Sarah M. Pritchard oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: Sarah Pritchard, former Dean of Libraries and Charles Dearing McCormick University Librarian at Northwestern University, and member, The Women's Thesaurus Task Force

Interviewers: Emily Drabinski & Amanda Belantara

Date: June 22, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; Evanston, Illinois

Amanda Belantara: Today we're interviewing Sarah Pritchard, Dean of Libraries and Charles Dearing McCormick University Librarian at Northwestern University. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History project. The interview took place virtually on June 22nd, 2022, recorded locally by Steven A. Poon at Northwestern University Library. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski.

Belantara: Hi Sarah. We're interested in hearing a little bit about your background in education. Can you tell us how you became a librarian?

Sarah Pritchard: I became a librarian after I was already in graduate school studying French and Italian literature and did not find that career path very compelling to me. And libraries were something I had always thought I might want to work in, I wasn't sure, but I happened to be at a university that had a very good library school. So I was already in one graduate program and applied to enroll the following year in the library science program. And right away I was extremely engaged by what I was learning within a week or two of starting courses in not just library science, but the role of libraries in society. And I just found it compelling. And so, it was a continuous move from me from education in the humanities and languages and literatures into academically oriented library sciences. I pretty much always was intending to work in colleges or universities or perhaps large municipal libraries that are like New York Public or Boston Public. I was looking for a large, at that time, collections centric libraries. But over my career I actually became quite fascinated by areas of services, technologies. So not literally just collections, but it was a steady but gradual progression. It was also during my time in library science in graduate school in the mid 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin, which was a hotbed of progressive activism. And it was while I was there that I started learning an enormous amount about the field of women's studies, which was in its infancy and more importantly perhaps the activism around equity issues for women, librarians, and women as customers in public libraries. So there was a convergence that started right at the beginning of my career between the academic fields of women's studies and the professional equity issues of women in the library profession.

Emily Drabinski: When you were getting your library degree in Madison, it sounds like that was a time of social change and social upheaval, can you say something about what that was like, particularly in Madison at the time?

Pritchard: It was a terribly exciting time to be in Madison, and I had been an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, which had a certain amount of activism, but we were always envious of other campuses. When we were at the University of Maryland, we always wished we were at Berkeley or Ann Arbor. And it was like, why doesn't our campus have lots of cool activism? I mean, we had, you know, I was tear gassed in an anti-war demonstration at Maryland. We weren't lacking in activism, but it wasn't as cool. So when I first came to the University of Wisconsin, boy was it cool, I was so excited to be living in Madison. The actual downtown area of Madison was full of stores that catered to activists. We had the Maoist bookstore and the feminist bookstore, and the university was coming off an earlier heyday of activism in the late sixties and early seventies that still lingered, so I was there from 1975 to 77, but there was still a huge, almost embedded fabric of activism, there were food co-ops, there were political co-ops, not just student activism, but the local community people. The political scene who ran for mayor was a former student activist, while I was a student there, one of the sort of had gone underground wanted for bombing activities, student activist was rearrested finally. So there was a trial, there was a resurgence in activism because of that. So it was a heady time in Madison coming off a number of years of such activism, and I loved it, I loved it, I was just very ready for being very engaged and participatory, and in the library science program, it translated into a lot of almost shoe leather. We were ourselves organizing, we were demonstrating we were going to community centers. We were talking about information for the people and what was the role of librarians in community activism. So it was all of a piece, I really didn't wanna leave, but of course, you know, I needed a job. Many people who I went to school with at that time never did leave, even though they couldn't immediately get a professional job, they just wanted to stay in that area. And this is true, I think I've seen of people in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, these communities have a magnetism that draws people.

Drabinski: You began working in libraries. You graduated and you began working in the Library of Congress in the 1980s, is that right?

Pritchard: 1977.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little bit about the working and professional environment for a reference librarian working at the Library of Congress?

