Transcript: Episode 9 - Library Technology

Loud Speaker: Good morning and welcome to the Richard J. Riordan Central Library. The library is now open.

Patron: How did librarians get anything done before computers were readily available?

Sheridan: Hello, everyone. This is Sheridan J. Cazarez, a librarian in the Exploration and Creativity department of the Los Angeles Public Library. Back with another episode of Past Due: 100 Years of Central Library, a podcast commemorating the Central Library Centennial. To celebrate the old girl, we're putting on a variety of events, a special reading challenge, and creating tons of original content for Angelenos to celebrate their beloved central library. For more about our centennial celebration, visit lapl.org/central100. On today's episode, we're exploring the history of library technology. Today we're chatting with Robin Myers. Thanks for being on the podcast today, Robyn.

Robyn: Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Sheridan: Tell us a little bit more about your career here at the Los Angeles Public Library.

Robyn: Well, I just kind of celebrated 50 years with the city of Los Angeles.

Sheridan: 50 years!

Robyn: Yeah, 50 years, but not all of it with LAPL. I was a messenger clerk in 1976, right out of high school. And I left the library, went to a few other city departments, and then in 1986 came back to work as a facility manager, working mostly in branches at that point in time.

Sheridan: So 1986, that's right before the big fire.

Robyn: After. Six months after the fire, um, the fire was in April, and the person who had my position left and I came in, in October of 1986.

Sheridan: Got it. Okay. Considering your long history with LAPL, we'd love to have the opportunity just to chat with you about your experiences and what you might remember about the technology that was being used at the time. First off, let's start with something that I think is at the core of what we do as librarians. The card catalog. Whenever I go on a docent tour, one of the places that we show off is the card catalog cabinets that remain in the rotunda. Right. And the card catalog is probably one of the oldest technologies that we have available to us to organize knowledge. Depending on their age, some listeners may or may not know what a card catalog is. Can you tell us a little bit more about the card catalog? And when you first started at the library?

Robyn: When I started at the library, one of my jobs was to pull catalog cards, and it was like going down a rabbit hole because if you're looking at catalog cards, it just doesn't tell you the title of the book. It also goes through the subjects. So if you want to find something and you're looking for something on Abraham Lincoln. You might find him in Abraham Lincoln. You might find him in biographies. You might find him in presidents of the United States. You might find him in a variety of subjects. And all of those subjects had cards. So when a book was removed, you had to go through and find all the cards so that people weren't expecting to find it if they found it in our card catalog.

Sheridan: Right. And one of the different sort of.

Robyn: In one of the different sort of ways, and it was an original search engine, but driven by your own brain power and the assistance of librarians. They sat in the middle of the room. They held pride of place. They had little pieces of paper and small golf pencils in cups, so that you could write down the call number or any other information on the card. Before you left the card catalog, it was cinched in by metal rods. So if you dropped the drawer on the floor, which happened frequently, everything didn't come flying out.

Sheridan: That makes sense, actually. Um, for any listeners out there that are participating in our card catalog giveaway as part of our centennial celebration, you'll notice if you go to any of the branches that a lot of the cards that you get given as part of the giveaway, or, you know, if you're collecting the stamps of the different branches, that they'll all have a hole punched right into the center lower part of the card. And that must have been where the metal rod was.

Robyn: Was, right? Those, those cards were created like that with the hole in them already. Um, we didn't create the hole. That's how they showed up. And I remember my colleagues sitting and rolling them into a typewriter and typing them in-house.

Sheridan: Yeah, that must have been a ton of work, too.

Robyn: It was a lot of work. It was a whole different thing.

Sheridan: So those cards all ended up in the warehouse because, uh, before that, I think it was the library board or the city librarian that decided that that was going to be a great time to transition over to a digital computer card system.

