Introduction of SAA President Jackie M. Dooley

Introduction of SAA President Jackie M. Dooley

2013 Presidential Address

New Orleans, Louisiana, August 16, 2013

Presented by Merrilee Proffitt and Bill Landis

MP:

Jackie Dooley’s professional reach is both impressive and expansive, as is her, shall we say, personal style. We decided it would take two of us to introduce her, even though many of you know her well already. As just one example of the breadth of her professional impact, she and Bill Joyce are the only two people to have served as both SAA President and Chair of ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section over the 54 years during which those two organizations have co-existed. Since her early career working in the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division, to her days at the Getty and UC San Diego, Jackie has always been a self- professed cataloging geek, and being fluent in the lingua franca of MARC and descriptive standards, has successfully bridged the archival / book divide.

BL:

If you don’t know Jackie, you will quickly learn that she is a self-professed and unrepentant grammar pedant, who will compliment your outfit and correct your sentence construction in the same breath, or offer you a preferred word choice as reflexively as some of us blink our eyes or bite our nails. That’s probably the most important reason why there are two of us managing this introduction.

MP:

Right, because that way we can blame one another for any faults, oversights or inaccuracies. Although I can’t imagine Jackie doing anything other than approving of us up here on the podium. Among her many wonderful traits, Jackie loves to promote her “kids” as she calls us, regardless of age. One of the things I’ve always admired about Jackie is her ability to make spot-on connections between people, to facilitate, to make things happen. For example, Jackie played an unheralded yet key role in the early days of the Berkeley Finding Aids Project. At a meeting of UC archivists and librarians she heard a Berkeley authorities librarian named Daniel Pitti talking about some crazy notion of using Standard Generalized Markup Language to encode archival finding aids. Jackie suggested that he needed to engage with some archival description gurus who were friends of hers and the rest, as they say, is history.

BL:

Yes, and she makes those connections and gets things done in such a Jackie kind of way. I remember in the early days of University of California-wide EAD work, when we desperately needed some common encoding guidelines and nothing existed. Jackie got a half-dozen or so special collections people together from different UC campuses and the Getty, including you and me; put us up on sleeping bags scattered around her house for two days; fed us; cajoled us; gave us coffee and boogie boards in the morning and sent us down to the San Clemente beach; and gestated the production of the first version of what eventually became the Online Archive of California EAD Best Practice Guidelines. Another good example of this cheerful can-do spirit is the work that Jackie has done during her presidential year in getting broad input and taking creative approaches to the work of the Annual Meeting Task Force and on SAA’s strategic planning process. There’s a real lesson in leadership, I think, a reminder that facilitating, making the connections, and stepping back to let things happen can often be a visionary action.

MP:

Along with enthusiastically embracing people, Jackie has also enthusiastically embraced technology -- although not always entirely successfully. However, her lack of aptitude has not deterred her in the slightest. At the 2008 RBMS preconference Jackie discovered that I was Facebook friends with Terry Belanger, founder of the Rare Book School. This blew her mind and she spent the rest of the evening quizzing me about Facebook. By the next day she had joined. If she is not Facebook friends with you, it’s because you are abstaining or because she has not ferreted you out yet. Extending her social media reach, in her term as SAA President, Jackie inaugurated the “Off the Record” blog as a key communication device for SAA, and has also become an enthusiastic voice on Twitter. As a decidedly non-technical person, Jackie might not be an obvious candidate to lead the charge into the mysteries of “Born Digital” -- deciding that she did not understand this critical area, and that time was a wasting, so she took it upon herself to school up on electronic records. When she joined OCLC Research, she took on tackling the Born Digital challenge in a way that would make dealing with born digital more accessible to more institutions, regardless of size or resources.

BL:

Speaking of resources: For those of you have have not had the pleasure of dining with Jackie, a word of advice: this is never an inexpensive undertaking, and you need to budget accordingly if she’s picking either the restaurant or the wine. Oh, and she will almost certainly end up flirting with a waiter. Jackie is nothing if not demonstrative in her enthusiasm for her friends and colleagues -- and she’s an inveterate smoocher. She worried out loud once when she was my boss whether or not she could be accused of sexual harassment for giving me smooches at professional meetings. The first time I met her was at the Chicago annual meeting in 1997. She arrived late from California and got to the Fairmont Hotel just as a group of EAD folks was getting ready to depart the lobby for dinner. I was there through the good graces of Kris Kiesling and Michael Fox. Jackie breezed in and went down the line of her dinner pals giving each a big kiss. I was last in the line, and after planting a kiss on me she held me away at arm’s length and said “Wait, I don’t know you!”  Well, Jackie, you do now.

MP:

Jackie, we don’t have enough time to tell the audience other things we think they should know about you, like your enthusiasm for driving. Perhaps Steve Hensen can relate a story or two about the hair-raising drive to Southern California after the 2008 meeting in San Francisco. Or about your love for your family and especially your step children. And then there’s the cats. Or about how you took on replicating and extending the 1998 ARL survey on special collections, not only in the US and Canada, but bringing the survey to the UK and Ireland. We’ll be digging through that data and dealing with the challenges you put forward to the community for some time to come. You still have many years in your career, but I think your enduring legacy will be your relentlessly positive spirit, and your ability to leverage and mentor so many of us over the years, including Bill and me and countless others.

And now, please join us in welcoming, your SAA president, Jackie Dooley.