers. And these are books that are not the finished published version, but it's a paperback, almost finished, what you might call a galley of the book. And it's meant as a promotional tool when they send these to bookstores and libraries as a way to get these books in front of librarians and other decision makers so that we can say, oh, this debut, okay, let me thumb through this book and do a little speed read, a paragraph here, a paragraph there, look at the blurbs, look at who is blurbing it.
• 41:31 Hannah: Just giving you a heads up that this is coming out.
• 41:33 Monica: Yeah, and you can get a taste for, especially if it's a new author, is this somebody that our customers would be interested in? So I love advanced review copies. When those boxes come, it's like my birthday.
• 41:47 Hannah: They are fun. You feel like you're getting a sneak peek into something before anyone else.
• 41:53: Yeah. So we do professional reviews, we do publisher information, we look at what's in the media, what books are being talked about in the media, and what topics are being talked about in the news because books on those topics are gonna be popular. And then most importantly, feedback from staff and customers. We do have a way for customers to request books and suggest titles that they'd like to see in the library. We don't always get it. We're not always able to if it doesn't really fit our selection criteria or our budget. Well, that's part of the criteria. But we get what we can. And the staff, the branch staff are really helpful about giving us an idea of how the collection is being used out in the branches, in the communities.
• 42:42 Hannah: So I know that there's that suggest a purchase form on the website. I've sent many a customer to that. I'm just sort of curious, what, how many submissions do you get on a weekly basis? Oh, what does it look like on that, on your end?
• 42:59 Monica: It can be a lot. What do you call it? It comes and goes. We have a few who will occasionally get all excited and send in 20 new suggestions all at once. And you just have to manage your time. But yeah, we do get maybe not hundreds every week, that would be a lot, but I would say at least a hundred every week among the three of the selectors.
• 43:33 Hannah: So it's significant.
• 43:35 Monica: Yeah. People use that tool. It's a good thing that they do. And then we look at them and see if we can get it or not.
• 43:43 Hannah: Do they tend to be titles that have come out recently? Are they older titles?
• 43:47 Monica:  Oh, it's a mix. Yeah, it's a mix. We will get requests for things that are coming out too far ahead. Like it's in our next fiscal year and we can't even buy that yet. And we will get requests for books that came out a decade ago that are available still from other library systems. And especially if the book is available from a Maryland library system, we're not gonna buy it all over again. We're gonna say, oh, you can get this through interlibrary loan. Go into what we call our Marina system and borrow it from another library, another county. And that just saves money. I mean, Maryland librarians like to call Maryland a library heaven because we are very collaborative across the state. And our Marinaand  interlibrary loan system is one example of that. It's wonderful and it's just a way of sharing all our collections with each other.
• 44:49 Hannah: I think I don't always have the best sense of what other states or libraries, places other than Maryland have or don't have. I know that Marina and interlibrary loan are wonderful, but that's a nice idea.
• 45:04 Monica: Well, I think it's easier for Maryland, partly because we're a small state geographically, right? And we're well populated. So it is certainly easier to organize all these collaborations.
• 45:17 Hannah: Sure, I'm imagining like, I don't know a lot about, imagining a state like California or Texas where they're just huge. That would be a lot harder to do. We're a lot more compact.
• 45:27 Monica: For sure, so we use it to our advantage.
• 45:30 Hannah: For sure. If someone is interested in working in libraries in general, what would you say to encourage them to start their career?
• 45:50 Monica: Oh, I would say first make sure you're using your local library. They probably already are if they're interested in doing this as a career, but go in, look around, pay attention to what the library staff are doing. I mean, this is how it worked for me. If you can get a part-time job just to make some money and shelf books or whatever, do that. Don't wait to get your master's degree in librarianship to then start trying to look for a library job. Get in wherever you can at whatever level you can. And wherever you can. You might be able to work in your college library. You might be able to work in your local public library. Anything you can do. Even volunteering, if you have the time for that, you can try doing that in the library. So just to get a feel for what it's all about. And while you're there, you can ask the staff questions that you're curious about. Ask the staff who've gone to library school. Ask them about it because it is expensive. It is time consuming. So you wanna figure out if this is gonna be worthwhile for you and what you wanna do. And be aware of all the different kinds of libraries that there are. Most of us know about public libraries and academic libraries in the universities, school libraries when they exist. Which unfortunately they don't always.
• 47:09 Hannah: They are not doing very well these days, makes me sad.
• 47:11 Monica: But there's all sorts of special libraries for the government, for corporations, for science, whatever. And you might find something that just fills just the niche for you.
• 47:24 Hannah: I've seen advertisements for very specialty libraries. Like I think I saw one for a librarian of the Galapagos Islands.