Robyn: Well, it certainly made sense as we left this building and we went into the temporary facility over on Spring Street, and we went in there and we began to explore the technology that was exploding in library science at the time. It was time to bring LAPL up because we had the opportunity to do it; because we were still cataloging what survived the fire, what we had, and we were bringing it back in. And it certainly made sense to join the digital age or actually spearhead the digital age. We were cutting edge. We were the envy of the library world because we were able to jump into the technology in a way that others weren't able to. Our library people had the foresight and the vision to grow us into the newest technology for libraries.

Sheridan: How was the change from going to like a printed card to a digital catalog received amongst the staff?

Robyn: It was weird. Staff either embraced it or just went, "oh." I would run into patrons who were confused, understandably confused. And it was a big learning curve for our patrons out there, uh, to learn how to use the system. I mean, certainly people still went back to librarians and asked for their help and we brought them along and taught them one-on-one how to use our cataloging system, which has certainly taken off. It was an exciting time, for LAPL.

Sheridan: I can imagine, I mean, if you think about it, there was, there was the fires and all the renovation that was going on at the same time. That was that was, most of it was already scheduled. A lot of it was already scheduled. But, and then you have the new Norman Pfeiffer wing opening, and all of a sudden this card catalog that all of Los Angeles had been used to for so long, all of a sudden is on computers and it's at the right same exact time as this opening of the new wing of the library. Like it must have felt very newfangled.

Robyn: Yeah. kind of daunting, I guess. It would be the word. Exciting and terrifying all in the same breath, because now you have to learn a whole new technology. The staff was really amazing in in the way they embraced it and the way they looked at it as, as the future.

Sheridan: Yeah. You brought along a couple of artifacts with you today. Robyn, would you explain to our listeners what you've got?

Robyn: What I have here are; the first thing is a Date Due card or called in slang, a TR card or a transaction card. Now the TR cards will tell you a number of things. It tells you the branch number. This one in particular is branch number 52 and it is Sunland-Tujunga. And then they have numbers on the cards. So it tells you how many books you checked out that day. They're six months apart. You flip them around. When you put it in the machine called, at the time I worked there, it was called a Recordak. And then later we got something called a STAR file and both of them took pictures of the transaction card. So you would take the transaction card with this date. So it's to February 9th and you would put the card like this. Mhm. And then take a picture of it. And at prescribed periods of time, staff would wind the film and send it down for processing. It would be processed and then we would get back microfiche with the patron's information on it. So when a patron came in and they were looking for a new library card or what they had to, they would pull out a microfiche from this folder and slide it into the microfiche [reader] and swish it around until they found that patron's information. But it was done every week, probably. But that's how that worked.

Sheridan: Wow. And there must have been an army of people scanning and creating the microfiche. And like, there's no other way without personnel, right?

Robyn: Yeah. I don't know how many people we sent it down. Somebody did it.

Sheridan: and the magic happened.

Robyn: And the magic happened. We got it back. I just remember, um, my one of my colleagues, every time the new 'fiche came in, throwing away the old ones, putting the new ones in, you know, it was kind of a thing that, that that took time. Now the, the Recordak, they're like three feet tall and they sat on top of the desk. And so to get to the film, you had to climb up on the circulation desk and wind the film. I don't know what they were thinking.

Sheridan: Nobody called Cal/OSHA because, oh boy!

Robyn: Cal/OSHA I remember, I remember only one of our staff would do it because the rest of the clerical staff wouldn't. They wouldn't let me do it. I would have climbed up there. But, uh, I just remember her climbing up there and everybody standing around making sure she didn't fall off the desk. It was nuts. And then the STAR files were much smaller. They were. They were about the size of a desktop computer. There was no climbing up and winding anything. But I just remember her doing that and I was thinking, oh my gosh, what we did in the in the late 70s was a little, a little crazy.

Sheridan: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, computers obviously have made things so much faster and smaller and faster, easier.

Robyn: Faster and easier. I mean, you think about it when you're home now and you need to see if there's a book that the library has, and you can just go in and type it in and it comes up and you can reserve it and it can be sent to you and boom. Now, back in the day, if you wanted to reserve a book, this is something. They/you would buy a postcard for $0.50 and fill out the postcard with all the information. And then they would send it around some kind of way. And, and people would, they would actually, somebody would actually look it up and see who had it. And then they'd notify the branches that had that particular item that we're looking for this book. And then it would come, and then they would mail you the postcard and you'd go get it.

