Lillian Castillo-Speed oral history interview, 2022.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection

Interviewee: Lillian Castillo-Speed, Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Interviewers: Emily Drabinski & Amanda Belantara

Date: June 10, 2022

Location: Virtual Interview; University of California, Berkeley

Amanda Belantara: Today we're interviewing Lillian Castillo-Speed, Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The interview was conducted for the "Ways of Knowing Oral History Project." It was recorded virtually on June 10th, 2022. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski.

Belantara: Hi Lillian, we're so glad to have this opportunity to talk with you today. We'd like to start by hearing a little from you about your background and education, and what led you to become a librarian.

Lillian Castillo-Speed: Oh my gosh, that could be a long story. Well, I was born in East Los Angeles. I grew up in San Gabriel Valley, and was the first in our family to go to college. Went to UC Riverside. I was an English major, and later decided to go to library school. That's the long part of the story. Ended up at UC Berkeley, and I got my master's in library science degree there in 1983.

Belantara: How did you decide to go into librarianship?

Castillo-Speed: Ah, okay, well, that's a long story. Well, when my husband and I moved to U.C.- Santa Barbara, because he was getting his PhD there, and our son Nathan had just been born. So I was with my son and had wonderful years with my son as he was growing up. And then he needed to go to preschool, I needed to do something else. I had not finished my graduate work in English at that point. I found an ad in the paper to be a volunteer at a high school library, and I went every Thursday. I looked forward to it, got dressed up for that one Thursday. Anyway, an actual job opening came up in another high school and I got recommendations to apply there. And I got that job as a library tech. There was a librarian there and she had her own office. And Susan and I, the other library tech, we didn't have our own office, but we were always out in the front desk where all the action was with the students. And anyway, I wanted to go and get some more skills as a library tech because I had no skills. I hadn't been trained in library stuff. This was way back before the internet. And I found out that there was a library tech training program at the Santa Barbara City College. I went there, I took the bus, went there, walked in the building, and they said, "No, we don't have that program anymore." And I said, "Well, do you know of any other place that has a library tech program?" Because there was no way to just look it up on Google, whatever. But they said, "Oh, well, go talk to the librarian on the campus." So I went into the library, there was a woman at the front desk, and I told her, I asked her, "I wanted to get library tech training." And she said, "Well, do you have a bachelor's degree?" And I said, "Yes." She says, "Well, you should go to library school." And that was the first time that that possibility ever came into my head that I could just go to library school. So I applied for different places. When I got an offer from Berkeley and a little scholarship for that program, then we decided after my husband's a PhD program was over, we got a moving van and we moved up to Berkeley so I could get my library degree there.

Belantara: Oh, I was just going to ask, what year was it when you started your library degree?

Castillo-Speed: Oh, 1981. Yeah, it was hot August time when we moved into married student housing on the campus, and very, very old buildings. But yeah, it was wonderful to be in Berkeley.

Belantara: When you started the program, was there anything that you found most interesting about the field?

Castillo-Speed: Well, I was looking forward to anything having to do with digital. Oh, I mean, well, what did we call it? Computer, we used to call it computer stuff back then, because that was just coming up, and that's where I thought it would just get a basic degree for librarianship. But then I ended up taking, what do they call them, like independent units in learning how to do some software program. I can't remember what it was, but I got a unit for learning how to use that program. And I kind of thought that's where things were going and that's where I could, that's where I should be. I should be learning how to do computer stuff.

Emily Drabinski: Can you tell us how you came to work at the Chicano Studies Library?

Castillo-Speed: At library school, I had a friend named Peter Latino, and he recommended a course that was in the library school curriculum called Ethnic Bibliography. And it was taught by a librarian on campus named Francisco García Ayvens. And I thought, "Well, I'll do it." I didn't really know anything about it, but I signed up for the class, and that's how I found out about the Chicano Studies Library, because I was going to go to that class. And part of the class was giving tours of different ethnic libraries in the area, public and academic, just anything that was some ethnic focused libraries. And so his library, then the Chicano Studies Library, was one of them. When I walked in, that was first time I had... well, the time I'd been on campus, that changed my life, walking through that door, which I can see in my mind very clearly, 104 Wheeler Hall. And I became a volunteer. I was in the class and just wanted to do everything that Francisco was doing. And he showed me collection development things. And everything that he was working on, like another person that was working there is now, like a lifelong friend that I have. And yeah, that was very important for me in my life, in my career.

Drabinski: Can you tell us anything about what sort of feeling on campus was around Chicano issues at that time? Is this still 1981?

Castillo-Speed: 1981, yeah, and I was not that connected with, as a graduate there didn't seem to be that much activity, like marches or anything like that. So, I was not really drawn into anything. But when I decided to focus on Chicano librarianship, I took a class in Chicano history, and just became more aware of the history and the issues, the concerns, and where I was In that arc of history. And also through Francisco, because he recommended books for me to read to just make me more aware of my history. I had been taking Spanish ever since high school because I'm not a native speaker. We didn't get Spanish when we were young, but my grandmother always wanted us to speak Spanish. And so that was like a personal goal of mine to please her and to try to become a Spanish speaker. So when I was in college too, I took Spanish. So then also when I was in library school, I also took summer class in Spanish. So I just kind of just kept that going up. And also there were like tutors and teachers that had classes offsite and you'd pay for them, and then we'd speak in Spanish, that kind of thing. Once I knew that I wanted to be in the Chicano studies, librarianship world, then I tried to learn more about Chicano studies and Chicano history.

Drabinski: Can you tell us about your initial thoughts about the need for a specialized vocabulary for these collections?

