Former University Librarian Rodney Waldron has died.

Former Oregon State University librarian Rodney Waldron died June 22 in Mt. Angel. He was 93 years old. Waldron served as University Librarian at OSU from 1965 to 1984.

A Newberg, Ore., native, Waldron came to OSU in 1954. He had served in the 77th Infantry Division during World War II, rising to the rank of master sergeant, and following his service, he received a bachelor’s in history from the University of Denver, and later a master’s of library science.

Waldron, who had inherited a love of books from his mother, threw himself into his work, first as assistant state archivist for the State of Colorado, and then as head cataloger for the State Historical Society of Missouri. After three years at University of Idaho, he came to OSU as administrative assistant to then-library director William Carlson. He told the OSU Messenger in 2001 “My first job at OSC (Oregon State College) was to keep rabbits out of the library’s window wells and to keep grosbeaks out of the reading room.”

He then worked as a librarian, and helped in the planning for a new library facility, the Kerr Library, which opened in 1963. Although that building was eventually replaced with Valley Library, one of Waldron’s biggest and longest lasting legacies was the establishment of the University Archives, which was formally established in 1961.

Waldron’s tenure as library director began in 1965, the same year he served as president of the Pacific Northwest Library Association. While Waldron often struggled with inadequate staff and budget, he prioritized student learning, and made sure that students were involved in the library planning process.

“I think Rod’s lasting legacy is that he put students first, and they in turn greatly respected him,” said Larry Landis, OSU’s director of the Special Collections & Archives Research Center. “The beginnings of automation within the library happened during his time as university librarian, and he played a key role in establishing the University Archives.”

He also fought against potential budget cuts that would have nearly halved the library’s funding, and after an impassioned talk in front of the Faculty Senate, he saw the cuts reduced to 18 percent. “You put up a fight for what you know is right or you can just go along, let the thing go to pot,” he once told an interviewer.

Waldron also oversaw automation of many of the library’s functions, and the expansion the library building. Two floors were added to Kerr Library during his tenure, increasing storage space and study areas by 54,000 square feet.

Karyle Butcher, professor emeritus and former University Librarian, said Waldron’s amazing memory helped connect her with library staff and donors from years past, and she appreciated his embrace of new library technology.

“He was a bit of a mover and shaker in his day,” Butcher said. “He was a strong advocate for libraries sharing the card catalogs to make interlibrary loan easier and more efficient.  In the days before automation this was not an easy thing to do.  He was also an early promoter of technology in libraries – creating the Library Information and Retrieval Systems LIRS which was an early system of database searching.”

When he retired in 1984, Waldron turned from university archiving to a more personal project, transcribing the oral history of his family. He eventually moved to Silverton, Ore., to be near family, and was living at an assisted living facility in Mt. Angel when he died.

Harvard University may have the cachet, but OSU has the cache—a digital archive for scholarly writings. Last year when Harvard passed a faculty mandate to deposit their articles in the university’s archive, there was just one problem: the archive hadn’t yet been created.

ScholarsArchive@OSU, launched in early 2005, is ranked among the top nationally and internationally by Web-o-Metrics on several indicators: total items deposited (more than 10,000), articles indexed by GoogleScholar, and Web links to archived articles. Only a handful of universities, including MIT (which designed the repository software), University of Michigan and University of Oregon, outrank Oregon State.

More than 2,500 visitors go to ScholarsArchive daily.

“We get a surprising number from the third world—India, Africa, places where they’re unable to access research if it’s only available through journals,” reports Michael Boock, head of technical services for the Valley Library.

The largest collections within the archive are in natural resources. Other hefty subject areas are oceanic and atmospheric sciences, agricultural research and forestry. To date, the most downloaded item during one six-month period was Ecology Effects of Wave Energy in the Pacific Northwest. Other popular titles include Harvesting and Marketing Edible Wild Plants, Applied Aerodynamics of Wind Power Machines, and Intertidal Invertebrates from Central California to Oregon.

Also in the archive are master’s theses and Ph.D. dissertations written by OSU students. “Many of the theses and dissertations have been downloaded more than 500 times,” Boock says. “The print versions rarely circulate, so ScholarsArchive is giving these papers broader exposure than ever before.”

The library has shared some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for those new to the Scholar’s Archive, which we’ve provided below. For more information, go to http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/jspui/index.jsp.

What is a collection in Scholars Archive?

Collections belong to a community. Items are stored in collections. They cannot be stored in communities. Collections are ordinarily based on the type of material being collected: e.g. Research Publications; Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research Papers; Presentations; Conference Papers.