• 47:31 Monica: Oh, cool.
• 47:34 Hannah: And also there was one sort of wine librarian. I don't know. The things you see go by in listservs and you're like, it catches your eye and you're like, in another life.
• 47:43 Monica: I don't. I don't. Yeah, for sure.
• 47:49 Hannah: I think I saw something that was said owl librarian. I think like a bird, but it was an abbreviation for some sort of special service. And I was like, oh, nevermind.
• 47:55 Monica: Well, that's not as much fun.
• 47:48 Hannah: You're not working with nocturnal birds, nevermind.
• 48:01 Monica: I would say another thing about advice for library staff wannabes. Certain traits I think will serve you well. Among them, I would say curiosity is a real good one. Curiosity, you gotta be a people person. If you're gonna work in a place that serves people, be a people person. You can't just say, well, I'm gonna be a librarian because I like books. You have to like people, too, because you're connecting people to books and information. And flexibility is the other one I would say. Because librarianship changes over the years. We've talked about that a little bit, but so much changes. And you wanna be flexible enough not only to deal with changes within a library that you're working in, but also maybe for your own career advancement, you might need to get a position in another county or another state. And the more flexible you're able to be, the better. Obviously not everybody's gonna be able to travel across the country to take a job if they're already in an established situation where they are. But if you can do that, it really does help.
• 49:21 Hannah: That's really good advice. Yeah, especially the people person part. I mean, I think that's, you don't have to be an extrovert, but you have to be able to interact with people.
• 49:35 Monica: There are introverts who can deal with people. I can tell you.
• 49:38 Hannah: Definitely.
• 49:39 Monica: We are here.
• 49:41 Hannah: Yes, we definitely are.
• 49:42 Monica: I think introverts are great in the library because of our thoughtful approach to things, our attention to detail, you name it. But yeah, you can be an introvert and interact with people very comfortably, especially the more you do it, the easier it gets.
• 49:57 Hannah: Yes, and I think people conflate introvert with shy and one can be both. But they're not necessarily the same thing. It's about how you recharge, not how you interact. And I think introverts will understand what other introverted customers might need. Yeah. Potentially a little better than an extrovert might understand.
• 50:18 Monica:Very, very well observed. Yeah.
• 50:24 Hannah: So on a similar topic, if someone is interested in working behind the scenes in materials management, what do you think are skills that they should develop?
• 50:37 Monica: Probably mostly just general good work habit skills. Attention to detail is a big one for materials management, especially if you're somebody like a cataloger. That is the most detailed work, for sure. All of them, because you're dealing with what subject terms should we deal with here and what exactly are the alternate versions of this author's name and which authors, which countries list the author's last name first and vice versa and you know. So yeah, there's a lot of attention to detail, but also if you're just working with the materials, you wanna make sure that you are getting every step of the process correct. Time management, again, the work never ends, so have good time management skills. There's certain technical systems that you have to work with, but you can learn that on the job, you can be trained. So I would say be comfortable with technology, of course, but beyond that, I would also say, very important to have good communication skills because you're communicating across departments within materials management, as you're talking about the materials and what needs to happen with them. And you're also talking, communicating with the branches, with the branch staff, so communication skills are really helpful too. So that's all very general good work skills to have and they all apply to materials management too.
• 52:24 Hannah: I was thinking what you said about cataloging and, cataloging is, I mean, I think this applies to pretty much everything you said about materials management. We wouldn't, without every single aspect of, from selection to cataloging to processing, without any of this, we would not be able, the library would not be able to exist in the way that it does. But with, I think you said about cataloging with the detail, like cataloging has to do with how findable, the way something is cataloged makes something how findable is it?
• 53:02 Monica: It's crucial, crucial work, absolutely.
• 53:04 Hannah: The choices that are made, yeah.
• 53:07 Monica: Yeah, and I also should say, especially for selection librarians, if you wanna go into that work, good skills to develop, I would say analytical skills are important because you're making lots of decisions every day, one after another after another. You have to decide, am I gonna get this book or not? And why or why not? And you have to be able to do that quickly without mulling over it for too long.
• 53:39 Hannah: That's, yeah, that must be challenging, especially since budgets are finite.
• 53:42 Monica: Oh, yeah.
• 53:45 Hannah: Because I imagine that you have an infinite amount of things to purchase, in a sense, and you have a not infinite amount of funds with which to do that.
• 53:53 Monica: Exactly.
• 53:55 Hannah: So making those decisions must be incredibly difficult at times.