Pritchard: When I first came to the Library of Congress, I came on what was then a very well-known internship program, the Library of Congress had for many years, they would recruit both internally and externally and they would put together a cohort every year that spent five or six months moving through the whole library undertaking projects and being given workshops and lectures about every aspect of library operations. And so, it was basically a group of 12 people, six new library science graduates and six existing workers, junior level librarians from internally. So, this was a wonderful way to start work at such a large place, at the time I was there, Library of Congress had 5,000 employees. I mean I think it's down to about 3000 now. But it was an intimidatingly large place. And of course, just being the Library of Congress as an entity was intimidating. So the intern program was a fantastic introduction to cataloging acquisitions, copyright, congressional research reference, and every aspect. And we had an opportunity to really learn about different areas that we might eventually want to work in. We were not necessarily guaranteed a specific slot at the end of that program, however, the idea was to keep on the lookout for openings because of course in a place at large there were always openings, there was always a lot of turnover. I very much wanted a job in public services ,and I was quite lucky to actually get one. But that was not immediately like, Oh yes, Sarah, we're going to give you a reference job. So I competed successfully for an entry level reference job at a time when they were expanding reference services to have more reference librarians at different service points. So they were introducing more user centric services and right in my first year or two there was sort of a reader's advisory desk right at the front of the reading room, which was a new service to try to help orient researchers as well as the sort of central reference area. And there was also a brand-new online catalog and when that kind of thing was really unheard of. And so we had a reference librarian helping people use this old VT 100 interface, very command line type of online catalog. And most people had no idea even how to look up a subject heading, we didn't have free text searching. It was in the pre-Google era. In my early days at the Library of Congress, it was, even though it was sort of all about reference, there was a great diversity. We also had a telephone reference for any kind of outside callers. And there was a little nook inside that huge main reading room where there was telephone reference. There was a reference librarian where you turned in your stack requests because when you got your request back saying Sorry, that book's not available, you often needed help. So right away I was working in an environment of user oriented multiple types of reference services and there was a big increase in user instruction and in preparation of printed materials to go along with that. So it was very fruitful and I learned a lot about online catalogs and how to deal with people who are doing research in a closed stack environment. Every once in a while, we could give somebody a stack pass, but we had to interview them about their research and make sure, have you really exhausted the tertiary bibliographies that could help you decide what books you need to request? Yes or no. In the job series that I was part of, there was a built-in promotion progression for those public services librarians where in order to progress through, it was a sort of a three step civil service grade progression, you had to develop a subject specialty. So once I'd been there about a year or two as I was going through a performance evaluation, I was sort of asked and what do you intend to target to develop, you know, over the next year or two into having a subject specialty. And the first couple of things I proposed were areas that were already being covered by other specialists. And I was told, Well, you know, somebody already does that. At the time I had no academic training in women's studies, but I was an activist in the field and I knew people and I said, Well, I would love to do women's studies. I don't have any academic classwork, I don't have any professional credentials, but I'm really super interested in this emerging field. And to my surprise and pleasure, they said, Oh great, we need that, we're getting lots of questions, we're getting lots of books. We don't have someone who's the official specialist. People are doing it sort of casually, but you know, you go girl. So I became the women's studies specialist at a time of incredible flowering of that field and also a time when librarians were coming together with both activists and faculty to try to develop resources like anthologies, bibliographies, guide books. How do you do research in this field where the subject headings are terrible and maybe they're just not enough books.

Drabinski: Can you tell us some of the challenges you face when trying to provide reference service for questions related to women?

Pritchard: Well, terrible subject headings. We were in a card catalog era, so it was a very structured card cataloging environment compared to today's metadata without free text searching with what we call pre coordinated subject headings, we had to do a lot of work with scholars and users to try to translate their research questions into the best subject headings. And many books had very vague or broad subject headings. And so you'd go to the card catalog, you know, and there'd be a hundred cards under some really useless broad subject heading, and it was a lot of headings, like Women in--, Women as--, there was a lot of extra insight that you had to bring to helping researchers. There were very few bibliographies specifically on women's studies or women's history. So you had to learn a lot about what terms were used by other subject bibliographies in order to get into the material. So really the access was hampered by poor cataloging, vague cataloging, sexist terminology. And then the resources you often had to be very creative about primary sources. That was really great primary sources if you could finally find them. But often there was a lot of training with faculty to use a primary source that they didn't realize would help them because it wouldn't be like a book that said how to track women's lives, but for instance, you could buy our own knowledge of the collections. You could show a researcher how to use Sanborn Maps to show how women lived in a certain town. But those Sanborn Maps sure were in catalog that way. Things like property ownership and wills and business records all were under husbands names because women weren't allowed to own property. So working with people to try to show them how to decipher these sources when you just didn't have the metadata, the cataloging, even the indexing was very challenging. And then gradually more and more news sources started arriving on the scene. And one of the good things at the Library of Congress is we were so comprehensive in our acquisitions. Even if these sources came from ephemeral or fringy places, we would go ahead and collect them. Whereas in many university libraries, if it wasn't emerging from a major publisher, they weren't going to buy it. But we had stuff coming in through copyright deposit. So I was able to actually retain a lot of materials and put those into bibliographies that would then help other librarians. So librarians working together to make sure that somebody was acquiring things somewhere. Also motivated a lot of us in the American Library Association working with researchers is how can we make sure the resources get created and often working with publishers to get more book reviews of their so that other libraries would buy it. We worked with a lot of indexing companies to try to get more women's periodicals indexed in things like Reader's Guide, there was only one index that really covered women's periodicals. When the women's review of books first came out, it wasn't being covered. We got mobilized to get periodicals included in indexes.

Drabinski: Were you involved in the 1982 ad hoc ALA Task Force on Women's Studies Database Evaluation?

Pritchard: I sure was, and I published a great article off that project.

Drabinski: Can you briefly describe your work with that task force?

Pritchard: We were concerned that there weren't any databases just in women's studies. So people were resorting to like how do you use psych abstracts or the MLA index, what vocabularies are used, what periodicals are covered in those indexes? So we decided different librarians would focus on different indexes and we would write up our assessment of whether that index was any good to use for women's studies. So we had to develop some evaluation criteria. And that was the particular part that I worked on because I had already been active in what we used to call the machine assisted reference section MARS, part of ALA how to evaluate databases because databases were brand new then users didn't do their own searching, librarians did the searching, it was very expensive, and you wanted to evaluate search processes. So I was already somewhat active in how to evaluate database searching. So I took that knowledge and worked on specific criteria for evaluating coverage and quality in women's studies, what magazines were being covered, what indexing languages were being used. We developed a set of criteria and we carried out a bunch of evaluations. And then I wrote it up into a nice little article and got that published.

