Karen Johnson Slaton and Selena Martinez

[00:03] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Karen Johnson Slaton I'm 59 years old. Today's date is March 11, 2022. We're located at the 78th Street Library, located in Palm River, Florida, and my conversation partner today is Selena Martinez. And I. We are both librarians. I am the class of 1994 from Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and I became a professional librarian in 2005.

[00:44] SELENA MARTINEZ: Selena. All right, so I am Selena Martinez. I am 24, and today's date is Friday, March 11, 2022. Still, I'm also located at the 78th Street Community Library in Palm River, Florida. And Karen has already introduced herself as my conversation partner. We are both librarians, and I am also a Simmons University graduate of the library Science and Information School of the class of 2021. And I've been a librarian for about three weeks.

[01:21] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: So today is our opportunity to have. Have a conversation about librarianship, how we both got started and where we are now and how libraries are relevant, still relevant today. And just talking about some of the things that we feel, how our library system, the Tampa Hillsborough

[01:48] SELENA MARTINEZ: Hillsborough County Public Library cooperative, it's a very big mouthful.

[01:53] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Yes, it is. I'm so sorry about that. But, yes. How our library system particularly responded to the pandemic, which I personally think was a fantastic, phenomenal response. So.

[02:09] SELENA MARTINEZ: And then we'll end a little bit on what we see the future of libraries being. You know, Karen's gonna probably retire somewhere with a nice drink in the future, so I still have a lot to look forward to.

[02:19] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Yes, absolutely. Cause, you see, there's a. A long time between when I started and where Selena started. So, just speaking about starting, Selena, what interested you in becoming a librarian?

[02:36] SELENA MARTINEZ: Well, for me, growing up, I was always that kid that read books during lunch and didn't really talk to the other kids. So I always liked the idea of the library was a good, safe space, and it was a place that respected knowledge. Like, I never felt like when I went in there, like, anyone judged me for reading too much, so I always wanted to. And then I went to school, was looking at being a historian, found out that you really don't get jobs as a historian anymore. And I was like, you know what? What I really like are the actual, like, materials themselves, whether they're photos, books, old law records. I was like, you know what? I want to be able to protect those. So that way, another little kid like me can one day see something from our city's history. So I decided to go to Simmons College. Simmons University, because they have a great archival management program.

[03:25] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Awesome. And I got interested in libraries from an early age as well. You know, avid reader, loved reading, loved going to the library and picking out my own books. I remember when I got my first library card, I was so thrilled and so excited because that was my gateway to the world. And then once I went to Northeastern University in Boston and worked for a librarian in a special collection, I really got more involved and more interested in librarianship and didn't realize that, hey, you have to go to school for that. And one day, I just had the opportunity to be able to attend Simmons College and study youth services librarianship, which my whole focus and goal was to be able to inspire young people to want to read, to enjoy reading, to see that reading is an escape, it's a way for you to have an adventure without leaving the room, all of that. And just was really excited to have that opportunity. And graduated in 1994, but didn't start practicing librarianship until I moved to Florida and became the youth services library here at 78th street. So it's. It's really a fun thing to know that here's Selena, and this is her first librarian gig at the same library where I started, and that we're both Simmons graduates.

[05:06] SELENA MARTINEZ: Yes. And this isn't even our first interview, because before I went to Simmons, I actually went to the University of South Florida for library school, and I had to interview Karen as my local librarian. And I just thought she was the best because she's got one of the greatest personalities you'd want from a youth services library. And she's passionate, she's excited, and she makes everybody feel welcomed, which is really what library is about. And I think that that's why they're still so relevant is they are a part of the community. And I would see people caring, greeting people, saying hi. She knew them by name. We talked so much, and for so long, they had to kick us out of the room because they said somebody else needed it.