• 53:57 Monica: Yeah. And speaking of the budget, rudimentary math skills don't hurt. Because you do have to keep track of where you are within the fiscal year and what's happening with the budget. And especially when you're dealing with book distributors who give you a discount, the way that we get our discounts is you get them, they get entered into our budget after the fact. So there's a little bit of math-ing to do.
• 54:26 Hannah: Oh, I never…
• 54:27 Monica: Figuring out how much money you actually have left.
• 54:29 Hannah: I never knew about that. So you, so what you're purchasing something for is more than what it will actually end up being when everything has come through in the wash.
• 54:41 Monica: Yeah. The retail cost is gonna be more than usually what we’ll end up actually paying.
• 54:46 Hannah: Oh, that sounds messy.
• 54:48 Monica: Now, let's talk about physical materials from a particular distributor. That does not apply unfortunately to Overdrive, for instance, with our digital books. Those are hella expensive.
• 55:01 Hannah: Yeah, that's a whole different cost structure.
• 55:05 Monica: But again, you have to be able to do the math with the digital books and say, what lending model will make the most sense for this particular title? Is it gonna be popular enough that I can spend all the money to get like 100 checkouts at one time? Or is it gonna just maybe do okay and I can just like buy one lending license for now? So there's a lot of analytical, numerical stuff that you need to pay attention to. It's all strategy.
• 55:41 Hannah: Do you mind talking a little bit about the lending models for eBooks?
• 55:45 Monica: Yeah, it's funny. I think when libraries first started being able to lend eBooks, I believe the model was you would buy the lending license and then you would have the eBook in your collection forever. That was it. But then publishers started getting really nervous about lending digital materials because they were afraid that it would be too easy for library customers to pirate them or they were afraid that too many library customers would use the library's eBook instead of buying the eBook. Never mind that libraries are one of the best publicity arms for publishers that they don't seem to realize.
• 56:40 Hannah: So you're gonna find out about a book that you don't wanna purchase?
• 56:43 Monica: Yeah.
• 56:44 Hannah: If you're not an author, you don't necessarily wanna purchase a book without giving it to you.
• 56:48 Monica: So what the publishers started doing was they started limiting how long we would get to have that title. Some publishers decided, okay, you get it for two years and then you have to buy it all over again if you still want it. Other publishers said, okay, you can have it for 26 checkouts and then you have to buy another 26 if your customers are still wanting to read this book. So there's probably about 10 different lending models at this point.
• 57:17 Hannah: How did they come up with 26 as the number for checkouts?
• 57:20 Monica: I think they tried to decide how many checkouts a print book would get in a year in a library. They were trying to compare it to print books which is kind of silly, but it was a time of experimentation.
• 57:34 Hannah: The lifecycle of a print book varies so widely though. I mean, you almost could assign a random number generator to it.
• 57:44 Monica: Yep, this is true. So yeah, and they've tried things like not making the e-book available to libraries at all or delaying when they would make it available. Poor MacMillan, the publisher MacMillan got in big trouble with the libraries a few years back when they decided they were gonna put a moratorium on new books coming out. Libraries couldn't get them for six months for e-books. And some libraries started boycotting MacMillan entirely, including their print titles. We decided not to do that. We thought that was gonna be too extreme and not really very effective. But we made our displeasure known. And it wasn't until the pandemic happened that MacMillan turned around and said, oh, well, in the greatness of our hearts, we're going to make our books available as soon as they come out, aren't we nice?
• 58:52 Hannah: It wasn't working for them, was it? I mean, how did they think that was gonna end?
• 58:59 Monica: And I am very pro publisher. I'm not trying to pick a fight with any one publisher, but sometimes they have to remember that libraries are their friends.
• 59:11 Hannah: I mean, we're, yeah, it's, we're, you know, complimentary. Yes. Well, I don't know if industry's the right compromise.
• 59:21 Monica: Yeah, and the libraries are here for the people who do not have the money to buy from you, Mr. Publisher. If you don't let the libraries have your book, that doesn't mean that everybody's gonna then go and buy the book, not everybody can.
• 59:37 Hannah: Like most authors love, love libraries because it's a way of, you know, your book is out there getting read by more people.
• 59:46 Monica: Yeah, the authors might pick it up, have a much better take on libraries than some of the publishers. Authors realize, and one of the things I didn't mention earlier that selection librarians do, one of the things we do is assess submissions from local authors. They send, they'll send their book to us, hoping that we'll put it in the library collection. And most of the time we do, but we still have to, you know, look at it and make sure that, you know, it doesn't have bad, like outdated information or anything like that. But, you know, we put a lot of local author books into the collection.
• 01:00:24 Hannah: I do like that we have a process for local authors specifically. We got a whole page to share with them so they can follow the process.