Castillo-Speed: That came as I was in library school, and again, I was being mentored by Francisco and also by Richard Chabrán, who at that time was the Chicano Studies Librarian at UCLA. And they were both part of the Chicano periodical indexing project. And so I started to learn about that just from being in Francisco's office. I just remember him telling me everything, telling me what he was working on, what it was. I didn't realize till later that that was like, the very beginning. I mean, that he was in the middle of a lot of transitions there like from there being a network of Chicano librarians who wanted to create an indexing project so that Chicano movement journals would be accessible to reference tools. Because at that point they weren't, they were not included in the Reader's Guide. So one of the transitions, there was a librarian group that worked on this, but then I realized that the project became more and more centered at Berkeley, and that Francisco was the head of that basically. He was the one that was keeping it going for the most part with Richard's help, getting help from the other people, but it wasn't like a cooperative kind of thing. It was mostly, they were there making sure that it kept going. So that was a transition. They were transitioning from the actual index was being published by G.K. Hall, but then they stopped publishing it. And so the Chicano Studies Library itself, which had its own publications unit, decided to publish it on their own. So that was another transition. So, it's only looking back, I see that when Francisco was telling me about these things, the project was in transition on different fronts. And back to your question, the vocabulary, at the beginning, it just seemed like if you're going to have an indexing project and you're going to index, then you're going to have to decide how are you going to apply subject headings to the things that you're indexing. So the Chicano Thesaurus was a tool, a necessary tool. It wasn't like, oh, people got together. Wouldn't it be nice to have a nice vocabulary, but it was something that they actually needed. It was something necessary. In order to have an indexing project, you had to figure out what a project was going to use in order to give subject access to materials. So I didn't see the Thesaurus itself as being something that you just create on your own, just because it would be nice to have a Chicano controlled vocabulary. It's because they actually just needed it. But it did interest me, and I think now maybe because I had been an English major, just language in itself. So I think that's why I wrote an article when I was in library school. I mean, I wrote a paper, it was actually a paper for a class to get credit. And it was from my interviews with Francisco and Richard and other librarians, and it was called "The Usefulness of the Chicano Thesaurus." And so I just wrote about it, what I was learning at that point. So that experience of having to write a paper, I had to write a paper, so I had to go interview other people, I had to take notes, I had to get bibliography, all that focused my attention on Thesaurus at that time. So that's how I remember my first experience with the Thesaurus and why it was important.

Drabinski: Did it feel when you were learning about it, like a political project or just as a utilitarian one?

Castillo-Speed: During that time when I took that class, met Francisco, walked in the door. From that point on, for me it was all political. I mean the work, the space, the library itself when I heard about the history of it and how it came to be out of a political movement. So it's hard to separate that work from what was not political because it was political. It was all political.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little more about the Chicano Periodical Index?

Castillo-Speed: Yes, that was the beginnings of the Chicano Database. So there have been some articles written about that time period. I'm just trying to think of 40, 50 years ago of what the state of computer technology was and what it is now. So back then, there were key punch operators, punch cards, I'm trying to think of the terminology. But anyway, in order to write a program, and we did learn this in library school, we did have a class where we had to learn how to write a program. We didn't go to a keyboard and type in anything. You had to go to a machine and it was a keyboard, a key punch. Once these cards were punched out with the little holes that indicated the program you were trying to write or the program lines for a program, you had to submit it. On the Berkeley campus there was a place to take them and put it in a box. And a technician there, or student, whatever, would then go and put it into the mainframe of the campus and it would get entered. And then two or three days later, you'd go and you'd try to pick up and see if the coding was accepted or if there were mistakes in it or something. So that was how it was when I was in library school. The Chicano Periodical indexing project began around the time when things had to be done that way. So that, from what I understand, indexers have something in hand, a journal looking at an article, and then they'd fill out worksheets, and the worksheets were sent to a central place. And then from there, they were coded into a mainframe. I wasn't there at that time. So I'm just imagining how that would work. But again, this was at this transition time when I found out all about this. Things were changing. Okay, about the periodical indexing project. There was a group of librarians in California, mostly some Texas, I think in Arizona and New Mexico that agreed to become indexers. They filled out worksheets, they were assigned different titles of Chicano journals. So they were librarians who had access to subscriptions to these journals. They signed up, they sent in the worksheets. It ended up being that Berkeley was the processing place and Francisco would be the one to make sure people were doing their assignments, and then putting them into a computer program. Okay, so then there was a company called Voort Corporation owned by Tom Holt. And he was the person who was contracted to make this data come out into, what is it called, printer ready pages that were then sent out to GK Hall, the publisher. And the pages that were printed out of the index were the actual the ones that came right out of the computer printer, formatted. They became the pages of the book of the index. The first two volumes of the index or the result of that process.

Belantara: It sounds like Francisco was heavily involved in terms of coordinating and organizing the group. Did all of this work occur in different places? Did people ever come together to do some of the indexing work? And when people were working on this, do you have any idea what the atmosphere was like and how did people manage to actually get the work done?

Castillo-Speed: First of all, I have to say that I was not there at the beginnings of that. So I don't know, Richard Chabrán would know more about the meetings. It wasn't that easy to get together, I assume during that time period. But the people that are listed as indexers in the early volumes, I've known most of them through the years, and I know that they are committed. I can see why they would be part of this project. I'm assuming that they thought it was very important and they did have to make it part of their work time or their like professional development time. I know they listed, people would list themselves, like when they were coming up for reviews or something, they would say, "Oh, I'm an indexer for the Chicano Periodical Index." So that was something that that could motivate them a little bit. But I think it was mostly because they thought it was an important thing to do. If it were me, I'm just projecting on to what I'm thinking they might be thinking is that if I knew that a sizable and important portion of intellectual printed, published history was not accessible and it was because they were not mainstream and that they had to do something not mainstream in order for that material to be visible, then I would also feel motivated by that thinking like, if we don't do it, nobody's going to do it. So we've got to do it. Seeing how things turned out afterwards, my take on it would be that that impulse or that motivation was strong there at the beginning, but as time went on, I think it became more focused with Richard Chabrán and Francisco García and that people saw them as the leaders and they'd actually were the ones, if it wasn't for those two people taking that leadership role and even putting more of their time and making more connections and try to get funding and those kinds of things, I don't think the project would still be going on. So, yeah, so I think it was the leadership that kept things going.