[05:44] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Yes, that was a lot of fun. And I really enjoyed that interview. And never in my wildest dreams that I think we would be having the opportunity to interview again and talking about librarianship and, you know, why we became librarians and how libraries are relevant today. And just speaking about that, I mean, you know, what do you think, Selena, given the fact that you attended library school during the twenties, you know, what. What were the differences or some of the differences in your education versus my education, where, you know, computers were just coming out on the scene for the public to use? Technology was still kind of in its infancy in terms of computers and the Internet. And things of that nature. I mentioned some of the search engines that were out when I was in school, and Selena was like, what? I never even heard of that. So excite, Alta Vista, you know, some of these things, mosaic, you know, they don't. Some of them don't even exist anymore. And, you know, aol.com was the big thing. You know, you had to have an AOL account. And we all are familiar with, you know, of a certain age group of that dial tone when you're dialing in to reach the Internet. So, Selena, what are some of the differences you experienced in graduate school?

[07:20] SELENA MARTINEZ: Well, now it's a lot faster. And definitely a big emphasis that we have now is using those search engines to our advantage. So I know you had talked about having those reference index cards so you could have all your sources. We would never even dream of doing that. Our professors would say, why? You have Google. But we know how to use Google is now the thing with all the fake news that's going on, people, I think, don't know what to see and what to verify as a reliable source. And that's kind of what they teach us to do, how to fact check, how to know if it's credible. Is it a university publication? Does it have a.org? that's a good hint, too. And we even talked about the differences of Wikipedia.

[08:05] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Oh, yes, Wikipedia. I remember. And I was a fairly new librarian at the time when Wikipedia hit the scene, and, oh, my gosh, just hearing the word, you know, my hair would be on fire. Don't use Wikipedia as a source. It's not reliable. And Selena and I were talking about that the other day, and she's telling me that they had to create their own Wikipedia account. I was, like, astonished. But that's how much things have evolved and the information science has evolved and that librarians have evolved. We're always there to meet or prepare for emerging technologies, emerging information sources, and things of that nature, and we have to be nimble, and we have to be ready for when these new things pop up and be able to kind of decipher them for the general public. So talk a little bit about your Wikipedia experience.

[09:12] SELENA MARTINEZ: So I had a teacher who said, you know what? We need to become friends with Wikipedia. So if we can't get rid of it, we've got to utilize it and make it better. So we all made an account, and we were given a series of topics that we knew that we could either find journal articles about them or we could even use our textbook. We had a wonderful textbook called the history of the book. I shouted out, it's out of print, but it's still wonderful and very useful. And we were required to pick three topics. And in the three topics we had to check the page, check all the citations, make sure none of the links were broken in there, that they were all actually factual citations. And then we had to add three of our own and then also cite them properly because it's part of that idea that as librarians we can contribute to the knowledge pool. And now it's so much easier to contribute. Like the idea that somebody over in South Africa could look at the Wikipedia page and be like, oh, this is a verified user that says, yes, book burnings. This is a very accurate page to read about. So that's something I really liked about it, is embracing it, because I also was a student in the era of don't ever use Wikipedia, and your paper will be thrown out if you do so.