• 01:00:32 Monica: Absolutely.
• 01:00:34: Will we be able to purchase their book?
• 01:00:36 Monica: For sure. Well, and in most cases, we're not purchasing them. We are accepting these as donation because, again, our purchasing decisions are led by customer demand and interest. And for the most part, local authors are self-published or they're published by a very small publisher and they're not able to get the kind of publicity and attention that traditionally published authors can. This means that there's not much demand for their books unless they themselves are doing something to generate interest.
• 01:01:16 Hannah: I see.
• 01:01:16 Monica: So we can't really justify spending money on books that aren't gonna get circulation, but we will take donations of local authors' books, put them in the collection. If the author wants to, excuse me, I'm getting rough here, I'm gonna get water. If the author wants to publicize their book on their own, then, you know, that will help them because the book will get circulation and won't get discarded after, say, 10 years. We give local author books much longer, we won't weed them out right away. I haven't talked about weeding at all, but if a book is sitting in our regular collection and not getting any use at all for several years, we need to make room on the shelf for other books. But we won't do that so much with local author books because they're special.
• 01:02:20 Hannah: We'll be a little gentler with them. Can you tell us about a special memory or anecdote in your work?
• 01:02:29 Monica: Oh, I have a funny one. So this just is an example of how your special interests can come into play in your work life. There was a customer one time, he liked to borrow a lot of music from us. I think it was even cassettes back then, I can't remember. This was when I was working out in the branches. So he would come in and he would say, oh, what is the music that goes bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, I wanna borrow that. Well, fortunately, because I like classical music, I would always identify what he was, because he was always interested in ones that were pretty well known as far as classical music goes, so thank goodness. But I would say, okay, here we go, here's your Mozart, here's your Beethoven. So you just never know. And if you didn't know, you would just have to say, I'm sorry, let's try and see if somebody else can help, but another musical interaction I had was with one of my fellow chorus members. She came into the library, came up to the desk, we had just started our next season, we had this big work, we were gonna be singing. And she came up and said, do you have a recording of, and I said the name of the piece, we were gonna be rehearsing. And she said, yeah, my boss was standing next to me at the desk and she said, do you have ESP or what? So yeah, the job can be fun, because you just never know.
• 01:04:20 Hannah: I paid my telepathy bill this month.
• 01:04:22 Monica: That's right.
• 01:04:24 Hannah: So yes, yes I do.
• 01:04:26 Monica: But you never know what interests of yours will come into play, because people come in and ask all kinds of questions.
• 01:04:32 Hannah: That's so true. On a semi-related note, what words of advice would you give to someone who was starting out and wanted to acquire and maintain strong skills in the area of reference services?
• 01:04:44 Monica: Oh yeah, I would definitely say, again, be a curious person. Read or view a little bit about as much as you can, like you were preparing for a trivia contest or something. It's fun, as long as you have this kind of personality, be a trivia nerd, be a reference nerd, find out as much as you can about all kinds of things, simply because that will help you search for information when you're trying to help somebody find stuff. It'll just help you make those connections between the information they're asking for and where it's likely to be found. And on that same note, I would say, develop your vocabulary and your logic skills, because that will help you with search strategies. I mean, yeah, Google's pretty good, but anything you're searching, whether it's our catalog or any search engine or special databases that you can search, the more synonyms you can think of to use for search terms, the better, because you never know what something might be tagged under. And the more you know about how to formulate a search term, a phrase, several different search terms together, using, okay, I'm gonna throw around some jargon, Boolean terms, if you are in a database that allows you to combine terms, like saying, I want to search for this term and this term, they have to be related and this is a way of searching to get both terms into the results. Or if you're doing, you know, trying to widen the search and using, I want to look for this author or this author or this author, just as an example, then you wanna get all of those results. So just knowing about how searches work and a lot of that is just logic. So that would be helpful.
• 01:07:06 Hannah: Yeah, Boolean searching is, I think, it's a really good concept to understand. And it's, I think the first time you encounter it, it's a little counterintuitive.
• 01:07:13 Monica: Yes.
• 01:07:14 Hannah: But once you get that down, it will serve you.
• 01:07:17 Monica: Why does and narrow the search and or widens the search?
• 01:07:21 Hannah: Exactly. So it melts your brain a little bit, it does.
• 01:07:25 Monica: But the other, again, though, coming back to communication skills, that's the other thing that would help you as a reference librarian or information librarian. When you're helping customers find information, you want to be able to have a good conversation with the customer to find out really what they're looking for. Because customers don't always know how to explain it. So you need to be able to know how to ask them open questions and kind of guide them to thinking about what it is they need to know so that you can then put your search together and make sure you're getting the right information.