Sheridan: Wow. Yeah, it's, it's wild to think about all of the technology that was being used and all of the like, sort of like corollary equipment and all of the paper goods that were being used and all of the personnel time that it took to, to punch these things and route them and move them and sort them and scan them. And yeah.

Robyn: You know, and consider the size of our system even back then. Um, you know, I think when I started working here in 1986, Chinatown was the newest branch.

Sheridan: Wow. Yeah, yeah. We added quite a few since then. I'm sure.

Robyn: We had we're up to 72 branches. Chinatown was 63.

Sheridan: Wow. Wow. Okay, so rumor has it that there's a couple of other technologies that you might have a little bit of insight about. Tell us about the punch card system.

Robyn: Okay. I don't know that we ever really used it to the extent that it was supposed to be used. All of this information is binary code that's punched in here, which tells you the information of the book, all of its numbers it's assigned to number and things like that. But I don't remember anyone ever using it as a messenger clerk in branches. So I was dealing with this. We never used that, the IBM. And I don't know if they ever did. I think it was a good idea that never went anywhere. It certainly didn't reach out to the branches. It may have been here at Central. Yeah, but I don't think so either. Um, because it would have been a total different learning curve for people who worked here at Central.

Sheridan: Gotcha.

Robyn: I just don't know.

Sheridan: Yeah.

Robyn: But there it is.

Sheridan: For for any interested listeners, what we'll do is we'll include photos of the punch cards that Robin brought to share with us today in the show notes. And we'll also include a link to the Recordak on Tessa Robyn. We also found references to SCAN.

Robyn: Southern California Answering Network. Oh my goodness. SCAN! SCAN was wonderful. They were a core reference service. When people had bizarre questions, they would send a letter or a phone call. And this core group of librarians would focus on answering their question and they'd get it back out to them.

Sheridan: And so it was librarians from different systems that would all work together.

Robyn: No, It was us.

Sheridan: It was just us?

Robyn: It was just us.

Sheridan: What? And so we were handling.

Robyn: Yeah.

Sheridan: Reference questions for all of Southern California. Just our staff?

Robyn: Yeah. I believe it was just us. Now, I could be wrong. I could be wrong. But I remember the people I dealt with were ours. Our folks. Um, I think it was funded, not by the library department. I think it had a different funding, but it was our people. Right before it ended, um, the last year it was there, it was funded then by the state. So it was then called The State of California Answering Network. They were able to do a deep dive into people's questions before anything was on computer. And I mean, it.

Sheridan: It took time.

Robyn: It took time. And the rabbit hole, they went out and sometimes they asked questions like. they had a newsletter. And, and they would ask, "Does anybody know the answer to this question?" And one time I knew the answer to a question. I was rather surprised. And so I sent them the information. But it was kind of funny. And the curiosity of people was amazing. And they were Google before, before Google existed.

Sheridan: Google before Google. Um, are there any other, uh, pieces of tech that you remember from those days, Robyn, that you think maybe deserve a little bit of love or some attention that you could tell us about?

Robyn: Fax machines were a game changer.

Sheridan: Fax machines. Game changer.

Robyn: Game changer. Okay. For a variety of reasons. Yeah. Um, if we needed to get information out to our people, if something was going on, we had to do a telephone tree. Everybody'd split up and they'd call here, there and everywhere, and you couldn't get information to people as quickly as you wanted to because it had to go down the down the chain of command. I'd call you, you'd call them, they'd call them. Fax machines. Boom. In five minutes, everybody had a piece of paper.

Sheridan: Yeah.

Robyn: Everybody had information that they needed to know if something urgent was going on. Some kind of emergency, you know, if they needed... back in the day when when we needed to send out information that was written, we had to put it in the gray envelopes, and put the envelopes in. Our shipping department is astonishing. But again, things take like three days because it has to be sorted, sent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, the book can't go out. So they send a fax, a fax of it so that people do have it.

