From hblackme@liberty.uc.wlu.edu Mon Dec 29 09:23:43 1997
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 11:21:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Hugh A. Blackmer" 
To: 73143.1570@compuserve.com
Subject: first of many

Dear Bob,

Such a pleasure to talk with you last night, and the experience set us 
off on a train of remembering all sorts of things from the past. As I 
mentioned, several times I've almost sat down to send you e-mail out of 
the blue but the moment was never quite right for the particular sort of 
concentration required to put together all I meant to say.  Don't know 
that I'll be any more successful this time, but at least I've begun.

Before I forget to include them, here are several URLs that are probably 
pretty effective summaries of what I am and do in this incarnation at 
Washington & Lee ('Dubyuhnel' as we-all say it):

http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/scilib/
    (the Science Library page, which is now my main venue)
http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/
    (my own home page, not especially public in that it's not on any menus)
http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/tenure/
    (parts of the electronic version of my tenure file, from last year)
http://www.wlu.edu/~hblackme/biology/bio182.html
    (the pages for the course I spend most energy upon)

And the essence of what I'd have put into those e-mail messages I didn't 
write: in recent years I've had occasion to think a lot about the past, 
about why I chose as I did or considered alternatives this way or that 
way, and I came to realize how very much I owe to various people, 
yourself among them.  Recognizing such debts is certainly progress of a 
sort, but I've also found it ?therapeutic? to try to tell the people 
themselves what they've meant to me, or what I've realized they meant to 
me. I realize that one of the things I was often bothered by as a teacher 
was not having any way to know if what I did or said was having any 
effect, any real significance, but once in a while somebody would 
communicate to me what THEY felt my effect had been on them, and it 
somehow made it all worthwhile. One never knows just WHAT will turn out 
to be the remembered or significant thing(s), and sometimes it's a real 
surprise.  Anyway, I'm deeply grateful for many things you introduced me 
to, suggested to me, pointed me toward paying attention to.  Cataloging 
them seems beside the point, but it's a great pleasure to have them bob 
up in the little theatre of memory.  Of course there are regrets too, 
things I should have had the wit to do more thoughtfully, dropped 
stitches of various sorts and magnitudes, but mostly it's not very 
profitable to fash oneself over such long-gone botched opportunities.

So what DID I do since last I saw you in 1980? Went back to Nova Scotia, 
chose to follow ethnomusicological directions instead of demographic ones 
(and lost touch with Bill Skinner as a result), spent 10 years working 
hard at various sides of teaching.  I tried EVERYthing: multimedia 
self-publishing before there were effective ways to do it, team-teaching 
(a course in Cross-Cultural Studies in Music which evolved over 7 years 
into something quite magnificent; another of 3 years duration in Peoples 
and Cultures of Asia), computers as teaching tools... most of that to 
quizzical response from colleagues and administrators, and mixed response 
from students.  I was very tired of the ambient level of mediocrity 
(though it certainly also provided me personally with a lot of freedom to 
do as I wanted), and a stint as Department Head really finished me off. I 
took a sabbatical in 86-87 to teach world history and geography at 
Northfield Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts (where Kate was then a 
Junior, and from which John graduated in '94), to try out teaching at a 
different level, and after the 89-90 year I took another (half) 
sabbatical to try to figure out what in the world to do next.  It took 
about 3 months of experimenting with software design (a multimedia 
encyclopedia of world musical instruments, before its time) and walking 
in the woods and writing to come to the realization that I was very 
curious about the consequences for libraries of the ubiquity of PCs.  
That question got me in the door at Simmons (Boston's library school) in 
January of 1991, asking if I could audit a course or two. They told me 
that they didn't do auditors, just people in the program, so I said "what 
would it take to be in the program?" and in an hour or two I was signing 
a tuition check...

Going back to school was wonderful, partly because I happened to fall in 
with just the right people, and partly because I decided I had the 
obligation to BE the sort of student I'd been claiming I wanted: 
interested, tireless, exploratory, committed... and I found that I could 
do that and do it very well.  Library School involves a LOT of using 
libraries to answer questions, and I was deliriously happy haunting the 
Harvard and MIT libraries.  I did a massive research paper on who cites 
Geertz, following the spread of several of his books across various 
disciplines, and another on the evolution of the subject classification 
in Harvard's Tozzer Library --all this in my first term. It was clear 
that I WAS a Reference Librarian, that everything in 40-some years of 
previous education had been preparing me for this calling.  So: how to 
make the jump?

Betsy and I were climbing a mountain that spring (May of 1991, this was) 
and I was bitching on and on about how I couldn't stand to go back to 
Acadia, as she'd heard me do countless times before.  Said she, through 
gritted teeth: "well, if you're so unhappy why don't you call them up at 
Simmons and see if they can't do something for you?" I got all silent 
(and she thought she'd offended me terminally by telling me what to 
do...) because I remembered seeing a bulletin board notice saying that 
someone was needed to run the Library School Computer Lab... so as soon 
as we got home I called the supervisor (coincidentally my advisor) and 
asked if they'd hired someone.... she said "noooooo..." I said "well, I'm 
interested" and she said "you mean YOU'd do THAT?" and the upshot was 
that I spent the next year finishing my courses and teaching library 
school students (and of course myself) about software and hardware and 
the early stages of the Internet (gophers scarcely existed, and of course 
the web not at all).  Wonderful fun, never a dull moment, all sorts of 
seat-of-the-pants learning.

