Up the Hill of Opportunity

The Library's most recent "doctor," our own Dr. Patti Clayton Becker, earned her PhD this year.  In January she finished her doctoral dissertation in Library and Information Studies at the UW-Madison (under the supervision of Professor Wayne A. Wiegand), and was granted the degree in May.

Patti's dissertation, Up the Hill of Opportunity: American Public Libraries and ALA during World War II, is wonderfully full of anecdotes and stories of how local libraries handled the changes brought by the war.  It also chronicles the efforts of the American Library Association (ALA) to meet wartime demands by creating new programs to be implemented by local libraries.

Patti is well known as being one of our most active "opportunists," and her dissertation title aptly reflects the effort that she has given this endeavor.  As Patti says, the degree was the "culmination of a long, long journey [up the hill of opportunity]."  She entered the doctoral program in 1989, taking 12 Ѕ years to complete the PhD, a span that crossed 3 decades, 2 centuries, and 2 millennia! During that time UW-Madison's School of Library and Information Studies (or SLIS, as the folks in the trade know it...) saw 3 different directors, experienced an almost complete turnover of faculty, and she had 4 different advisors.  Her dissertation topic changed only once, from a study of how people use language to look for information to a history of American public libraries during World War II. 

She worked full time throughout the entire process, with the degree paralleling a career shift from Head Cataloger at Marquette University to Coordinator of Reference at UWSP.  During the first four years she traveled between Milwaukee and Madison, taking classes using vacation time and evenings.  Patti and her husband Dave, who is on the violin faculty of the American Suzuki Talent Education Center (ASTEC) at UW–Stevens Point, are not regarded as slackers by any means.  In addition to their full time work and her dissertation, they embarked on building a new house, and we are delighted to learn that following lots of sweat equity – cleaning the construction site every night, staining siding, painting walls, varnishing woodwork, gardening and landscaping - they are still happily married and thoroughly enjoying the fruits of their construction labors and the freedoms offered by her recent post-doctoral status.

Patti's dissertation covers ground-breaking territory.  World War II presented America’s public libraries with the daunting challenge of meeting new demands for war-related library services and materials with Depression-weakened collections, inadequate budgets, and demoralized staff, in addition to continuing to serve the library’s traditional clientele of women and children seeking recreational reading, especially fiction. During mobilization many librarians purchased technical materials to assist library users in acquiring skills needed in the expanding workforce.  After the U.S. entered the war public libraries held film forums to discuss current issues, mounted patriotic exhibits, and participated in the Victory Book Campaigns to collect supplemental reading material for armed forces libraries, among other local activities.

While libraries responded to their communities’ library needs as best they could, the American Library Association (ALA) under the leadership of Executive Secretary Carl H. Milam turned to the federal government for support for its ambitious war program to put libraries in official war service. Shedding librarianship’s customary neutrality, ALA believed that public libraries should participate in disseminating government propaganda and in promoting the American democratic political system, even if it meant violating the civil liberties of library users. However, ALA met significant resistance and indifference from legislators and government agencies that did not share the association’s view of public libraries as essential community institutions. Furthermore, many librarians and library users rejected ALA’s attempt to expand the jurisdiction and purpose of the American public library.

It took Patti 2 years to gather enough primary sources to begin writing, and another 4 years to continue reading secondary materials and to write the dissertation. In addition to many cartons and folders of letters, minutes, official reports, and other archival material she read countless books, dissertations, theses, and articles.  ALA primary sources included correspondence, press releases, meeting minutes, published documents, scrapbooks, and the ALA Bulletin. Similar types of materials from the Library of Congress, the Office of War Information, Office of Civilian Defense, and Office of Education lend insight into the government’s perspective. Annual reports, board meeting minutes, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and other miscellaneous materials from small, medium, and large American public libraries throughout the country provided color and detail. Numerous secondary sources contributed to the dissertation’s conceptual framework and historical context, and related the concerns arising during the period under study to ongoing discussions of the purpose of the American public library.

Up the Hill of Opportunity is available at the UWSP Library, and we are anxiously awaiting Patti's announcement that the 417-page work will be published.  It is bound to become a fundamental source in the library literature.

Never idle, and while preparing her dissertation for publication, Patti has been asked by the UW-Madison School of Library and Information Studies to teach the History of American Librarianship during the 8-week 2003 summer session.  She is also reviewing Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union, 1917-1960, by Stephen Karetzky, for Portal: Libraries and the Academy, an electronic academic library journal published by Johns Hopkins Press.

Congratulations, Dr. Becker!