Sheridan: It's funny because fax now seems so antiquated. People like 'fax machines'?

Robyn: Fax machines, oh my goodness, they were just a game changer! And I talk about it like that. And people just like, look at me like, 'what are you talking about?' But you know, if you, if you had to make phone calls to talk to people, to tell them, you know, this is going on and this is blah, blah, blah. And it was crazy because you had to do these things. But the fax machine sped up our information delivery.

Sheridan: Mhm.

Robyn: And we can talk about computers and, you know, the things that happened out in the field.

Sheridan: Mhm.

Robyn: Okay. Because the computers that we were using for the card catalog was just a database, just database access. But then we started to get word processing for people to use. And people started coming in to use the word processing; and people started to reserve the computers and come in. And we became not just books. We became a work center. We used to have typewriters in branches who could come in, and for $0.15 an hour, rent a typewriter. So you could do your term paper. That technology leveled the playing field for people.

Sheridan: Sure.

Robyn: And certainly our computers now level the playing field. I'm so proud of what we do for communities, to rise people up to the level, you know, that helps them move forward and get ahead in life.

Sheridan: Yeah. And even just participating in public and in civic life, you know.

Robyn: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Sheridan: Okay. Robyn, I think I'm going to ask you the question that I ask of every single guest on the podcast. And you can look at it however you'd like, whether you know, you yourself as a Robyn, the person or Robyn, the facilities manager. Um, and the answers may be the same. They may be different. I don't know, but if they are different, let us know both. Okay. What is your favorite part of Central Library?

Robyn: Oh, God. Central library. Oh my goodness. Okay. There's a couple of things at Central Library that if you come to visit, you cannot miss. Teen'scape. I love Teen'scape. Back in the day we we didn't address them and we lost them as readers. And so we had to drag them back in as adults. But Teen'scape! Oh my gosh, you walk in there, you've got a cyber cafe, you've got books, you've got information, you've got a room dedicated just to teenagers. Amazing! And my favorite thing to look at is when you come through the old Goodhue building and you step across the little transition strip, the transition strip, and you go out and you look down in to the atrium; and you can look straight across and see where the street level is. And you can look down and see how far down our building goes, and you can look up and see how high up our building goes. We have the largest library west of the Mississippi. We're an eight-story building. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I just love that. And I think those are the things I direct people to see when they're here. "Come on. You gotta see my favorite thing!" So I do take people on tours. I was taking my niece from a very small town and her friends on a visit, and they were here, and I'm taking them on a tour and I'm "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, library, blah, blah, blah library." And we get in, we get into Teen'scape and one of them says to the other one in a stage whisper, "where are we?" I said, "hon, you're in the library." She goes "Library? I thought we were in a museum." I said, "Well, kind of."

Sheridan: Yeah, it is. It's a little bit of both. That's what makes it so amazing.

Robyn: It's a little bit of both.

Sheridan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing, sharing your memories with us, Robyn. Keep an eye out for those show notes. We'll have some photos of the punch card and the other things that we that we discussed in today's segment. Thanks so much, Robyn.

Robyn: Thank you.

Sheridan: Thanks again to Robyn Meyers for sharing her wealth of knowledge. Next up on our podcast is the Library Mystery segment. And joining us today is librarian and self-proclaimed science guy Josh Sanchez. Josh, thanks for stopping by.

Josh: Hey, Sheridan, thank you so much. It's such an honor to be here on the pod.

Sheridan: Josh is a young adult librarian who started with Los Angeles Public Library in 2024, same year that I started. He's seen almost every episode of MythBusters and a whole lot of How It's Made.

Josh: You're darn right. And I just want to say, I'm so sorry if I seem a little out of sorts today. I just I really haven't been sleeping well, and it's just been keeping me up at night.

Sheridan: Uh, what's been keeping you up at night?

Josh: The murals.

Sheridan: Which murals?