[10:26] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, with that, we can segue into, you know, right now we're going through and hopefully the tail end of a pandemic, a worldwide pandemic that basically ground us to a halt in 2020. You know, I remember the last day that the library was open, you know, physically open, where customers could come in. And by that following Monday, we were closed. And, you know, I was like, oh, well, we'll probably be closed for like two weeks or whatever, you know, it will be fine. And then two weeks became two months, etcetera. But in the meantime, I was just absolutely amazed at how quickly our library system, our administration, responded and started figuring out, okay, how do we still serve our customers? You know, how do we still connect with our staff? How do we make sure that everyone is still working together as a team for the county? And so some of the things that we were involved in were making masks for county employees who had to be out on the front lines making cloth masks. So, you know, they asked for volunteers who knows how to sew. And so, you know, one of my teammates on my team, you know, she and I were making masks along with, you know, other library staff throughout the county. We had staff that were assisting at the drive through windows at two of our branches, handing out applications for people to be able to file for their unemployment. During that time, we had staff, a lot of staff that was deployed with the emergency operations center, you know, doing various types of jobs, you know, from transcribing notes for the EOC meetings. People were working in the warehouse, you know, packaging up stuff and loading up stuff. And, you know, shipping things out to various locations within the county to assist other county workers or county citizens. So we were in it and doing what we needed to do to serve the citizens of Hillsborough county. And not only that, then once we got to the point where, okay, we can establish some level of library service, we expanded our digital collections and, you know, offered a longer loan period to customers to be able to use these things. We switched to doing a lot of our contact with customers online, you know, so people wanted to get a library card. They didn't. They couldn't go to a building to do it, so they had to do it online. So we responded quickly. We responded well. When we were able to finally open and do curbside service, our customers were really grateful for that because we're community organizations. We're 28 libraries in Hillsborough county, and we're community organizations for our community and the community at large. And when people could see their library staff and know that people were okay and could, you know, talk to us, whatever, even though we were, you know, at a distance, masked up, dropping stuff in people's trunks and sending them on their way, they were still grateful to have access to the library and to be able to do the things that they needed to do, like fax, make copies, print out, print jobs, you know, all of those things get their library materials. So we really, I'm really proud of Hillsborough county that we responded the way that we did and are still responding in these days of the pandemic. So you were in school, Selena. So what was your experience like?

[15:18] SELENA MARTINEZ: So it was kind of that odd. Like, you're reading about it and you're also doing it, and we kind of had to change it on the fly. So since I did archival management and I was doing book preservation, you know, they were talking about, yeah, you don't have an m 95 mask anymore because we had to give those all to first responders. So they're like, okay, well, now you're wearing your own homemade cloth mask. Wear three of those. You don't have gloves anymore, so in case there's mold on your book, you better wash your hands multiple times. You might need to be to a closer station. And it also just talked about safety protocols. You know, we talked about, you have to get a degree in this. So there was a different change of, all right, so if you're gonna go through a global pandemic, how are you gonna change your library services? What can you offer patrons? Can you have paper mask? Can you have curbside? How can you do contactless checkouts and I was over in the reference center at the library, so I was answering phone calls, and all of that was coming through there. You know, we added a texting phone line so you could text in to renew your library cards, which people would send all these messages afterwards. I'm so happy with the libraries, you know, I'm so glad that Tampa's so hip. My old library in Arizona, you couldn't even get a library card application online. So they were just thrilled that we were, like Karen was saying, to be able to have the contact for that. But how was your experience in school? What kind of safety protocols did you have to learn about?

[16:42] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Oh, well, we didn't really learn about safety protocols when I was in school. You know, we took a class. We had, everybody had to take reference, and you also had to take library management. And in our reference class, as Selena alluded to earlier, is that we had to write out on index cards. And for those of you who don't remember what index cards are, they're actual cards that you write on handwrite. And we had to hand write these cards with all our reference sources. We had to write an abstract. What does this reference source do? How do we use it? All of that? And I just recently, within the past five years, threw away that huge stack of cards. You know, I felt like I needed to hold on to them forever because I worked so hard to put that whole collection together. But we didn't really talk about safety so much because it wasn't really that much an issue when we started work. When I started working here in Hillsborough county in 2005, that's when I really started practicing librarianship and on the job training. And one of the things that we, that we had to learn about, and we still do as a county, but it's not as much emphasized is the blood born pathogens, because, of course, you know, there are diseases that travel through contact with bodily fluids, particularly blood, like HIV AIDS, which was the big thing, you know, during the eighties and nineties when I was in school, and that was what was on the forefront. And people talking about it now, you don't hear it discussed as much due to the fact that now we have antivirals, there's, you know, all these medicines, you're seeing commercials on tv, you know, and things of that nature. So not that we've forgotten about it, but it doesn't seem to be, you know, on our forefront. And Covid has definitely pushed everything out of the way, you know, so those are the things that we, you know, initially talked about in terms of safety. Now we're talking about safety in terms of health with COVID but we're also talking about safety in terms of your personal safety, because a lot of people we're finding or, you know, have found in the last 20 years or so, you know, are really suffering from mental illnesses that, you know, you have no idea, you, you know, you have people right now who are, you know, dealing with the whole thing of the pandemic that's just sending them to other orbits. And the library has become a place where a lot of these people end up coming, especially homeless people. And so I think there's been a shift in terms of some of the things that we've learned, like I've learned on the job, and maybe you might have learned in class, Selena, that we're learning more people management and we're learning more softer skills, skills in terms of how do we talk to people, how do we engage with people, how do we help people get the services that they need? You know, when I went to school, we weren't talking about faxing people's, you know, food stamp applications or helping people do their food stamp applications or their, you know, their job applications and things like that online. You know. Now that's something we do every day. You know, we assist people with those types of things, you know, filling out their claims for unemployment, you know, looking for employment, you know, helping them to find the resources that they need to put together a resume. All of these things the library does for a lot of people across the board. And so, you know, I'm pretty sure that you probably had a lot more of that in your education process at Simmons University versus Simmons College.