Drabinski: In your chapter, "Developing Criteria for Database Evaluation: The Example of Women's Studies" you wrote, "The increased awareness of sexism and other biases in language has led to the use of many new terms and phrases. If these are not found in database, thesaurus so the very point of the research may be obscured and the evaluation criteria includes a section on vocabulary and indexing." Can you tell us what the committee found when they were evaluating databases at the time, and do you think that much has changed since then?

Pritchard: Well, it was a real patchwork. There was no consistency in terminology because each database came from a different publisher and these were mostly abstracting and indexing databases that indexed the journal literature, not as much monographic literature. So they all had their own internal indexing languages that they used for old style printed indexes, which were then converted into online indexes. So you had Medline, you had Social Science Citation Index, you had PsychAbstracts, you had all these indexes, many of which had just converted from a printed form and had not really expanded to a multiplicity of headings. They would assign two or three indexing terms to an article. And we had to look at the actual thesaurus used by each publisher. What is the indexing language used in social science citation index for example. And do they also index the author's abstract if the author's supplies and abstract, do they pick up on those terms in addition to the tags that they add themselves? So we found a lot of unevenness and inconsistency and lack of contemporary terminology that was very rapidly emerging in the women's studies field that everybody was coming up with new terminology for the concepts themselves that were new in feminist discourse. Some of this was coming from activists and some of this was coming from historians, you know, I remember the first time I heard the looksism, you know, it's like, well what's that? And that was new. And that of course was not in the indexing languages, but that was starting to be a term used in feminist activist magazines. Obviously this leads to the Women's Thesaurus as you can imagine, in addition to everything we found for the indexing languages, we also had the problem of the Library of Congress subject headings for the monographic literature, which we weren't even looking at in that particular article. I think things have evolved rapidly in the indexing languages for the journal literature, partly because the journal literature themselves are using these terms, so it's in people's abstracts, but also frankly the advent of free text searching. it's a little more difficult to do free text searching because you have to sort of guess after the fact. But on the other hand, you have a lot more terminology that you can try. And most databases now you just have far greater penetration of the article itself, depth of text that can be searched. So what the specific terminology is that's being used by a certain publisher is a little less crucial. But it has improved. And again, partly because publishers and databases are looking at the most current literature, they're looking at that year's journal literature. And we found that terminology changes much more rapidly in the journal literature and publishers. Will respond to that, in the monographic literature, it changes more slowly because it's based on the journal literature. Changes in history or sociology monograph aren't going to show up in an actual book for a couple years after they've already been in wide use in the journal literature and the Library of Congress subject headings were very conservative and they were very reluctant to introduce new headings until they saw it, not just once, but in enough monographic literature that they could say this is really emerging. So that meant by default you weren't going to see changes in subject headings for sometimes as long as four or five years after you had already seen that in the journal literature because it was a trailing impact trailing through the monographic literature and there was a lot of concern about that. And even working within the Library of Congress itself as a reference librarian, I did not have authority to demand changes in the subject headings, we could send suggestions, but there was a very intense review and vetting process for changes in the subject headings that was very slow and still is as we see even now, that was, you know, 40 years ago. And we still see the difficulty recently with getting the heading for illegal aliens finally changed. So much of the recent activism over especially racist subject headings, just makes me both happy and sad thinking that, well we were working on this stuff 40 years ago trying to get things changed, it just takes a very long time. And some pressure works better than others, some people have more sway than others in bringing these changes about. And often grassroots activists are not the ones that the Library of Congress is listening to or some major publisher that is producing a large database.

Belantara: Can you tell us about the Women's Thesaurus and its goals?

Pritchard: The Women's Thesaurus was a project of the National Council for Research on Women, which had just come into being a few years earlier that emerged from a lot of academic women's centers and the National Women's Studies Association was brand new, but they were really a focus on individual scholars and students, the National Council for Research on Women, which benefited from a lot of foundation funding early on, they were really looking to coordinate the research centers that were starting to grow on campuses. A great many colleges and universities and sometimes independent organizations were setting up basically research centers in the same era as the UN Decade for Women as not to be underestimated, the impact of the UN Decade for Women on the founding of these centers for research. Because of the demand, we need more bonafide research about the status of women in this country or that country or we need more historical research. So the National Council for Research was rapidly building coordination across the centers that were members of the council. And they started of course publishing directories of all the centers, where are all the women's centers, who publishes what, which women's centers publish a newsletter. And quickly from that emerged, which women's centers are collecting what, who's got a library focused on that topic at that women's center, and at these women's centers, you often had a lot of specialized in ephemeral literature. If you were the research center in one particular area, you might have had a lot of pamphlet material, for example, from one area of work like say it was abortion rights or women's development work in Africa, you know. So the council became very interested in trying to not only connect the centers, but connect the resources that were being collected and published by the centers in order to develop a database that would include all the centers the thesaurus then evolved because we realized we needed a consistent indexing language and we couldn't use the indexing languages of other publishers because it was not adequate. But really that the Thesaurus evolved out of a desire to connect the centers that were members of the council and the resources that the centers were developing, either through publications or collections. And so then it was, well how do we help these centers catalog these mini branch libraries, all these scattered little collections in these different centers? People were starting to use homegrown database software. People were growing a little file on their brand-new little Macintosh computer in their office, but they were using very inconsistent practices across the different centers. So our desire was if everybody could use the same thesaurus it would be far easier to connect all these fantastic but disparate little collections in the women's centers around the country. And that was both research centers at universities and activist centers or places like the American Association of University Women, which had a huge headquarters library, or the Business and Professional Women's Society, which was almost a hundred year old organization. But you know, had a big library aimed at professional women. There was a convergence through the Council of New Centers focused on women's studies research and universities and some of these more longstanding centers aimed at women in the professions and women's development and the sense of international development. That's what was getting a huge benefit from the UN Decade as well. So the thesaurus was a desire to connect women's centers and the resources they were developing.