Belantara: In your article, and in some of Richard's writings as well, there's mention of the Chicano Classification System. Did that come before the thesaurus? And if so, was that used in the creation of the thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: I'm not sure which one came first. I do know that Richard Chabrán used to be the librarian before Francisco of the Chicano Studies Library at UC Berkeley, I'm assuming it was during that time, because the classification system preceded Francisco. It could have been like almost at the same time. It was like in that same, time period maybe it's kind of an analogy, the periodical indexing project needed a tool, needed the thesaurus. The Chicano Studies Library, when the students were starting to organize it and found a space and a reading room and had bookshelves and they started to collect books, they needed to start figuring out what order are we going to put these things, how do we organize this? And they were not library school students. Richard himself, he was an anthropology major and got pulled into this. The way I hear it, they sent him to library school. The group, they needed somebody to go to and they figure who's the most likely one that can go and get library training and come back to help make this library work. So Richard went to library school. But during that time period, the students, and I'm not sure if Richard was part of that at that point, but anyway, they consulted with librarians in the mainstream library, the main library for help. How do you do this? How do you find it those numbers that you put on backs of books? I've heard that they were helpful, and they told them about the Library of Congress Classification system, okay? But that the students, and I'm including Richard in that, because I'm not sure if he was in there, but he was a student. They saw right away that if they used the Library of Congress classification system, everything in the library, the Chicano Library would be under E184.5 something. And they wouldn't have that. That would just be so unusable that they just couldn't do that. So anyway, so they decided to take over the classification system on their own. So for instance, music has the ML classification. So they made music, Chicano music. So the Chicano music books would be under M, the Chicano art books would be under N, the literature would be under variations of the P class rather than putting everything in under E184, they had to create that. They made a modification of it. And I do have a copy of, I think it's the original copy of that was printed out on computer paper with lines on it and holes on the side. And it's been marked up and edited. When the Ethics Studies Library was formed, the Chicano Studies Library became part of the Ethnic Studies Library. And I actually gave it to our cataloger. The cataloger was using- had to use that to understand how the Chicano studies collection was organized because that's how it had been organized from the beginning. I'm not sure which one came first, but it was all during that time period. I wasn't there at the time, but that's like the legend, the lore, the history that pulls me in. And I repeat to people who come, when I give classes, library classes for students coming in, and I tell them the history of the library and the history of the collections and everything. I've repeated the story many times. And while we're talking about it, the students came upon the class of E and PS, which is literature, language, and literature. And they were trying to find a place to put Chicano literature. And at the time, and I guess it still is, that if they put it in the PS class, they would have to make a distinction between things written in English and things written in Spanish or any other language. And they wouldn't have that at all. For them Chicano literature, this is very political too, could be any language that was just an artificial division. So they created PX as Chicano literature. And that we still have PX. I mean, that is where we have our Chicano literature on the shelves in the Chicano Studies collection, at the Ethnic Studies Library. If I have time, I always try to tell that story because they took it on their own. I mean, they saw what the structure was supposed to be, but they made it their own. They altered it, they changed it so it could reflect what they wanted to show, how they wanted things to look, how the world should look from their point of view. Because the shelves of a library are like a world in themselves with all this different areas.

Belantara: In your article, "The Usefulness for the Chicano Thesaurus for Indexing Chicano Materials" you wrote, "It was to be what Chicano librarians had long dreamed of, a subject heading list of their own, which would provide vocabulary control." Could you talk more about this dream?

Castillo-Speed: Yeah, well, first of all, I was making an assumption about what I think would've been their dream. But when I say dream, I think I was thinking more in terms of when the Chicano periodical indexing project was conceived, the way it stated there, it sounds like for decades, but more just when people started to focus on it and think about that an indexing project would be a great thing to do. I think that's as far as like long dreamed for. And also, I think it goes back to what I said about the PX classification, that it would be something of their own, that there wouldn't be mandated by what was established already or what was supposed to be. And that often would leave out things that were important to Chicano culture or Chicano experience, Chicano history. Just because they didn't fit. That's what I was thinking is that they did dream of it, and they did see it as important because then it would be their way of expressing themselves.

Belantara: Related to that, what does vocabulary mean for access?