[21:18] SELENA MARTINEZ: Yes, I will say in our public libraries class, like, what my teacher loved to emphasize was public libraries are one of those last bastions in the United States where everyone's equal doesn't matter what your socioeconomic status is. You come into a library and you are guaranteed all the services, every single person. And they do, they have a big emphasis on mental health. Now, we need to be able to recognize the signs if we need to be able to call somebody to say, hey, I think we're going to send somebody down to the hospital today. I think they need a little bit of extra help how to work better with law enforcement that's in your library. You don't have to be two separate courses work together, which is something I got as on the job training. A lot of times we would talk with the officers would be like, hey, looks like he's having a rough day. I think you have some of those cards for the free showers. Like, maybe you can just go talk with him a little bit, and if he's uncomfortable, you can give them to us. We can work together on it. You know, there's not as much separation anymore.

[22:18] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Yes, that's so very true. And it's. It's very important that we, as librarians, those of us that are more seasoned and those, those of us that are three weeks old, you know, learn to do those things and learn to do them quickly and, you know, approach our profession and our day to day jobs as we are community helpers. And we're here. We chose to be in the public library because we want to help people. We want to work with people. And for me, that's been a, the most fulfilling of my career. You know, this is my second career. I've had a career in higher education before I became a professional librarian, and this is the best job that I ever had because I get that. And no two days are the same, you know, because something always happens that's, oh, I didn't expect that, you know, oh, I didn't know that was going to happen. And, you know, that's great, you know, and the fact that you can help people from all backgrounds, all ages, you know, all so socioeconomic strata that the people who are coming to the library are coming for something, and if you can give them what they want or what they need and they walk out the door with a smile on their face and they're happy, then we have done our job. We have done our job. And that, to me, is so important. And just, you know, like I said, it's absolutely fulfilling every day to come in and have that opportunity to experience that. So let's talk about the library of the future. You know, my future in libraries is coming to an end. You know, I'm at the end of my. At the end of my career. Not that close, but close enough where I can see the horizon. But, you know, Selena, she's got a long way to go and a lot of opportunities ahead of her. You know, my hope for the future is that libraries will stay relevant, that they'll stay particularly public. Libraries will stay places where people can come and still receive the services and access to the services that they need, and that there'll be a human face here to assist with that, to facilitate that. That's very important. I think people need that human contact, and the library is still one place where you can get that, you know, and they can come in, and if they're having a bad day, you know, and if it's a mom and she's got three kids and the three kids are all over the place and one is just so busy, busy, busy. And we had this experience the other day that someone will take time to work with the mom while someone else might take time to distract the children long enough so that mom can get her business done and get out the door. And that's what we do on a day to day basis. We do those things to help our customers achieve what they need to do and get it done. So what do you think the future is going to look like for you, Selena?