Belantara: And how did you become involved with the thesaurus project?

Pritchard: Well, I was already involved with the center. I remember the first time I met Mary Ellen Capek at a meeting in New York City, and I don't remember whether she had called that meeting and there was two or three librarians and the Feminist Task Force was already known and because we published things and so it may have been that, you know, some friend of a friend, somehow a connection was made by people working at the council. Maybe one of the member centers had a librarian on their campus who had said, you know, how do we find out more about this council? It's sort of lost to my memory how that first connection was made, Mary Ellen might remember, or somebody like Sue Searing might remember Sue's Bibliography, which was actually started by Esther Steinmann, the Esther Steinmann bibliography was a watershed in women's studies reference books that came out from the University of Wisconsin. And it may have been by seeing that bibliography that people at the council said, Hey, you know, we need to get in touch with some of these librarians. Several of us came together as librarians with people at the center, there was a small number of librarians who were invited to a meeting at the National Council for Research on Women. And it may have been because people at the council became aware of some of the early bibliography work that librarians were doing; the council was an organization of centers. If you were a women's center at a university or an independent organization, you could join the National Council for Research on Women. Centers were motivated to do that because of the connections that they could then make with each other, the National Council was seeking grants to fund projects and was seeking to connect women's centers because those were its main members, you could also affiliate as an individual. But the primary membership of the council was other centers, academic research centers in women's studies and women's history.

Belantara: And so which center were you affiliated with at the time?

Pritchard: None. So the librarians were kind of a side group that was developed by direct relationships with the folks at the council and we started this work with them. Then several of us joined as individual affiliates, but we became a project of the council. Now some of us worked on campuses where there was a center, but at the time I was at the Library of Congress, there was not a center. In Washington DC, there were several organizations that were centers, but my work with the council really came about because the council convened a librarian's group.

Belantara: Thank you for clarifying. And so, what was your role in the task force and how was labor divided?

Pritchard: Well, I don't frankly remember how labor was divided, but we started collectively the task force developing word lists and different people took on different subject areas and Mary Ellen was coordinating all of it. And I went back looking in my folder and I have all these type scripts and mimeographs of these word lists. We kept trying to think of all possible language. We were trying not to duplicate existing indexing languages, or thesauri, we didn't want to just recreate the Library of Congress subject headings, we wanted to really focus on the distinctive language, the distinctive terminology. And we looked a lot at what were the collections in the different centers, what language was needed, what were those broad subject areas? So, we started developing word lists and then the librarians really came to our area of excellence, if you will, in exploring synthetic structure. Syndetic structure is the web connected by cross references. When you have a thesaurus, you have to look at, which is a broader term, which is a narrower term and which is a parallel term. And you set up all these references like see and see also, broader and narrower. That's what makes a thesaurus sort of magic is the syndetic structure. And that's what we were able to start shaping with this committee, okay, we've got to bring a structure to this thesaurus, it can't be just an A to Z list, it's got to have cross referencing, it's got to have "see also" and "see references" and that kind of structure, and of course is very intellectual, almost argumentative work, is this broader, is this narrower, is this the better term? Which one do we want to use? This went on for quite some time and I had sort of lost awareness of that until I went back looking at all these copies of word lists, Mary Ellen Capek heard on all of it, so she set the deadlines early on. I was so impressed with her level of ambition. She had decided this was going to be a published work. She was the one talking to publishers and really corralling all the content and we were providing the professional expertise on what a thesaurus, how it needed to function, and also constant refining or expanding or both of the actual terminology. I don't remember that I individually had a special role. It was very collective work.

Belantara: Could you talk next about how the task force went about securing funding for this project?

Pritchard: I was not involved with that at all. That would be Mary Ellen's area. She was prodigious at reaching out and she had access to very powerful women funders at the Ford Foundation. Miriam Chamberlain was another very powerful figure in the early years of the council. Mary Ellen did most of the work on securing grants and funding and endorsements from people at foundations. And she also did most of the work interviewing publishers based on insight from the librarians as to how to make sure this book had credibility and was properly published and not just a sort of a little quicky vanity press. We wanted this thesaurus to have as much credibility as possible. We wanted it to be seen as a valid supplement in libraries that were already using the LC subject headings or the Sears list in a Dewey library. We wanted this to be seen as an acceptable augmentation. We were very aware of the rigidity that many cataloging departments had about what terminology they were allowed to use. We wanted to do everything we could to ensure that this thesaurus would have credibility in that world. I didn't personally work on any of the grants.

Belantara: And so the goal then was to never develop an entirely new system, the idea was to really augment the existing systems.

Pritchard: That was my perception. I don't know if everybody felt that. If you were a standalone women's center, you might only have needed this thesaurus but if you were a university library, it would be more of an augmentation. I think we hoped it would be both. If you were a specialized center or small library and this was your only subject area, maybe this would fill all your needs. But in a larger library with so many other fields, they weren't going to stop using the other standardized indexing language and subject heading work.

Belantara: And so you already talked about this just a little bit, but I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about how the work actually got started.