• 01:08:05 Hannah: Those are all, that's fantastic advice. I think it's, yeah, it's really difficult to, especially if you don't know the person that are coming up and they're trying to find something and they don't know you and you don't know them and you're trying to connect with them enough to get on the same page so that you can help guide them  to hopefully what they're looking for.
• 01:08:22 Monica: And being a people person helps.
• 01:08:25 Hannah: For sure.
• 01:08:26 Monica: Yeah.
• 01:08:27 Hannah: In your opinion, what makes public libraries important in our communities?
• 01:08:32 Monica: You know what? I would say one of the main thing is expertise because we don't just provide the information or the books, we provide expertise, we help customers, we guide them to finding the information or finding their next good read. We get trained in doing effective programs for the community. We're not just coming in and saying, well, here it all is, here's our warehouse of material, knock yourself out. So I think the guidance is the big thing because again, you can go online and try to find information and often you will find some information but then you have to be good at figuring out, okay, is this correct information? Is it authoritative? Is it useful to me? And all of this stuff is what a librarian is gonna be thinking about as they try to guide you to what you need to know. So I would say the expertise is the main thing. Other things, of course, are the fact that we are supported by the taxes so we're a public institution and anybody can come in, the library is for everyone. We don't care what beliefs you're bringing in with you or whether it's political or religious or just what you think about other people. You can think whatever you want to and you can look up whatever information you want. We're going to be open to having people come in. And I would sum it up, I guess, by saying that we're a portal to connection and success for our communities.
• 01:10:28 Hannah: Well said.
• 01:10:30 Monica: Oh, and I would also say, I thought of another thing. We attract staff members who are very service-oriented, at least nine times out of 10. And I think that allows us to be highly customer service-oriented and really good at getting people what they need and getting them to want to come back. And also, I think that we are flexible enough that as service needs change in different situations, we're able to provide extra things like when we were passing out COVID tests, eclipse glasses, you name it. Making available health services, food services in partnership with other organizations. So again, I think our very strong focus on service, it's not always just about the information, it's also just about supporting the community in various ways and as an organization, we're set up to be able to do that. Obviously, we can't do everything, we can't be everything to everyone, but when we can take advantage of our staff being here and able to help in those ways, I think it's good that we do.
• 01:11:53 Hannah: Definitely. So, last question. Is there anything we didn't ask you about today that you wanted to share? So, in all of it, experience we didn't get to, any closing thoughts?
• 01:12:05 Monica: I would just say, yeah, I don't think you missed anything, but I'm gonna close by just coming back to customer service. When I started in 1984, we were known for our customer service. Customers would come in and they would have used neighboring county library systems and they would tell us how much better we were. And it was stressed to me as a new staff member, you are here for the customer, you are approachable, you're ready to help. Once they've asked their question, you walk them to the stacks of books or you walk them to the computer and make sure they're getting what they need. I haven't been in the branches in a long time, this might be harder now that we are so short staffed, but it's still the gold standard.
• 01:13:07 Hannah: I think, well, as someone who's still in the branches, we still try to do that. It can be harder, but when I came on board in 2007, that was very much emphasized. You walk the person there. I mean, if they don't want you to, you respect that, but that's the default. And we still really try to, at least in my observation, I'm not at every branch, I don't know. But that's, I believe what we are striving to do.
• 01:13:39 Monica: Yeah, I hope that still gets stressed with brand new people because that's what's gonna keep people coming back. Libraries worry about staying relevant in this age of the internet and it's all about the people skills, the one-on-one help, the expertise, being there for people and making sure they're getting what they need and treating them with courtesy and being pleasant and all of that stuff.
• 01:14:06 Hannah: Yeah, thinking of the person in front of you.
• 01:14:08 Monica: Yeah, and I am going to, and I'm gonna wrap up by putting in a plug or a good word for our union. We are a unionized library and I think that's turned out to be a really good thing. I think staff are treated better now than they used to be in several ways. And I especially want to thank our staff members who are shop stewards for the union representing us. Thank you, thank you, thank you, all of you.
• 01:14:41 Hannah: I think that's a great note to end on. Thank you for being here with us today. We appreciate you.
• 01:14:47 Monica: Thanks Hannah, this is a fun thing. I'm glad you're doing these oral history interviews.
• 01:14:50 Hannah: It's been really enjoyable.
• 01:14:52 Monica: It's awesome.
• 01:14:53 Hannah: Thank you.

*Maryland Folk Legends and Folk Songs by George G. Carey

Hannah Erickson

Monica McAbee

Hyattsville Library