[25:58] SELENA MARTINEZ: Well, first of all, I don't think you're getting out of it that easy, Karen. I'm going to have you come in and teach some programs. So, which I think is a big factor of libraries is, I think programs are going to continue expanding because like you said, it's a place where you can see another human. I know working down at the reference center. We always got you guys answer calls so quick. I wasn't on hold that long. You're my favorite government agency to deal with because you actually help me and you resolve my problem in a timely manner. And I don't think that that's going to change for libraries. And I just think programs will expand. Like, I know back in the day we had something called the Discovery Pass. So you could go to a library, you could check one out and you could go to a museum or sometimes it was the aquarium or the orchestra for free, which in itself is an amazing thing to be able to do, to be able to continue expanding your cultural experiences. And, you know, I even went to the Florida Holocaust museum on one of those discoveries passes. So thank you. I didn't have to pay the fee for my class. And I think we're only, I know we're already trying to roll out something different in the future, and I just think we'll continue expanding. I think we're going to be able to. I know before COVID we wanted to start getting more authors in libraries to talk about their books and their content. And even as we were talking about libraries can get up with the times we have 3d printers and libraries. And I think as new technology continues coming out, we're just going to add more classes. I think that there will be a time in the future when everybody can have a 3d printer in their home. You know, the library is where you're going to get your troubleshootings done. It's going to be the geek squad of the future. And I think that that's going to be a wonderful thing for libraries to show that they're still relevant. And I also think that libraries are still going to be here to help you fact check your papers. They're going to still be here to be your interviewer in a couple of years. I can honestly say I've reached out to a lot of people for interviews at USF, and Karen replied the fastest. She's like, yeah, sure, come in on a Thursday, and they're just going to be so happy to impart knowledge. I think that's a big thing about librarians, is we do just want to help the community and help each other, too, as colleagues and co workers. I can say Karen's my best on the job training teacher. She's given me so much help this week just with understanding. What do I do if x, y, or z happens?

[28:19] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Exactly. You know, it's great. And I think libraries will remain relevant for a very, very, very long time because we have our finger on the pulse, and we are nimble organizations, as nimble as we can be, you know, to be able to respond to what is happening right now in the world and what's going to happen in the future, you know, the preparation for that. And, you know, I have no doubt that Selena is going to, you know, achieve her goals, achieve her dream of being the archivist and, you know, but I do hope that her experience here within the public library system will really give her that well rounded, you know, always ready to go kind of attitude and, you know, sense of adventure that every day is different and that working with people and working, you know, in a service industry where we are public servants and, you know, in the best possible way, we represent the best of the county. We represent the best of ourselves as librarians because we want to be able to help people. That's our whole purpose for being in the library. We want to help people, and that's what we do. We help people. So we will continue to help people for as long as there are people. And I guess that's it. You know, in a nutshell.

[30:06] SELENA MARTINEZ: It is in a nutshell. Obviously, we could go on forever. We joke that we're going to have a podcast. Karen the librarian, she's going to go around in her retirement and talk to everybody at all the public libraries. But I just want to thank you again, Karen, for another wonderful conversation.

[30:21] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: And who knows?

[30:22] SELENA MARTINEZ: Maybe there'll be a third time in the future for us.

[30:24] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Oh, yeah. Well, the third time will be the charm, Selena, and it will be my absolute pleasure, because, you know, I really do enjoy talking with you and sharing and the fact that, you know, it's just been serendipity, the fact that we had an interview before you became a librarian. You ended up at the same school that I went to a million years ago, and that you ended up with your first librarian gig here at the very library where I started as a librarian. So I think the stars were aligned.

[30:58] SELENA MARTINEZ: Yes. And even in the end of that interview, you told me you're like, river review is going to expand. Maybe you should try to apply for a job at rear review. So I didn't quite get rear review, but like you said, it was serendipity. I still ended up here with you.

[31:11] KAREN JOHNSON SLATON: Yes, you did. And it's been our pleasure for this conversation to take place today.