Josh: The murals on the second floor in the Children's Lit department.

Sheridan: Uh, what about the murals?

Josh: I don't know if you've ever gotten this question, but it's been keeping me up at night. How did the murals survive the fire? How did they survive? Sheridan?

Sheridan: Oh. That's right. Um, well, I have heard folks kind of musing about it. Uh, why don't you tell us what what's been keeping you up?

Josh: Yeah, yeah. Um, we all know this, but I'm going to say it. As you know, in April of 1986, there was a massive fire in the library. And thanks to Susan Orlean's book, many more people know about that fire. And I've heard about how remarkable it is that the murals were pretty much fine afterwards, pretty much no damage to them at all.

Sheridan: That's right.

Josh: Back then, the Children's Literature department was the History Reading Room, and back then people were allowed to smoke anywhere. It was the 20s. Laissez faire. Do what you want. So lots of folks have theorized that there must have been already a thick layer of grime built up from the smokers, that the murals were actually protected from the damage, but it doesn't add up. Best I can tell, these are oil paintings. And sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. Once the oil is dried, it's not a total combustion hazard, but it's certainly not fireproof.

Sheridan: Okay.

Josh: And my first thought was the original placement and the moisture as, as we've mentioned before, the Albert Herter mural was originally placed in the Hope Street tunnel, but it had to be moved due to high moisture.

Sheridan: That's right.

Josh: Yeah. And that was only a year after the murals were installed. And we're talking like 50 years between when they were moved and when the fire happened.

Sheridan: Half a century.

Josh: Yeah. And I don't think it's likely that the paintings remained wet for that long. My bath towel is usually dry the next day, so moisture theory out. Mhm. And then I thought maybe the height was an advantage. But we cannot forget the laws of thermodynamics. Heat rises. The murals were not safe at that height. So I started investigating this theory about the smoke.

Sheridan: The smoke from the fire?

Josh: No no no no no no, the cigarette smoke. We all know this, but I'll say it again. The American Lung Association cites over 7000 chemicals released when a cigarette is burned. Things like acetone, acetic acid, ammonia, arsenic, benzene, butane, cadmium, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, hexamine, lead, naphthalene, menthol, nicotine, tar, toluene.

Sheridan: Josh, we get it.

Josh: And that's just modern cigarettes. Who knows what kind of gnarly things were put in mid-century cigarettes. Probably super carcinogens. But I want to focus on tar. That's, that's the main thing you're seeing in a place where secondhand smoke is prevalent. It's what turns the walls yellow.

Sheridan: That makes sense.

Josh: And if there's anything in secondhand smoke that will linger, it's the tar, it's resinous. And do you know what else is resinous?

Sheridan: No, but I'm sure you'll tell me.

Josh: Varnish. Okay. And at least the varnish in the 1920s. So it makes sense that this layer of build up on top of the paint varnish could have maybe created a protective layer.

Sheridan: I think you're on to something.

Josh: I know I'm on to something. And oil paintings have a lot of interesting chemicals that could have acted as a fire barrier. I was reading this case study from oil paintings damaged by fire. They concluded that the varnish sometimes acts as a barrier or a sacrificial layer. So if we assume that the tar from the smoke sat on top of the varnish, it's likely that these two served as the coating that prevented the fire from burning. And the paints that doesn't even begin to touch on the wild chemicals present in the pigments. I have this book here by Gettins called Painting Materials. There's so many bizarre chemical equations that I can't even begin to comprehend. And, you know, not to mention it's the 1920s. So they were putting everything in these pigments. And there's no way of knowing for sure unless you can get someone. Sheridan. Because you know, people you're connected. Let me take a sample. I'm sure you know someone you can ask, and.

Sheridan: I don't know if I have that kind of pull. Josh. Um, those murals are historic. They're, they're protected. They're part of what makes L.A. special.                

Josh: It's just a small, tiny sample. I just I'll have my kit ready if you hear anything. No one's gonna notice.

Sheridan: Thanks for joining us, Josh. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Josh: Yeah, sure. Thanks.

