Bonnie Buzzell begins by stating her current job and saying that she came to Brown first as a Pembroke student in 1968. Her first impression of the Rock was that it was cold and intimidating but after she began working as a student assistant and got to know the staff, she found it friendlier. She became a full time employee in 1973, working in serials at the Science Library. She later became a Searcher in Rock Acquisitions, doing all work on paper. Later an automated system was brought in and then OCLC. She talks about how as a student worker she would get book paging requests via the pneumatic tube system and send them down in the dumbwaiter, and also how they would find overdue books by "needling" cards. The next innovation was using carbon paper. She discusses how spaces have changed, including how much room the card catalog used to occupy and how there used to be music listening stations in the Rock and a caged area for sound recordings. She talks about having to wear skirts while on the Brown campus and to work in the Rock, and how there was no food or drink allowed in the library but there were smoking lounges. She goes on to say that all of her work back then was checked by supervisors but now there is no time for that kind of checking due to how fast everything happens. She talks about working on level C as a student and being scared by a loud noise that turned out to be a ticker tape machine printing out interlibrary loan requests and also how scary it was to work alone in the building during the Blizzard of '78. Bonnie ends with a story about a project she organized to measure all the books in the Rock and goes on to say how happy she is that students still find a home here.
This collection contains oral history interviews with longtime members of the Brown University Library staff, in celebration of the Rockefeller’s Library’s fiftieth anniversary in 2014. The interviews were conducted by Brown librarians Carina Cournoyer and Karen Bouchard. Staff members represent …