Who can submit an item to ScholarsArchive?

OSU faculty, staff and students may deposit items once they are affiliated with a collection in ScholarsArchive. Contact Michael Boock for assistance if you wish to deposit scholarly material.

What can be submitted to ScholarsArchive?

1. The work must be produced, submitted or sponsored by OSU faculty. Examples include published research, conference papers, technical reports, working papers, white papers, classroom resources, theses, dissertations, journals, newsletters, creative works, and other scholarly material.
2. The work must be in digital form. OSU Libraries can digitize print materials for inclusion. Contact Sue Kunda if you are interested in the Libraries’ digitization services.
3. The author/sponsor of each work must be willing and able to grant to Oregon State University the non-exclusive right to preserve and distribute the work.

Can Authors Legally Deposit Scholarly Articles in ScholarsArchive@OSU?

If scholars retain the copyright to their articles, they can deposit any version of them wherever they wish. However, most scholars transfer their article rights to a journal publisher as part of the publication process and, consequently, it is the publisher’s policies that govern deposit. For example, a publisher may permit deposit of a preprint to ScholarsArchive@OSU, but not the final published article file. Many publisher policies are available from a Publisher Policies and Self-Archiving web site. If you have any trouble finding out what you can and can’t deposit, contact your research librarian.

The History of ScholarsArchive:

The OSU Libraries implemented this digital repository service upon the recommendation of a 2004 Task Force report. We use it as one tool in our suite of services that comprise the OSU Digital Libraries. ScholarsArchive@OSU is a permanent repository for the university’s digital research and educational output.

~ Lee Sherman

Terry Reese is a leading authority in innovative library services.

Terry Reese Jr., has been named as the new holder of the Gray Family Chair for innovative library services at the Oregon State University Libraries.

Reese is known nationally and internationally for his leadership in the investigation and application of new metadata and digitization standards to digital library collections.

He has been with OSU Libraries since 2003 and has had his MarcEdit program adopted by libraries in the United States, Australia, France and Pakistan.

More recently, Reese, along with former Gray Chair holder Jeremy Frumkin, developed LibraryFind, an open source resource discovery tool used by libraries in the United States and Europe.

Reese, an adjunct professor with the Emporia University School of Information, is the author of numerous articles and is co-author of the book Building Digital Libraries: A How-to-do-it Manual.

The Gray Family Chair for innovative library services is an endowed chair designed in part to identify innovative means for accessing and improving the delivery of information to the students, faculty and staff — with the goal of moving OSU Libraries to the forefront as an information provider.

Halstead’s fervor for Lawrence would soon turn out to shape her future.

Carmen Halstead found a lot of support from Neil Davison of OSU's English department. (photo: Jim Folts)

Halstead enrolled in one of Neil Davison’s upper-level modern literature classes after noticing Lawrence’s name on the syllabus. Not long after the class began, however, Davison announced he was dropping Lawrence due to time constraints.

“Carmen immediately came to my office,” Davison recalled. “She told me how disappointed she was and that the whole reason she took the course was to study Lawrence.”

Halstead’s zealous lobbying on Lawrence’s behalf worked. “Thankfully, it turned out we did study Lawrence,” Davison said.

Halstead took her interest in Lawrence beyond the classroom setting. For a class assignment, Halstead wrote an essay highlighting one of Lawrence’s best-known works, Women and Love. That essay evolved, with Davison’s encouragement, into a thesis that won a 2006 research award from the Valley Library.

“I camped out in the stacks for a month,” Halstead said. “I thought it was awesome that I could study [Lawrence] in such a specific way; looking at the female unconscious as it relates to men, especially in his erotic texts.”

In her thesis, Halstead analyzed Lawrence in relation to the “somewhat tumultuous foundation upon which his work rests” (Halstead, 2006). She stretched beyond character development to look at other factors of Lawrence’s appeal, including his “complexity of theory” and “[reflection] of the modernist mentality” and the way in which these aspects of his literature relate to the “major feminist misreading of [his work]” (Halstead, 2006).

“While pop culture history has labeled him scandalous and immoral, he remains for some truth seekers a brilliant, inspirational philosopher,” Halstead’s thesis concluded.

Through Davison’s class and his guidance on her thesis, Halstead was able to harness her literary research talents and discover the direction of her dreams.

“I had no idea there were people who devote their whole lives to studying Lawrence,” Halstead said. “Professor Davison told me ‘if this is what you really want, then this is how you get there’.”