Sheridan: Whoo! Okay. Uh, that was something. Uh, next up on the podcast, we're going to be talking about our Cookery Ephemera collection with a librarian from our Science and Technology department. And now on to our library resource. For today's episode, we're highlighting the Cookery Ephemera collection in the science department. And we have here today, Stella Mittelbach, who is a librarian in our Science department here at the Central Library and an active member of the crew producing this very podcast. How's it going, Stella?

Stella: Pretty good. Sheridan. Thanks for having me.

Sheridan: Of course, of course. Stella, tell us a little bit about your career here at LAPL. When did you start? Have you always worked in the science department? Fill us in.

Stella: I started with LAPL in 2006 as a children's librarian at the Vernon branch. In 2007, I transferred to the Science, Technology and Patents Department. I've been here ever since. I started out being the, like the government documents librarian and I worked with the environmental impact reports, but now, primarily I'm the patent and trademark librarian, as well as one of the cookbook librarians.

Sheridan: Is the Cookery Ephemera Collection part of the cookbook collections? Is that what it is in general terms? What is the Cookery Ephemera collection?

Stella: The Cookery Ephemera collection is a small subset of our larger cookery collection. As a lot of your listeners probably know, we have a really amazing special culinary collection here at Central Library. Our general collection is probably over 50,000 titles on food and drink at this point. We've got books also in our special collections department on food and drink. It particularly emphasizes California cookery. So we've got the general collection. We've got our special collections in addition to cookbooks, we have a very large menu collection, and we also have digital resources like A to Z World Food. So the ephemera collection includes about 2500 or so pamphlets, you know, cards and little booklets, things that are they're small paper items that weren't thick enough to bind and put on the bookshelf. It's kind of like your typical booklet that you might, when you buy a new waffle iron or a ice cream maker, they give you a little booklet about how it works and they include a few recipes. So it's a lot of it is that, it's a lot of things from the 19th century, but primarily 20th century. There's also things like from the Almond Growers of America or like the Olive Manufacturers of California, or I don't know if that's... But just as an example, different sort of especially California-related ephemera about food and drink.

Sheridan: So you're saying that the ephemera collection is more like from a manufacturer commercial standpoint of like, hey, we made this product or we're trying to promote this particular crop. Here's a few recipes to sort of get you, the consumer, hooked on this particular product or crop, fruits, vegetable. So that that way you can buy some more. And this is a little kind of way to get you started.

Stella: Yes, exactly. So so a lot of it is, is that type of booklet. There's also strange things like business cards or restaurant promotional material. Even things like, you know, when you go to, to a restaurant like a Denny's, they'll have a little card on the table with like, hey, 'today's ice cream sundae is this.' And so we've got, there's sometimes there's like little, I think they call them table, table, tent cards. Mhm.

Sheridan: How did this cookery ephemera collection start? Was there just like a big donation that the library received? Was there a particular librarian that was interested in this type of material?

Stella: After the 1986 fire, when we reopened Central Library in 1993, there were a couple of librarians that were very interested in beefing up the culinary collection. One of them was named Dan Strahl. Another was Billy Connor Dominguez. They joined a non-profit group that got created for the sole purpose of helping Central Library get its cookbook collection back to what it was, and even more. And that organization is called The Culinary Historians of Southern California. I think probably Dan Strahl was responsible for collecting the donated material, and other librarians probably put it together and organized it. And yeah, they did a great job; I think there was a lot of donations, probably from the Culinary Historians and, and other people over the years.

Sheridan: Gotcha. Okay. Stella, so you mentioned that the Cookery Ephemera collection has a number of different kind of like, disparate items. You have table tents from restaurants, and then it seems like there's a lot of little trade or consumer pamphlets from when you buy a new appliance and you brought some items to share. Can you show us what you've got for us today?