Castillo-Speed: That's a big question. I mean, a lot of things come to mind. One is very political, right? And very current. The way people are named, or language that's used to describe people is very powerful. It could be very hurtful, or it could be empowering. Language I think is potent. I mean, it's almost like when you're dealing with it, you have to be careful. And if you, let's say a group of people decides to create a language, create a list of subject headings, then every word becomes important. Because that means that you're choosing that one as acceptable to a group of people. And you're just one, maybe you're like a handful of people, but how do you know it's going to be acceptable to a lot of people, to everybody who might read that. It's very emotional that people can be classified, cataloged by the words that are used to describe them, and they lose their humanity. At the same time, if you have the courage, and I'm not saying me, I'm saying the people who've created the idea of even having a thesaurus, and saying like, we're going to include all these words that maybe, oh, my grandmother used or these words that I grew up with and these words that we know among us that we use all the time. Even if they sound whatever foreign or clunky or odd to other people, we're going to just say yes, even the word Chicano, I mean it goes even just thinking of that, to call yourself Chicano or call anything Chicano. I mean, you're already taking a stand against a lot of other stuff. So, yeah, so I think creating, deciding to create, I mean with each word, I mean I'm sure some of them were like very easy to figure out, like, okay, they didn't have to think about that much, but I think some of the words they had to think about, oh okay, we're going to include that word. Okay, yes. Okay, what's the related term to that? Oh yeah, there's another term. So yeah, that's language and is very important of, I mean that's a no brainer, but I'm having in mind, the more recent battles about the term Illegal aliens and how that certain language that was and is used by the establishment and how there's other language that could be used instead. And how that first term is so hurtful, even if you're not in that category of people that is trying to describe, it is hurtful, and it just shows how powerful a language is. So I guess the people that were putting together the thesaurus were pretty aware that they were creating something that some people would not accept, but because of the material that they were trying to index, it made sense. The material brought up these words. If there was a concept that they were trying to convey, it'd be better to use a term that was not hurtful than to use one that was hurtful. I mean, why pick that other one if you could pick something else.

Belantara: Can you mention a few of the terms that might be most meaningful to you personally or to researchers that you work with?

Castillo-Speed: You know what, in preparing for this, I had printed out a list. I don't know if the paper's going to wrinkle here, crinkle. The one off the top of my head, I can think of the one that's used or the other terms that are used instead of Illegal aliens from the beginning was Undocumented workers. Later as the material evolved or there was other types of materials, it wasn't just the worker aspect that was important or needed to be described, but it was also the people that were living in the United States who were undocumented. So then we've added the term Undocumented residents. And then I think we've had for a long time, Undocumented children. So just to give you the other side of Illegal aliens, over the years, another term that's come up was Racial profiling. And I just to mention that the way that we do the periodical index, now it's the database. There are index terms which are in the thesaurus, but there are also supplementary terms. And those are terms that are people, places of things. That's where we would put a term that was coming up and we weren't sure was going to become an index term yet. So at the time when a lot of news articles and talk was about racial profiling, we made it a supplemental term. Sometimes what happens is that another term takes over. You decide, okay, this is going to be Racial profiling, and then turns out it's going to be another term that becomes like, oh no, everybody's calling it this, so then you have to change over. So that's why there's like this waiting period. Finally, it took hold, it became a term. And so we added that. I'm trying to think of ones that I wasn't involved in adding, there was a project to actually add two areas to the thesaurus that needed to be fleshed out or we needed to have more terms in those areas.

Belantara: How did you actually start getting involved or being the person in charge of the Thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: Well, that came with the periodical index. It was 1984, Francisco decided to resign in order to go back to LA to be with his family. And I was working as a cataloger on a temporary project in San Francisco. But I was always coming back to the Chicano Studies Library to continue doing volunteer work there, hanging out. When he resigned, he gave me a little bit heads up on that. But anyway, I applied to be the temporary librarian to take over from his position, and I was named the temporary librarian. And then when the position was opened up for the permanent position, then I applied for that, and I got the job. So with the job came everything that Francisco was doing, which was organizing at coordinating the periodical index, which was becoming, at that point the database. There was a transition that was beginning around that time. And with that was the thesaurus. I mean that they're intricately involved. You can't separate one from the other. So I had to keep up working with that. And I just to list, just to be clear, I was never alone. I was not left on my own to do this. Francisco was always available by phone. Richard, who was still the Chicano Studies librarian at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center was always available by phone. I still remember the phone number because I think I talked to him daily because he was in the system, he was at UC. He knew how things worked, and he was also mentoring me on just being a librarian at UC, not just the Index. During those years, and still to some extent today, I don't see myself as being like, I'm the one person totally in charge of the project. Sadly, Francisco passed away in 2018, but Richard and I, I see us, is co-equal of being in charge of what's going on. I took over from Francisco, but never left on my own to just figure out what to do.

Belantara: And when you first started taking over some of the work that Francisco was doing then with the thesaurus and the database, did you have some learning curves, and how did you go about acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge?

Castillo-Speed: Oh my gosh. Okay, so what comes to mind first, I know there's probably a lot of things, but what first comes to mind is the equipment, the computer, the system. I think by the time I met Francisco, he had already purchased a system called the Alpha Micro 1000. I don't know if Alpha Micro is still out there or if anybody's heard of it, but it was revolutionary at the time. It ran on Alpha Basic, its own version of the basic language. And what was different about it was that it you could have several terminals connected to the one mother computer. And so that meant that he could have one terminal in our, I couldn't even call it a computer room, but it was just the other side of his office. And then he had a monitor in his office, have a monitor in the reading room, and different people could be adding data to it. And that whole thing about different terminals was like, whoa, that was really neat. The other thing I want to mention is that he told me that he had used one year's allotment for collection development to buy that, I think it was like $10,000 at the time. And that means there were no books bought, no serials. I mean he probably kept the serials, but the whole book budget went to that to just buy that one. So he took a chance. I mean, he bought it, and with that came the programmer person that I mentioned to Tom Holt. So the learning curve that I have in mind right now was working with Tom Holt. He was the kind of person that... looking back on it, he was not the most pleasant person, but he taught me a whole lot. And he was, at times seemed impatient. But I think I needed to have somebody to be impatient and not mess things up. Because I think he was trying to let me know that I was in charge. Francisco wasn't there, Richard wasn't, I was the one that could be messing things up if I didn't do it right. And so I remember this one night, it was night, it ended up being night, but it was the end of the day, for some reason I started some program, and I think he had said something like, "Okay, just let it run until something else happens." Okay, so then I waited and waited and waited and waited, and I was so afraid that if I touched anything, I was going to mess something up. I was there for like a couple hours after work. I don't know how long I was there, but I always remember that I was just that feeling that I'm going to mess it up either by not doing something or by doing something. And I don't know how I got home that day or how I slept that night. It turned out to be okay. But I think he wanted me to be in that kind of state so that I wasn't going to do something rash or mess things up. But anyway, that was a big learning curve for me. And then also just realizing, just trying to learn everything I could. Again, this was when we didn't have desktop computers, we couldn't go look up the how to do things. You had to rely on somebody like the programmer to tell you you're doing it okay or not. Another thing I learned was to be very precise with programmers and try to speak their language even though I'm not a programmer. I think instead of just saying, okay, I wanted to do this and this and this, I could be very precise and that would help things. And then the programmer would respond to that positively, and I could work better with them. So anyway, that was a learning experience for me.