After graduating in June, Halstead began applying for graduate programs. While she may become a professor of English literature, it may take some time before Halstead fully recognizes her professional path – but she believes she is on her way.

“Having someone there to constantly support me and who not only recognizes all of the hard work that I’ve done but really believes that I can go further is wonderful,” Halstead said. “It has done a lot for my education. You can’t always see that by looking at the transcript.”

For Davison, nurturing Halstead’s academic passion has been “the great reward of teaching. Every once in awhile, you get an undergraduate who is intently focused,” he said. “The greatest moment for a teacher is to see that his student has outshined them, and knowing that they contributed to that.”

Finally, Halstead has a piece of advice for other students: “If there’s something you’re really passionate about, don’t let the instructor pull it from the syllabus.”

~ by Tara Pistorese

“Mentors” is a regular feature of LIFE@OSU. Along with LIFE/Work, In the Classroom, OSU Around Oregon, and especially Commentary, we encourage submissions and suggestions of articles that would be of interest to the staff and faculty of Oregon State University. Send them to lifeatosu@oregonstate.edu. Also, comment on this and other stories already appearing in our web edition. Just click on the “comment” link at the end of each piece. Thank you. — Editor

Linda Richards, a graduate student in History of Science.

Fifty years ago Oregon born OSU graduate and 1954 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry Linus Pauling with his wife Ava Helen, demanded the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union end nuclear bomb explosion tests, arguing that the fallout from the weapons contaminated the globe with dangerous radioactivity. The Paulings presented a petition to UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld with more than 11,000 signatures, seeking to end nuclear weapons testing as a first step toward total nuclear disarmament.

Later that same year, Linus Pauling and 17 others filed a lawsuit against the Atomic Energy Commission and the Dept. of Defense to end nuclear testing. He also published the seminal book No More War! In 1983, he wrote a new preface to the 25th anniversary edition of the book, which reads in part as follows:

“Twenty-five years ago the message of this book was that the development of great nuclear weapons requires that war be given up, for all time – that the forces that can destroy the world must not be used.

This is still the message of the book.

The danger of world destruction in a nuclear war is greater than ever before…I hope that when the year 2008 arrives, after another 25 years, the world will have survived and the human race still will be here (although I probably shall no longer be living) but that there will be no need to republish the book, because the goal of world peace will have been achieved, militarism and nuclear weapons will have been brought under control and the threat of world destruction will finally have been abolished.”

No More War! approached peace and disarmament in much the same way that Pauling approached science: Pauling used his genius to see the connections between the chemical bond, molecules, biology, physics and genetics to explain the dangers of nuclear weapons, radiation and fallout.

Pauling also presented alternatives to violence to build genuine, lasting security by developing systems of coexistence, human rights and international law.

The final chapter outlined his wish that resources be contributed not to weapons, but to understanding and eliminating the conditions that lead to war by researching what creates peace. He proposed, among other things, a UN World Peace Research Organization.

The book contains appendices that are actually a history of actions and petitions that contributed to the attainment of the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, including the famous Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, the last petition signed by Einstein before his death. That manifesto ends with a plea: “There lies before us, if we choose continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom.

Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal, as human beings, to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest.”

The day that the Atmospheric Test ban Treaty took effect — Oct. 10, 1963 — Pauling was announced as the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Ava and Linus Pauling Papers in the OSU Valley Library contain more than 500,000 documents and artifacts of their lives and is the largest such collection anywhere of a scientist. The materials were donated by Linus Pauling in 1986 to OSU in hopes that his and Ava Helen’s work for a better world where human needs are met would be continued.

Masterfully catalogued by archivist Cliff Mead, researcher Chris Petersen and a staff of honor students, the papers are organized to achieve maximum impact and access with vibrant, interactive Web pages.

The Ava and Linus Pauling Papers illuminate Pauling’s ability to connect diverse concepts to find likely unifying theories, using a stochastic approach to truth, as described by his biographer Tom Hager: “Pauling used a leap of courage to make an educated guess.”

Pauling believed in generating lots of ideas that could be discarded to find one that is likely to be correct, and it is with this confidence he has left so much behind for us to continue his work.

Link to a documentary history of Linus Pauling and the International Peace Movement:

http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/index.html

View actual documents from 1945 debate on nuclear weapons that still rings true today:

http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/papers/peace4.007.3-statement-19451106.html

A three-minute video of Linus Pauling addressing the dangers of atomic power, and additional information relating to Pauling’s book: No More War!

http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/peace/narrative/page29.html

Linda Richards is a master’s degree candidate in the History of Science program at OSU, as well as a graduate teaching assistant.