Stella: One of the many items that is covered in this collection would be a refrigerator booklets. Starting, I guess in the teens and 20s, people started getting home refrigerators. So there's quite a few refrigerator booklets. So I brought a couple out of the collection. I've got a booklet here. It's called Frigidaire Frozen Delights. One thing that's cool about this item, you can tell immediately, it's from the 20s. It's got this sort of lovely chambermaid type looking woman looking down at a beautiful cake. It's black and white, but you can just tell she looks like sort of flapper gals from the 20s. It has a lot of, yeah, just recipes for stuff you can keep cool, like salads and desserts. And I also brought another booklet. This one I was excited to find. Since we have this collection, I had a researcher contact us. They were an Academic in Argentina and they were studying a particular industrial designer, and they reached out to our department. They wanted to know if we had any material on the Coldspot refrigerator, which was a brand of refrigerator, apparently. And we did. So I was able to send him various illustrations of how those refrigerators looked. It's got an alligator pear cocktail recipe, and alligator pear is an old, old timey term for an avocado.

Sheridan: That's right. Yeah.

Stella: I learned that. I'm still kind of a student of; I mean, the Culinary Historians of Southern California. I've learned so much from them about food history. I was not really a foodie or a food history person, but I really enjoyed learning all about this stuff from them.

Sheridan: It's cool to see, too, in the pamphlets, how they used to photograph food and how much that's changed. You know, it was a very straightforward kind of like bright colors and like no backgrounds type of thing. And now obviously we like, chop up a couple of limes and put them on the side of the dish to, like, indicate that there's freshness and that they came from natural ingredients and real food. Yeah.

Stella: Right. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. This Frigidaire one from the 20s, definitely illustrates what you're saying. I brought some other items. I was, I was excited, um, to see this. We had a volunteer working on the Cookery ephemera collection for us, organizing it a little better. And she found; there's quite a few items that were donated over the years that never got processed and added to the index. One of these I saw; it was from this restaurant called Aunt Kizzy's Back Porch. And I remember back in the 80s, my brother was always raving about Aunt Kizzy's Back Porch restaurant, and it was a restaurant in Marina del Rey. They've got this promotional sort of brochure from Aunt Kizzy's Back Porch called "The Road to Aunt Kizzy's." And it's a kind of a lovely narrative about this couple that started the restaurant. They were both social workers and also educators, and they decided at some point to go into the restaurant business. It's just really lovely. And I was sort of Googling about them to see, 'oh, what else can I find out about Aunt Kizzy's Back Porch?' and I see that their sons, Greg and Terry Doolan, have continued the tradition with one restaurant called "Dulan's on Crenshaw", as well as Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen with a couple of locations in Southern California. It's just really fun to; tt's kind of a nostalgic feeling, I guess. You know, sometimes when times are tough, it's nice to sort of indulge some cosy nostalgia and look at these old-timey things and just look at the clues to the past and see what, what happened, you know?

Sheridan: Yeah. How did we get here?

Stella: Yeah, exactly.

Sheridan: So it looks like you have a bunch of stuff here in this Cookery Ephemera collection that comes from a bunch of disparate places. Does the Science Department continue to develop this collection? Are you all adding items as people bring them in? Do you have a budget for buying these types of things?

Stella: We are not adding to the collection at this time. In our department, we are reference librarians. We, we put on programs. We develop our collection. We spend most of our time answering the immediate questions of the public for their research needs. So there's not a lot of time or resources to process new donations of cookery ephemera. You know, if somebody has something super special that's specific to Southern California, you know, you can hit us up, we'll we'll take a look or, you know, consider adding to it. It's wonderful that people are saving these things and they're not going in the trash. Sometimes things do slip through the sands of time or to eBay, unfortunately.

Sheridan: Yeah. So so if anybody wanted to get in touch, let's say that they felt like they had something that was really, really unique and Southern California specific, or they just wanted to get in touch to see what you, you know, if for research needs, how would they get in touch with the Science Department?

Stella: You could write us at science@lapl.org. If you are a researcher writing a book, our culinary collection is very wide. We've got books from pole-to-pole, from east to west, literally. So hit us up. You can use the book-a-librarian link on our website to make an appointment, and I can show you how to find what you might discover in our collections. To find the Cookery Ephemera Index. At this point, if you go to lapl.org and you click on Digital Library, you'll see a link to the LAPL indexes and the Cookery Ephemera Index. The online index is there.

