The Words of South Carolina Librarians

RVW: How did you choose the public services, adult services particularly? Was this a conscious choice or something you got into gradually?

MDM: I kind of fell into all of this. I’ll tell you, one experience I had with my cataloging. During the war, we couldn’t get a cataloger and I was doing reference. I had to do the cataloging in the morning and do the reference desk in the afternoon, but be constantly on call, interrupted from cataloging, for a reference question. You can imagine what I encountered. “You haven’t looked that up yet, or, from the cataloger, why isn’t this book out?” You know what I mean? Oh! Brother! That was a year. Then we got a cataloger, fortunately, Elizabeth Foley (sp?) to do the cataloging. Then, I could do reference again. I enjoyed it on the bookmobile and the circulation head left and Emily said, “I think we’ll combine the two, why don’t you do adult services?” I said, “O.K.” And so just fell into it. I loved book selection, I just loved it. It was the best thing, I liked reference, too. You had so many interesting questions. Charleston was an interesting place to do reference because, first, we didn’t do genealogy, and of course wouldn’t, but we did have a lot of questions relating to history which were interesting, as well as general questions. I can remember one time – I was telling about Anne Russell, after I became deputy director under Emily—this young girl came in – there was a ballet school across the way – and this young girl came in her ballet costume. She said, “I would like a job in the library.” I asked if she had had any library experience. She said—she was in this ballet costume—“I have a master’s degree in library science.” I could have dropped on the floor. (Laughter)