Belantara: Can you just paint a picture of what it was like when you actually just sat down at the time, state-of-the-art system, what was it like when you sat down and how would you get started to just do that work?

Castillo-Speed: Yeah, gosh, some of the work was inputting data from worksheets that were sent in, and that started to dwindle a bit. But there were worksheets when I first started from outside indexers. And then a lot of it was us, myself putting in indexing, putting material, putting data in. And then we also hired students after the worksheets were already edited, I already figured out that okay, these are good to put in, and then the students would just put the data in. So yeah, the way it looked was completely different. Small screen, all black. You're working in basic language, it's kind of like DOS, but it's even more basic than DOS. And it was the Alpha Micro version of Basic. You had to learn that, and for what we were doing, it was just over and over again. I didn't have to learn a whole lot of other stuff. But there would be a template. I can't even remember if there was something that was there and we filled it in or if it was just you input something, and then something would come out next line or hit return that I can't even remember. But I do know that all we did at that point, it was all numbers. I mean, for the most part it was numbers. Let me back up. What I meant was if you're inputting a title, you would type in the title because that was probably a unique piece of information for the database there. It is unlikely, like if there are a lot of poems, there would probably a lot of them called mother or love or something like that, right? So that title could be repeated, but often the title was not repeated. So that would be unique. You type it in. And then the author actually had a number for an author, and so you would type in the number for that author. I can't remember if it would show up on the screen, you type it in and then it'll tell you what the number was and you type it. That I can't remember. But I do know that the terms themselves all had numbers. So Chicanas was 638, like Richard's phone number that was always going to stay in my brain. 638 is Chicanas. I probably could remember some other ones if I thought about it. It was like typing in numbers. And then you'd hit return, and then you could review it. And then when you were ready to make a printout camera ready, that was camera ready pages, then that was another process, and you'd print it out and it would come out. You'd hear that the printer typing it out. Thank you for inviting me to remember that because it's so different now.

Belantara: And so over the years, you worked with a group of people to revise the Thesaurus. So how were revisions decided upon with each new edition of the Thesaurus? And as you were making these revisions, were the changes and decisions actually documented as well?

Castillo-Speed: That's a good question. I think I documented everything I did on the database in a series of notebooks written. So probably in there, it's there buried in there. But at some point the software was such that we could keep old terms. I do know that when we changed a term, we would put like a use for. If we had an old term, we would say use for and then show the old term. But it wouldn't document like when we did that in the program itself. So that's something that probably should have been done more diligently. But I know, it's in my notes. If I or anybody ever goes through those notes, they might find it. But yeah, so there was another part to your question.

Belantara: How did you decide it's time to revise and publish a new edition of the thesaurus? How would you go about making that decision? And then how would you decide on which revisions actually needed to happen?

Castillo-Speed: Okay, so I actually see it a whole different way. It's not like, isn't it time for a new one? It was so organic as part of the indexing process, as we were indexing, we needed to have a new term. So we added a term. And it ended up being put in the thesaurus, like in-house versions. And then at some point, and I wasn't even that involved, I'm trying to remember when was the last time we actually printed one out, and then like a paper kind of thing and sent it to indexers. That might have been so early that I don't remember that. But more recently, the thesaurus is embedded in the database. Major revisions that came out was due to somebody from the outside saying that we should make those changes. This is what I'll tell the story about my working with Yolanda Retter-Vargas, who was the new library after Richard had left the UCLA Chicano Studies Library. She wasn't the one that came right after him, but in the mid-2000s, she was the librarian there. I started hearing from other people saying, "Oh, Yolanda doesn't like the Thesaurus, she's going to get in touch with you." And I'm thinking, "Oh, wonder what that's about." So finally she did get in touch with me, and she was concerned about the terms relating to LGBTQ and also the terms that should be in there describing Latinos in the United States and what countries they came from. So she and I wrote a grant, got some money, we got money from our own library, the Librarians Association of the University of California. And it was a grant to revise the thesaurus to add those terms in there. And that was a successful grant. We got two extensions to it, we needed more time, but we actually, we did finish and that, and those were major additions. It wasn't just changing a word here and there. That was like a whole concept that were brought in that was Yolanda's doing, making that happen. So I guess to go back to the original question, I love my work, but there is a lot of it, and I can't spend as much as I want to on the thesaurus and the database. That's the dessert at the end of the day. Like if I can make time, oh boy, now I get to work on the database, but if I did have more time, I think I would be more conscious about the regular revising of the database or making sure it's okay. And then the other thing I would like to explain or mention is that the fact that the latest version isn't available right now, there is a version available on the Ethnic Studies Libraries website. I had worked with EBSCO, EBSCO is the company that distributes the Chicano database. And several years ago, we had discussed making the Thesaurus available for people who use the database. And I pushed back a bit and said we really need to do some more work on it before it gets more public that way. And so in the intervening years, I contracted with a consultant. We did work in two different periods, and we made a lot of great changes, but we haven't gone... I haven't had a chance to go back and start that conversation over with EBSCO. For people who have passwords and can get into our maintenance database, there is a list, you can actually see the living list, the living thesaurus, and because of the interest in the Thesaurus lately, I've actually figured out that I probably could with our current programmer, print out that list even as a PDF and just have it on the database. But I guess what I'm trying to say also is that it does keep changing. If I added a term today then does that mean that I send out as a revised list? I guess I could now that we can update things more quickly. But in the past, I think it had always been like a big chore to think, oh, we're going to have to do a whole project to revise of the thesaurus.