At the same time I took Science Reference with Jay Lucker, then-Head of 
the MIT Libraries, and again did a monster overkill. And then it was time 
to start trying to find a real job.  Daunting problem: somebody in late 
40s with a PhD in a maverick field looking for an entry-level academic 
reference job, with no "library experience" but 17 years as a professor... 
So I applied for pretty much everything that moved, nearly 50 
advertisements, many of them in places like Vermilion SD and others I'd 
never have considered. It took several months to start getting 
interviews, but in one week I had one here at W&L and another at Berea, 
and I was about to have others in Ontario and Maryland when I accepted 
the W&L job, just barely able to believe my good fortune.

W&L is a wonder: excellent faculty, highly selective, lovely setting, 
quite enlightened administration, bottomless endowment pockets, etc. 
After 5 years I'm even happier with it than I was when I arrived. I was a 
general reference person at first, but I grabbed liaison with the science 
departments (which nobody else wanted) and started turning myself into a 
Science Librarian, since I knew that there wre plan afoot to build a new 
Science Library.  I survived a national search and won, and for the last 
18 months I've been presiding over the construction and planning and 
moving into the glorious new Science Library --we dedicate the New 
Science Addition next week, with Stephen Jay Gould as featured speaker.

I also spent a lot of that 5 years cajoling W&L into the new information 
age, using first the gopher and then the web as my main tools, teaching 
faculty and staff and students the multifarious electronic skills (as I 
learned them myself, needless to say). What I was missing all those years 
as a professor was an effective MEDIUM for communication: lecturing 
wasn't really it (inefficient, falling-on-deaf-ears, etc), and writing 
for academic journals was just not in synch with what I was interested in 
learning and teaching about.  But hypertext in the context of the WWW IS 
it, is my medium.  

Anyway, I have a level of job satisfaction and daily challenge and sheer 
fun like nobody else I know. Somebody wanders in needing to know about 
the sewers of Paris in 1890 (his professor sent him, saying that I'd 
know...), somebody else calls wanting to know the whereabouts of the 
manuscript of the report of the Coronado expedition to the Seven Cities of 
Cibola [it's in the NY Public Library, or rather a copy of it is, the 
original being no longer in existence], and another needs to know about 
keratogenic diets, another about statistics on the incidence of unstable 
angina... and so on.  So I get to find out the answers AND teach about 
how to go about thinking about looking for them.

Meanwhile, Betsy's jobs and vocational evolution deserve another whole 
missive.  I'll sketch a bit for you --doubt that she'll find the time to 
tell the tale herself, since the pitch of her daily activities is more 
demanding than mine. In addition to the job (now 3 1/2 years) with Codman 
Research Group for whom she's the methodologist and a primary designer of 
software, she's also been moonlighting in development of some software: a 
product called Speech Works which she thought up, prototyped, developed, 
and brought to marketability (it's now in a Windows version, having 
started life as a Mac product) which is an interactive aid for non-native 
speakers of English who need to reduce their accents (she spent a year as 
a Visiting Prof in Speech/Hearing/Speech Pathology at Northeastern, and 
did Speech Works with a colleague there). It's sold mostly through the 
Speech Pathology folks, but there's also an individual version.  It's 
aimed at professionals, with hear-model record-self hear-self-and-model 
exercises for about 15 professions.  And in the last year she's been 
working with the same publisher to develop interactive software to assist 
people who want to take the US Citizenship exam --that one is getting on 
toward being done in its first version, and later ones may be multilingual.

Her genius for logical intricacies is if anything more fully developed. 
She's also the communication bridge between code-writing engineers and
semi-articulate dreamers about what might be in Codman's software for
analysis of such humongous health care databases as California Blue Cross,
Arkansas Medicare, etc., and she seems to be the court of last resort if
somebody can't figure something out.  All that has some built-in
frustrations, and Codman itself is a bit rocky, so the middle-run future
isn't very clear.  She may have yet another career in six months, but 
meanwhile she flies back and forth between Boston and Roanoke on a 
fortnightly schedule (Codman pays, thankfully) and telecommutes when 
she's here.

We've also been hiking the Appalachian Trail for 5 years, day-hiking 
weekends when we could: all of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland; about 
half of North Carolina/Tennessee; a bit of Pennsylvania; and Betsy has 
done a lot of Vermont and some of Massachusetts, and a lot of New 
Hampshire (I've done a fair bit of the White Mountains with her, 
summers). It'll take a few years to finish... We still have a house in 
Nova Scotia, and manage to spend a week there (a friend lives in it) in 
the summer, but vacation time isn't what it was when I was in the 
professor game.

Obviously more to say, but let me get this on its way...

--Hugh

Hugh Blackmer      hblackme@wlu.edu    or    blackmer.h@wlu.edu