Pritchard: It was always only ever eight or 10 people. So, it wasn't a mass outreach to all the centers except through the council itself. Because the centers were members of the council. The task force was mostly librarians and Mary Ellen Capek and maybe somebody else from the council. And frankly, I don't remember the day to day how we worked on it. There was a lot of exchanging of Xeroxes of lists. We had email, but barely, we didn't have online documents sharing. People didn't yet use email attachments even. So, it was still a lot of paper based work. We would meet as a committee during ALA or during the early years of the National Women's Studies Association. As I said more of the logistics were all being managed by Mary Ellen Capek. As I look back on it, I don't know how she did it, frankly. She was just like the Energizer Bunny or something. I don't mean to be patronizing, but she was just tireless in her ambition to see this project to fruition. And the vision was connecting the centers and she really had this great vision for how to get this huge body of information that was quite different from sort of traditional library collections, you know, how to get this huge body of an emerging field and a very interdisciplinary international grassrootsy information as well as more vetted research information, how to bring that all together.

Belantara: And so you've got this stack of Xerox lists. What was the next step then? Let's say you receive a stack in the mail or in person meeting at ALA, what happened next?

Pritchard: Kind of a brain gap for me. Mary Ellen started, or she must have had a project assistant working with her at the council, started inputting all of this information to consolidated draft texts, you know, at some point eventually there were even galleys, but I don't remember being as deeply involved at that stage. I certainly remember vetting various specific areas of terminology and parts of the list, but I wasn't involved in the actual assembly of the document.

Belantara: We understand that terms from 35 research centers, libraries, publishers, and associations were used. How were these identified and selected and how did they provide their list to the task force? Did any of these organizations' terms stand out or have a predominant impact on the task forces work?

Pritchard: So I can't answer that last piece at all as to which had most distinctive or influential lists. But I do remember Mary Ellen, and again, because these were the member centers of the National Council, the council reached out and got lists from everybody they could. And we looked at all those lists. I do remember going through all of those. And of course, there was some overlap and some complete areas of not overlap. And we sought to consolidate those terms. We did a huge aggregation and then a weeding, almost a weeding out process. But different librarians might have specifically been fascinated by the list from this or that or the other research center, I don't remember myself. I mean some of the centers had much bigger libraries, so by definition, you know, there was more terminology coming from them because they just had a larger task that they had already undertaken.

Belantara: In working on this project, were there any learning curves for you or for the group?

Pritchard: Compiling a thesaurus from scratch is really very complex. And it was actually a subject I thought I was familiar with because even when I was still in graduate school, I had written a paper about how to develop multilingual thesauri. What did you do if you were a publisher with a database that had to reach out to multiple countries? This was a very interesting concern at the time. And because my background in languages, I really thought this would be a great term paper topic, which turned out to be far more complicated. I had really bitten off more than I could chew as a grad student, but my faculty at the time were very supportive. It's like, Oh Sarah, this is a really good topic. And it's like, man, do I, you know, not see how to do this work. But I had learned a lot of the sort of guideposts for thesaurus development in this, in this attempt to understand what were the ways to assemble a multilingual vocabulary. So what was the real learning curve working on the Women's Thesaurus was what I was alluding to earlier, the syndetic structure, how to conceptually decide what's narrower or broader, what's parallel, where do you want the main term to be, and therefore, which other terms are you going to label as See, you know, and the difference between a See reference and a See also reference. And where do you want to have subheadings or not? Do you want to just create a new main heading or do you want to have like, you know, Women dash something or other? So that is a fundamental philosophical structure of a thesaurus. Do you want it to be, this is, you know, more than you may have wanted to know, but pre coordinated or post coordinated vocabulary. Do you want the person doing the research, the user to have to put the words together after the fact? Or do you want your thesaurus to already show what the combinations might be? These structural decisions were very complicated and I remember spending a lot of time as a group working on that and trying to decide on that structure and then trying to, you know, at a certain point it's like, do we have to do this? It's like, this is really complicated, but maybe we're making it more complicated than it needs to be. By the time the thesaurus got published, which I think was 94, 92.

Belantara: I think it was 1987.

Pritchard: Was it that early? Not long after the thesaurus was published and it had a big impact, we had a lot of publishing parties, we sent it to all kinds of publishers and of course the Library of Congress and centers, and, but pretty quickly in the early nineties emerged, not just the internet but very powerful search engines. Even before Google we had Yahoo, we had Mozilla. And I was very skeptical in as a librarian, Oh that's not good enough, you need subject taxonomies, you need structured searching. Well, all of us pretty much had to admit that users weren't going to put up with fussing with structured searching. So I think probably within 10 years after it was published, the thesaurus became less necessary because you could rely on the free text searching capabilities and you could import a search engine from Google to search your own cataloging. You didn't even have to develop your own search software.

Belantara: I just want to go back to what you were saying, you know, trying to decide on the syndetic structure. Were there any disagreements and how were they handled when creating the thesaurus, when making those decisions?