Belantara: So, the Chicano Periodical Index, CPI for short drove the need for the Thesaurus, and then the Chicano Database came about. So basically, the database is coming from the index, but can you talk about how that actually came to be and when did you switch from talking about the CPI to just referring to it as the Chicano Database?

Castillo-Speed: When I came on the scene, G.K. Hall had published the first two printed CPI reference books, huge books. And then as I mentioned, the Chicano Studies Library itself published the third volume and on, and I think we went up to a few more volumes after that. So that was the printed life of the index. But we started exploring other ways to make the database available to people electronically so that there could be an interface with the data. So we did explore and we did publish some CD-ROM versions of the database. Here I'm going back and forth. So this is right at that point because it was a database once you put it onto a electronic thing, it becomes the database in my mind. And that went on for a while. We actually had customers and we were sending them CD-ROM updates, but it was also at a time when I think the university became more aware of through different initiatives. And then Richard Chabrán was part of that as well as trying to get the university to be more cognizant of the need to support Chicano Latino resources at the University of California. And so he and I were on a committee where the state of California was encouraged to provide some funding to the University of California to enhance the collections in that area. But one of the things that was recommended is that this CD-ROM of this database, that it be distributed to all of the campuses for free, that they all have it somehow. And that ended up being supported by the University of California administration at a very high level. And some people from that high level came to see me one day after that. And they introduced me to the idea of having not just the CD-ROM but to have it online, and that they could connect me with people at RLG, Research Libraries Group. That was nearby, that was like in Mountain View, Palo Alto area. With that introduction, I met with people there and they made it into a file that could be accessible. And I can't even remember now what the interface looked like, but it was an interface. And then we had a contract with them, we got royalties from that. So that's when like the indexing, I should say the Chicano Periodical Index became the database during that period. We weren't publishing it as a paper, and we weren't publishing it as a CD-ROM. It became available through this RLG service, and then RLG switched over. It became an OCLC database. I think it was just like RLG was going into a different direction. I think that's what it was. And so its databases became OCLC databases. Same thing happened years later. OCLC databases, select ones were taken over by EBSCO. So now our contract is with EBSCO, and EBSCO has its own EBSCO host interface. And so that's what people see, or libraries see when they subscribe to the Chicano Database. That's where Index became database.

Belantara: With all of those transitions between all of these different companies, were you then asked about whether or not you still wanted to be working with that company?

Castillo-Speed: Not really because we didn't have much choice. I mean, we could go back and say, okay, let's create our own product. I mean this has been done by other projects where they made their own interface, they sold their own product, and they weren't part of a bigger company. And we've always kind of had that in mind that that would be like a... I don't how to say it, emergency exit or something because we couldn't rely on businesses. We had a good relationship with RLG, but they had a business decision to make, and we just would go along or not go along. I mean, we couldn't say, "Oh, why don't we do this instead?" No, we weren't part of that at that level. Same thing with OCLC, that was more like, this is a big change. We're not the only ones that this is affecting. This is happening to a lot of databases. You can't fight that. I mean, couldn't see how we had a way to fight that. And then when EBSCO came along, we had a really good relationship with EBSCO at the beginning. I mean we still do, but we did have a lot more person to person contact. They came to visit, they came to talk. There were different things that they asked. They even asked if we could change the name of it, of the database. We didn't do that. I think they wanted something that had like Hispanic in it, something like that. They didn't put up a big fight, but they were trying to make it seem more marketable, I think because the name doesn't exactly represent what's in the database because it is Latino and not just Mexican American experience. And so in our advertising we try to tell people, but for history's sake, we've always kept that the Chicano and for identity's sake because that's what it was, the Chicano Database, that was years and years ago. They haven't come back and said, "you want to change it." Over the years working with the different staff persons at EBSCO, I've learned that people change. You have a good relation with one person, and then oh, it's a new person. There's nothing bad about that. But I mean it's just you have to start over again and work with another person. But it's been cordial and friendly and good with the staff persons that I work with. Have not had that contact with the top people as I did at the beginning. It's been more of the programmer and also publicity. We work a lot with the publicity people. They help us when we go to conferences and they provide free materials to give out. So they're very helpful with that.

Drabinski: I'd like to ask about that particular technological shift to the CD-ROM and the database was the first Ethnic Studies database to be released on CD-ROM in 1990. Can you say a bit about the decision to move to that technology and what were some of the challenges and benefits?

Castillo-Speed: I think, again, it's not me by myself, it was Richard and Francisco talking about these things. On my end, I think part of it was just like, oh, there's this great new thing, CD-ROM, we don't want to be left behind. We want to be up to date, we want to take advantage of new technology. That kind of thing. Whether it worked or not, but I think we wanted to be aware of it in case that was something that would be the answer to everything. We also also had to figure out the interface because we weren't programmers. We couldn't just say, okay, here's the program to put on CD-ROM and then there it goes. So we had to find out how that all worked and how to get experts involved in creating a CD-ROM for the interface part of it. If we just wanted to just have all the data there, okay, maybe that wouldn't be so hard, but the whole point was to be able to send it to somebody and they would have a CD-ROM reader, and then they'd be wowed, like, oh look, you can look up all these great things. I think that was, yeah, wanting to be part of this new thing, but also not wanting to be left behind. Little did I know that that would not last that long. Yeah, it all changes really fast.