Nice. Thanks. Is there anything else you'd like to share about the Cookery Ephemera collection or the Science Department.

Stella: Aside from cookery, we've got science and technology. We've got auto repair books, all sorts of materials for your homework or for brushing up on your trade skills. We can help you.

Sheridan: Yeah. Perfect. Come on in anytime the library is open. The Science Department and its mighty librarians are here to help you. Stella, I think we can wrap this up with one question that I ask of every single guest on the podcast, and that is, what is your favorite part of Central Library?

Stella: I love in the Literature Department, there's a sort of a breezeway where you can sit over the atrium in the Bradley Wing, because it's just this really lovely view of the of the Bradley wing.

Sheridan: Yeah, yeah. I, I can definitely agree with you on that. For interested listeners, what you can do is, if you want to visit the space that Stella is referencing right now; you would come to Central Library, go up to the third level, go through our Literature and Fiction Department all the way to the back, and there's a space where you can make a left, and then all of a sudden you find yourself kind of on this bridge/breezeway that has windows overlooking the entire atrium. And it's really, it's really pretty special. Sometimes the light is coming in through just right and hitting everything and just lighting the whole, the whole thing up. And you can sit, there's a few tables there. You can sit, read your book, work on your laptop. And it's, it's really nice. Thank you so much for coming, Stella, and showing us the Cookery Ephemera collection, and we'll see you around Central.

Stella: Great. See you around. Thank you.

Sheridan: Before we say goodbye today, we'd like to highlight another part of our Central 100 celebration, the Oral History Project. With our Oral history project, we're inviting you to submit audio or video recordings of how the Central Library has impacted you. The recording can be a fond memory, a funny story, or an anecdote of a good experience at the Central Library. As part of the project, we'll preserve your story in our archives so that future Angelenos can listen and enjoy. Find out more at lapl.org/100/oral history. Here's an example of a submission.

MEL: Hello, my name is Mel James. I live in North University Park here in Los Angeles. I'm really excited to do this. I love the Central Library. I actually moved to LA almost two years ago for a graduate school program at USC, go Trojans! Um, fight on. And I'm studying heritage conservation. But before I moved here, I lived in a lot of small towns outside of Sacramento up in Northern California. And so when I moved to LA, I knew to find resources like free Wi-Fi and like just fun community events, maybe some things to do in LA, I should go to the public library. So at the time, I did live downtown. It was walkable. And when I came here, I took a tour, the architecture tour, and was just like in awe of how large this building was and, um, how community feeling LA actually felt; which I had heard was not a thing, but, uh, yeah, very friendly place. Um, let's see. I think some of my favorite things about the library. One, I love the puzzles area. Actually. I didn't know how much I would need that while being in grad school. And so every once in a while I'll pop in. I'll work on the puzzles on like the first floor, on the second floor. Sometimes there'll be somebody else there, sometimes there won't, but it's very relaxing. And I want to say, I found out about that through Instagram and I came to try it out. Um, also, I've appreciated the free printing because sometimes you need to print something out and not just read an e-book. And, uh, I don't know, I'm just really excited to be here in town during the centennial. Very exciting. And, um, I really appreciate having this resource. I tell everybody about it in my program. Um, oh, also, I love the Tessa archive, super helpful with my research and heritage conservation. So that's it. Yay! Central library!

Sheridan: Today's episode was made possible by Executive Producer Christina Hairston and Producer Joshua Sanchez. It was recorded at the Central Library with help from the amazing staff in the Octavia Lab. If you’d like to see photos, documents, and more about the places and spaces we discussed in today’s episode, check the Central 100 Podcast show notes at lapl.org/central100. I'm your host, Sheridan J. Cazarez, with the Los Angeles Public Library. Thanks for listening to the Past Due podcast. We'll see you at the library.