Pritchard: I don't recall how we handled the disagreements, but there certainly were disagreements. Maybe we all just made Mary Ellen the chief decider. I don't remember whether that was in fact how we did it. And disagreements were not unpleasant. These were complexities of terminology. It's like, well what do we like better? What, a more common term? What's a newer term? So we struggled with some of the areas, but I don't remember it being confrontational. A lot of it was sort of by consensus, common sense. It's like, look, okay, this is the better term. This is the one that's more frequent in the literature right now, or this is the one on the list from this center and they really are the experts in this field. So we're going to use their term. I'm trying to recall, and I frankly don't recall, it's just faded in my memory whether we ever had a really difficult, like how are we going to decide? I wanted to just while I'm sitting here to look and remind myself of some of the other librarians, here's correspondence between Mary Ellen and the Library of Congress in 1987 as we were trying to get them to use the books. I'm finding that we had developed internally some of our own guidelines for a thesaurus structure that we adhered to as a group. I can't tell who wrote these 10-page guidelines for thesaurus structure. And then we had forms that we used when we wanted to submit terms. We worked with international centers because they were also developing thesauri. Almost every memo I have is signed by Mary Ellen in terms of the international database project and working with a couple of women's centers, one in England, one in the Netherlands that were also developing the thesauri. The ACRL Women's Studies Discussion Group helped with a lot of the testing. By then it was not just the individual librarians on the core thesaurus committee, but this larger subject groups. We had a roster of people for the subject groups that was all these librarians. And I was in one subject area communications, I didn't even remember that, but we had the language, a literature group, the social science group, and there was a group of about 25 librarians in these subject areas. That wasn't the steering committee, but that was really how we worked on the subjects and the subject groups worked often individually with the centers in that early group. At least one person has passed away by now. But Joan Marshall, who was very prominent in the cataloging world. Ernestine Dukes, she was early on, very involved with this. She's another ARL director. Sarah Whaley, who published Women's Studies Abstracts. I suspect that she has passed away by now because there's a whole big award named after her. But again, almost all the correspondence I have is going through Mary Ellen and then these subject groups I'd sort of forgotten about that, that we did guidelines and we farmed out to ourselves a broader amount of work.

Belantara: What were some of the new terms that were introduced via thesaurus? Could you tell us about any terms that were particularly meaningful to you or the communities you worked with?

Pritchard: Well the one that always stuck in my mind is what I mentioned earlier was Looksism. Because at that point I personally had not seen it before and it came out of a lot of active feminist activist work and I was just fascinated with that concept. There were probably many other terms that I, that were new to the broader field, but maybe not new to me because I was so immersed in the literature of the time, and not only as a librarian but my own personal reading. For instance, I was an early subscriber to Off Our Backs, which was published in Washington DC and if you read that every month, you were just immersed, you know, starting in the 1970s in a lot of terminology that by the time we worked on the thesaurus probably didn't seem that new to me, but I have been away from the field for long enough that I can't remember now what was new then the language has continued to evolve. So looking at that snapshot of time in the 1980s, I'm not recalling.

Belantara: So another question that we had for you. What role do you think race and class difference played in the creation of this thesaurus and how did you think about incorporating cultural differences in the selected terminology?

Pritchard: We were as aware as we could be at that time in the evolution of feminist thought, which was to say somewhat, I would call it by today's standards not enough. But we were aware, especially because of having these international partners in other countries, we were aware deeply of the need not to be too ethnocentric in our use of terminology. And we were of aware of overtly racist terminology. I don't think we were as well informed about the subtleties. Intersectionality was not yet a word, but it was already a concept. So in the women's studies field, the phrasing we used at the time was race, sex, and class, race, sex, and class, we have to look at race, sex, and class. So we were definitely aware of that, but maybe not as sophisticated of fashion when it came to terminology. We were very aware of how bad were the Library of Congress subject headings for both race and sex, especially in very overt kinds of terminology. The classism dimension probably took more of a role in terms of international development in those years, again, because of the UN Decade, not to be underestimated, the awareness of the status of women internationally and how much country specific norms came to play in different modes of feminist activism and that a feminist group in the US couldn't just assume that its ideas would be welcome in another country. We were very highly aware of that in that time. And there was a lot of effort made to be sensitive to cultural norms because those conferences were bringing people together from so many different countries. There was a real reckoning among activists that no, you can't just import that concept to this other country and those people might have a different view. So there was quite a lot of discussion of cultural norms of sexism to a degree, racism that is as far as it was something that we could see was an overtly bad word, but did we have a lens literally every single word? Did we second guess and ask ourselves what are the implications of this word in an intersectional environment? I don't recall that discussion, but many of those concepts sort of permeated. So I would say, as I said initially as well as we could do at the time, but we probably were still somewhat elitist frankly because most of us came from university institutions and even the women's centers who were members of the National Council, this was not the grassroots women's crisis center in a town or the shelter for the battered women. This was where those folks were doing everything they could just to fund crisis situations. The centers that were members of the councils were centers at universities or independent research centers affiliated with foundations. And so the centers themselves were already coming from what of a position of privilege, even though we were desperately trying to reach beyond that.

Belantara: Thank you. And then now I just want to come back briefly to the different categories that were selected in order to structure the thesaurus, I won't read them all, but just to give you a little sampling to refresh your memory, they were Communications, Economics and employment, Education, History and social change, International women, Language, literature, religion and philosophy and so on. Do you know how these were decided upon?

Pritchard: Nope.

Belantara: And what do you think about these categories today.