Belantara: So you already commented on this already, but we just wanted to learn a little bit more about your decision in 1992 to expand the scope of Chicano Database to include materials related to Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, and I'm just curious, how was this decision made after so long it was really focused on the Mexican American experience. How did you decide to switch that up?

Castillo-Speed: It's the kind of thing where it's kind of a no brainer, but I'm trying to figure out now why it was a no brainer. Here's one thought that I hadn't really pondered before, but the project started, I'm trying to index Chicano movement journals, right? But even at the time that the project started, that outflow of production was already starting to ebb. So Chicano journals that published Chicano writers and scholars, artists, in some cases, they lasted forever versus the journal Aztlán from UCLA has lasted all these years still there. Whereas the one that was published very early on in Berkeley, El Grito is no longer published. So when like scholars were looking for places to publish and because now there were like Chicano Studies programs and Ethnic Studies Departments, and they were trying to get published in other places, not in Chicano Movement journals. And so a lot of the academic scholarship, the writings even anything on the topics was being published in other places besides Chicano journals. Part of all this realizing that the original source was not going to last forever. Then looking at what other sources there were, so one was obviously academic journals or any journals or magazines. We didn't really make that distinction. That was publishing something that was about Chicano, something that we could find and we could access. So we had to open up that anyway. But also realizing that if we wanted to add more stuff, more things, more types of materials like books or articles in books or newspaper articles, then there had to be changes to the database. And so that was working with programmers. And so we had another series of programmers, and that's what I worked with them for, was like, oh, okay, now we're going to try to do adding fields, that was the basic thing, adding another field. How do you make this a book citation instead of a journal citation? So over the years, we worked with programmers to make those changes. So adding books was another way of getting to another source of materials. And it also, as I mentioned before, more books were being published. I mean, at the beginning, and this goes back to in Francisco was showing me that original collection back in 1983. I mean, when I first saw it, he would show me a book and say, "Okay, the people are looking for anything on migration, this is the book. And just think about what that means. This is the book." Okay, yeah. For Chicanas, I remember that there were probably a handful. Okay, it wasn't just a one, but I remember that these are the important ones. And so he would show me, these are the books on, this is the book or the best book or one of the books on immigration. So now because of Ethnic Studies departments, because of Chicano Studies Programs, people are going getting degrees, writing books, getting tenure, they have to get tenure, they have to write books, they have to write articles. So now there's books more and more and more books where before you'd have to draw from anthropology or sociology and say, well, there's a chapter in here on farm workers. And that's why it was in the library in the first place. But that was all there was. Okay, so anyway, so what I'm trying to say is now there was a lot more. So then we started adding books, and I guess at that point we just cycle, look, we don't want to limit ourselves in the future. So we even try at one point we even put things like web links or something trying to anticipate what we would want in the future. So yeah, so I think it was more like trying to accommodate what we thought where things would go, but also accommodating where the literature was coming out.

Belantara: In the article that we talked about earlier, you mentioned how the Chicano Thesaurus was really feeling an ethno-specific need, not a language need. Once the database started indexing materials related to other groups, did you also incorporate cultural terms used by people from those communities into the thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: The first thing we would do probably would be to put the terms that came up. If they came up over and over again, is to make them supplementary terms, and then see later on, see, oh well gosh, we're using this all the time. We better make it an index term. So they went into this holding, this waiting room stage. Other terms did come up. I have to say there was a conservative, how should I say it, feeling on my part. I'm like, what can I do? How much time and effort can I put into this? Do we want to expand it and am I the authority on these terms? So I think a lot of times it was mostly, okay, let's hold those terms until they become unavoidable. We have so much literature on this that we have to use it, but it's always there as a supplementary term. And then we try to keep those consistent so we aren't using a whole lot of different versions of that supplementary term. I don't think we ever did something that I could say was a standard method for doing that. It's more like as things come up, having to reacting to them. When I contracted with the lexicographer consultant, wonderful person, wonderful work and brilliant that time I spent with her working on this was really well spent. We did make some good changes because I have felt over the years that one of these days I need to go back and look at it over again. I need to make sure that it's presentable, like it's something that could say like, yes, this is the latest version, but only working with Kristen, her name's Kristen Jeffries, that I could feel a little bit like I was keeping up. She went back and found some terms that were outdated and no longer used and just like negative kind of things that I should have taken out a long time ago. But it's not that easy to take things out once it's embedded in the database. One of our earlier versions of the database was on Microsoft Access and that one, and the previous version, the Alpha Micro 1000, were relational databases. So if you made a change to a term, it automatically changed it in all of the citations. Whereas what we have now does not do that. That was a drawback when we changed over, but we've had to deal with it a different way. But it is more complicated. It isn't that easy to change a term, not just because it's a substitute. If you just had X term and you wanted to substitute Y, if they mean exactly the same thing, okay, that can be done through the computer. I mean, you could write a little program or we actually have a program now that we can use to do that. But if you're making a change where the term could imply a lot of other concepts in it, and then if you use that term instead, then you don't know if a citation might have other terms that would be like duplicative of that term that you're trying to add in. So you actually do have to look at each one if you're going to do it the right way, you do have to look at them. So that keeps you from wanting to like, yeah, let's go change that term. But we have changed some terms, but we really needed to change that. That kind of brings up something I wanted to put on the record here. This is something I learned from Francisco back in the publishing times when we were publishing things, there were books that were being published, not just that reference work, but there were other reference works that came out of the Chicano Studies Library. And I was an editorial assistant while I was in library school around that time. And he told me, not just me, but our staff, he would just say like, "If you know something is wrong then you can change it. If you can't change it, okay. If it's already down there, okay, but if you know that it's wrong and you can change it and you fix it, then fix it." That stayed with me over the year. So this whole thing with the Thesaurus, I'm not going to put something in there and say, yeah, it's good enough, I want to do it right. But it might take a long time to be done right.

Drabinski: I have another question about the sort of shift to Research Libraries Group and then to EBSCO. Now that the Thesaurus is in use in these commercial products and it's been implemented by the Library of Congress, it feels like it's a mainstream controlled vocabulary. How do you feel about the sort of mainstream adoption of this work?

Castillo-Speed: Well, first of all, I don't even know if anybody's using it. It was accepted, this was on May 24th, 1990. I got a letter from the Library of Congress, Sally McCallum, that they had assigned the code CHT to the thesaurus. The code is to be used in subfield something, to, of 6XX subject heading fields. And that it was going to be published in part four of Subject Index Terms: Sources of the US M-A-R-C, US MARC Code List for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions, when that publication is reissued recently. And that it was a short letter. So that was 1990. We were really, really proud that that had to happen. We wanted to be recognized. That was great. But over the years, I mean that's a long, long while ago. I'm not aware that anybody was using it. Even we weren't using it because that wasn't something that we were able to do. I was asked to come to a meeting at the main library because of that letter, they had wanted to consider whether they could use thesaurus terms. And I showed up with a list of terms from the thesaurus that weren't in Melvyl. Melvyl was the UC library catalog at the time. I made copies, pass it out and everything. It was a pleasant meeting, but I don't think they ever actually adopted it. They just said, "Oh, okay, we'll get back to you." But they considered it, I guess for me it didn't really matter that much either way. Your question implies that maybe it would be like absorbed by the mainstream and taken away or something like that. But I was glad about the recognition it got that it is a thing. Really it exists. Somebody created it, and I'm a career long member of the American Library Association. So those are important things to me. Library of Congress is important, ALA is important. Being a librarian, a professional librarian is important, so to me that was a good recognition. But yeah, unfortunately I wish that I guess I thought that maybe other people would use it, but if they are using it, I don't know. We haven't heard. Because of the recent webinar I was on, I got contacted by some librarians at UT Austin, I think the University of Texas. And we had a nice conversation yesterday about that. And they were asking me that they might use some terms for some newspapers that they're indexing or cataloging. Oh yeah, yeah, that's my take on it.

Belantara: So now after all these years, what do you think about the Chicano Thesaurus project itself and what would you tell your younger self, Lillian back in 1983 or 84, the year that you took over managing it along with the help of others, you said you always had a team, but what are your thoughts looking back?

Castillo-Speed: Wow, over the years, I have felt very grateful that my colleague at library school told me to think about taking this class called Ethnic Bibliography when I was in library school. I might have missed that. I've missed the whole thing because I wasn't looking for that at the time when I was in library school. So being part of this whole project in the broader term of the project, the library, the database, the indexing project, the thesaurus, the network of people, the UCLA and UC Berkeley and all the friendships, all the working together, just the fact that I had a job almost right out of library school that has lasted until now. I mean, it's not many people can say that. So I feel very, very lucky in that. But not only that, but that it's something that sustains me and that keeps me going. And there's always something new, and this I guess might pertain more to being a librarian. It's like every day is another challenge. And I'm just very, very grateful for finding my place, I guess finding something where I felt that I could contribute, whether it's because I was in library school, I thought that I was just going to get a library degree, but because of the whole trend towards computer things, that that's where I should concentrate on. So I did concentrate on computers and that combination with then finding out what I could apply that to and how important that was. And of course learning about myself, my identity, being Chicana myself, learning to even call myself Chicana, at that time, I just felt very lucky about to be part of all that.

Belantara: What is your hope for the thesaurus and the database moving forward?

Castillo-Speed: Well, of course, I hope it continues forever, but I've had to take a longer, a more practical view of it. Not just me, but Richard. We're not just working on this. We're working on other things and we see them as important and wanting to keep working on them. Of course, I'm going to retire some or somehow leave. And before COVID hit, I was actually making some long term plans. Not immediate plans, but like longer term plans to phase out. I mean, to phase somebody in, to take over what I was doing. And so I met with my supervisor at the time and I was asking like, "How's the budget? If I leave, would I be replaced?" And at the time they said, "Oh yes, yes, yes." So that made me feel good at that time, but things have changed now because of COVID, I couldn't leave when all that was going on. I guess what I'm trying to say is, ideally I would leave when I knew that I was going to be replaced and ideally I would be part of somehow of finding the person and ideally I would, there would be a person who was at least willing to be committed to continuing what we were working on. But I understand on a practical basis, people will find their own things that they are passionate about, and this might not be that. So I would like to be involved as an indexer for as long as I can. I see myself as doing that, oh yeah, I'm going to index, then I'll actually have the time to do the stuff I wanted to do every day. I want to do some more indexing, but I don't have the time. So if I had the time, that's what I would be doing. I can't keep things from changing. I can't predict the future. But that's what I'd like to think that at least that one person beyond me would continue working on it.

Belantara: Well, we've come to the end of our questions. Is there anything else that you would like to add or something that we should have asked you about and didn't get to this time round?

Castillo-Speed: I just do want to emphasize there are other librarians that have been supportive, and people I've mentored even that are part of a group that we have other projects that we're working on. Just very, very grateful for that. Whoever is learning about the Chicano Thesaurus and the Chicano Database, I hope that they know that it's not one person, it couldn't have been done with just one person. It had to be a group effort.