Pritchard: I think perhaps these categories derived from literally the way library collections were organized, like Class P was Literature and natural sciences. We may have been just thinking about how did our own libraries, clusters emerge. Although that isn't true of all these categories because some of these span quite broad areas of a library. But I suspect it was based partly on what are the general groupings that we as librarians saw and what are the groupings that were emerging from the women's centers themselves, the lists that they sent and the sense of importance from the women's centers. Most women's centers were not collecting heavily in science and technology, most of the collecting was in health. The women's health movement was huge. So you're not going to see a lot in here about other areas like physics or something, or Women as physicists might have been something that would've been focused on under employment and not under science and technology. I think the groupings were just based on our common awareness of the growth of the field in not only in women's studies but in the type of work happening in university library collections. I'm realizing as I look at the list of who did what subject that I was in the communications list and I remember deep constant work with one of the other women in that group who published something called Media Report to Women who was this really dynamic, very flaky, dynamic activist called Donna Allen, Dr. Donna Allen. She always made sure to call herself that. She had something called the Media Report to Women, which was produced in her basement practically, and she was hugely productive in linking with international. She really broke the news to the US about female genital circumcision for example. All of this came out in the media report to women back in the day. She was also based in DC. So communication was something I worked on a lot because I could get together with Donna. She always was coming over to the Library of Congress and she introduced me to a lot of sort of people in sort of that state department public policy world, so I got, and I imagine this happened in some of the other groups that brought together like a librarian and person from a women's center. Now I'm sheepishly embarrassed to admit that the three people in the communications group was Donna Allen, myself, and Sarah Sherman, who was then the women's studies specialist right here at Northwestern University. So talk about coming full circle. I certainly remember working very closely with both Sarah Sherman and Donna Allen and each group, we didn't work together, each group kind of, you know, was its own little pod. I don't remember a lot of concern that, oh we've left something out, it was like, well maybe we'll just send this list over to the such-and-such group, was really just a way to do the initial stages of the work because once we had sort of developed these groupings, you know, then we moved toward how to consolidate the whole thing.

Belantara: How did the task force actually decide when the thesaurus was complete and what was the feeling or atmosphere once it was sent off for publication?

Pritchard: I don't remember how we decided it was complete. That may again have been Mary Ellen having to just bring down the gavel. I think we always assumed it would be revised too, which I don't think it ever has been. But I think at the time we thought, well you know, we've completed it enough, we should go for it. There was an enormous sense of elation when we knew that it had been sent to the publisher. Actually, we were hugely elated when we realized what a good publisher that it was going to come out from Oxford. It's like couldn't have wished for a better success path. And as I'm looking now at the list of subject groupings, who was in which subject, literally the individual roster. I'm realizing that I wasn't actually on the steering committee and that may have been why my memory's a little Swiss cheesy because I felt as if I was, but I'm remembering, well no I wasn't. It was Mary Ellen Capek, a great librarian from Colorado called Barbara Parker, Cheryl Sloan, who was the librarian at the Business and Professional Women's Foundation in DC, so she was hugely involved. I lost track of whatever became of Cheryl. The BPW was a really interesting boundary crossing group that started out very conventional, sort of like the League of Women Voters or something. It emerged from the early women's suffrage almost era. And it was early equity advocacy for women in the professions and in business. And it took on quite a feminist tinge in the eighties and it had a very active library, and it really was able to bridge both the audiences. This was something one was often very aware of in those years, the professional women audience, the activist audience, the scholar audience, and the public policy political audience, these were quite four different segments of audiences in a city like Washington DC, we had all of them, but the different centers didn't always address all of them. So, the National Council and Mary Ellen were independently of the librarians, they were connected not only to the centers, but to these various agencies that worked on women's educational advocacy or women's public policy advocacy. It was a blending of areas of expertise that I think was quite rare.

Drabinski: You've suggested in this interview that the era of free text searching and algorithmic retrieval makes projects like the Women's Thesaurus less necessary. Can you say more about that? Do you see any role for these kinds of projects in the contemporary environment?

Pritchard: I definitely still see a role and I guess what I would say is not less necessary but less urgent. There was literally no way to connect all these centers, databases, and library collections. So there was a feeling of urgency about literally linking the databases and the ability to link different databases and the ability to search just became easier with various internet search tools, even in the late nineties, although not as good as it is now. We didn't have metadata cross walking back then, but I mean we still made a huge leap with the advent of the internet, and not only free text searching, but the ability to upload little local databases and have them available to other people. What is still extremely important is good tagging. And even though we don't use static pre coordinated structured terminology, we still do huge amounts of metadata tagging. And it's even more important when you have Google searching metadata that you don't even see on webpages, you know, now we call it search engine optimization. There are people who are employed doing nothing but search engine optimization. And really what that means is adding more tags so that your content gets found on the internet. And so search engine optimization can be kind of done in a lazy way by just pulling terminology out of whatever document you're trying to upload or whatever website you're designing. But you can also optimize that searching by actual explicit tagging of documents, especially for archival materials where the original item might have been in very old-fashioned language. If you are in an archive right now and you're looking at the records of some women's group from the 1920s and you're digitizing and uploading that, free text searching as not going to make all the linkages you need because people view those issues now with an additional layer of terminology. Or you might actually need to cross reference some rather antiquated term that was being used at the time. If you look at something for example, like the birth control movement, you know, people were very oblique about what they called it. And if you are looking at the Margaret Sanger archives and all these letters written to her by private individuals, they're not going to say things like, you know, Hey, I really need birth control, you know, they write in a very indirect fashion using a lot of metaphors and workarounds if you will. So the need for enhancing the description of materials as we put materials on the internet, you can't just scan and do free text searches, you can, but that is only scratching the surface of access. We still have the problem of multilingual access. If you have all kinds of US documents going up and you want to reach out to an international audience, you're putting a huge burden on them if you don't try to broaden your tagging or have some crosswalking with lists from other countries. IFLA [International Federation of Library Associations] for a while really picked up on some of this work and there was a women's interest group within IFLA that looked at a lot of international database access. I don't know if that's still happening. But, so yes, I still think there's a need, but it's labor intensive to do this kind of tagging. And so smaller women centers might not worry about it as much, but I think major research centers really trying to improve access should still be thinking about how to enhance their tagging and how to have less sexist terminology. Don't just default to that Library of Congress subject heading list, which still has an awful lot of Women in, Women as, or Women something the qualifier, adding a qualifier to a word automatically reduces the importance. If you say women in business, that's not as important as saying business owners. You don't want to have to say women business owners. That's a denigration if you will. There's been very interesting studies by a linguist, a very feminist linguist, a man called George Lakoff that showed how denigrating it is when you have to add extra words to a term that means it's no longer the main thing. It's sort of like the margin instead of the center, which we've often talked about in feminist studies. If you want to center women, you don't want to have to use all kinds of add-on terminology.

Drabinski: We have one last technical question. In speaking with Mary Ellen, she indicated that the Library of Congress added the Women's Thesaurus to its official MARC code list of the thesaurus.

Pritchard: Yes, I just was looking at that letter.

Drabinski: Do you know how this generally is decided? Having worked with LOC, are the groups involved in these thesauri consulted and how did you feel about that inclusion?

Pritchard: We were very excited at that inclusion. I knew from working in the Library of Congress that was, as I was saying earlier, very elaborate process for proposing a new subject heading. Every week there was a meeting in the subject cataloging division of the senior subject catalogers who would review the proposals for new headings. And it took years for the reference librarians to be allowed to even sit in as observers in that meeting, let alone we were never allowed initially to actually propose headings. So it was a very tightly controlled process for proposing and reviewing headings. And there was an official list of additional thesauri that were considered valid for consulting to either agree that yes, we should add this heading to the Library of Congress subject headings, or we should use their term. Just because a term was listed somewhere didn't mean the Library of Congress would consider it worthy or have credibility. So to be added to the list of approved thesauri and I'm looking at this memo from Mary Ellen, September, 1989, all its one line, "Hey, we are getting mainstreamed, how about that?" And it's attached to the letter from actually not even just the chief of subject cataloging, but the chief of the MARC standards office, the MARC cataloging was very tightly controlled. What, in the MARC bib record, the bibliographic record for a book or for a subject heading, you had to enter what was the source of your subject heading? If you didn't use the Library of Congress subject headings, could you use MESH, medical subject headings? Could you use, and there was a list of what were approved to be entered into the mark record and you needed a code when we were granted this code, WOT could be in the subfield two of the six XX subject headings. So the 650s, for example, this is cataloger speak, were where you would list your subject headings. And if you didn't use the official ones, you could use alternative ones, if they were approved alternative. Now you could use your own, but then your record wouldn't get used by anybody else. If you uploaded a record to OCLC and another library was going to use it, they would look in that field to see whether your subject headings were sort of valid or just fringy. So to be designated an official code for the Women's Thesaurus meant that anybody who used those headings had a leg up getting their bibliographic catalog entry able to be shared with credibility, again, it was all about credibility. I mean, you could have used those headings, but someone would not have necessarily used your cataloging record. They would've gone ahead and redone it with other headings. But once the thesaurus became an official source, then if you listed that in the mark record in that code, then that meant that somebody wouldn't have to redo the cataloging work. So it was a huge ease for catalogers in other libraries to know that the Women's Thesaurus was one of the official source books for subject headings. And it was one of the outside non-LC librarians who was part of our group that wrote to the Library of Congress an official request to request this. One of the things I found while working at the Library of Congress is that it was far better for a librarian on the outside to write and request these than for me on the inside.

Belantara: So what do you think about the Women's Thesaurus project now? Would you have any advice for somebody taking on this type of project?

Pritchard: It was very exciting project to be part of. We really felt like we were doing something, and not only we were doing something, we were crossing professional boundaries as well as obviously disciplinary, but it was, it felt so meaningful to bring together, you know, scholars, librarians, people administering women's centers, funders. And my feeling was that although it was very linked to a certain moment in time, it was very valuable for, in a permanent way, for showing the possibility that cross-functional work and the benefit of the people who understand the tools, the people who understand the domain, and the people who understand the sort of policy that has to go into this. And that's what I would urge people looking at projects like this today. Any kind of project related to developing resources, you've got to have the people who understand how those resources are used and needed, and then what are the organizations and tools that you need to make it happen, you can't take a narrow view. As I said, I don't think this particular project would happen today, partly because there were fewer rigid boundaries back then among women's organizations. You could drop in and out of a lot of these organizations and everybody was very welcoming. We didn't have as detailed an array of organizations, so there was fewer places to go to work on things. And so it was easier to converge everybody in a sense. It also took a huge amount of energy from literally one woman to really push it through. And so you need sort of a combination of a very outcome driven leader and then a big team that is committed to the vision of that, I don't think either could have done it without the other.

Drabinski: Thank you so much, Sarah for that.

Pritchard: And thank, I want to thank both of you for doing this. It really refreshed a lot of my memories of what we were doing back then and why we were so energized.