CU News Contents:
  Library Equipment Replacement and Related Issues
  Golden Anniversary for Oral History Research
  The Bancroft Library Acquires Native American Oral Histories

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  Library Equipment Replacement and Related Issues

Ralph Moon, Director of Library Systems, has prepared the following explanation of The Library's equipment replacement and upgrade policy to provide staff and faculty with a common understanding of the issues.

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The Library's day-to-day operations and many of the services it offers its patrons depend on a computing infrastructure consisting of approximately three million dollars worth of equipment of various kinds: a Tandem mainframe computer; three large UNIX servers; a dozen smaller Novell, UNIX, and NT servers; eight hundred networked PC's; three hundred Wyse (dumb) terminals; hundreds of printers, networked tape and CD-ROM drives, terminal servers, barcode readers, scanners, and the like; plus the software needed to make it all work.

Each of these pieces of equipment has a limited useful lifetime and will need to be replaced eventually - PC's and software about every four years, large servers about every six years, and other pieces of equipment somewhere between. Taking these factors into account, along with current price trends, the average annual equipment replacement cost to the Library is approximately $665,000.

The Library has always treated equipment replacement as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Unrelenting pressures on the operating budget have, however, increasingly forced the organization to defer replacement when possible, and to use a variety of one-time fund sources - gifts, grants, endowment and other discretionary funds - to cover the expense when replacement is necessary.

Like using personal savings and donations from friends to pay the rent, this is an inadequate long-term strategy. Inevitable expenses need to be matched by reliable, continuing sources of income.

Equipment maintenance and upgrade are separate, but equally important issues. While the Library has service contracts for its larger machines, it performs most PC maintenance itself, as this continues to be significantly more economical than outsourcing the work. A frequently quoted study by the Gartner Group estimates the annual cost of owning a networked PC in the private sector to be over $13,000. This is an order of magnitude more than the Library expends, including maintenance and replacement costs. (Three factors account for this result: standardization of hardware and software platforms, aggressive use of labor-saving technologies, and lower University salaries for computer technicians.)

The cost of major upgrades - the substitution of one sort of equipment by another, more capable kind - are, on the other hand, more difficult to contain through good management alone. Consider the case of the Library's public-access terminals. The majority of the digital information resources most used by Library patrons require graphics-capable PC workstations. At the same time, over 200 of the Library's public workstations are text-based dumb terminals, incapable of providing access to these resources. The solution is to replace the latter with the former. This, however, would entail an initial outlay of over $575,000 - for the PCs themselves, increased server capacity, and network connections - plus nearly $200,000 per year in ongoing maintenance and replacement costs. The Library can afford neither at the moment, and as a result, upgrades of this kind have, in recent years, been dependent on corporate and private gifts, primarily in conjunction with facilities renovations.

- Ralph H. Moon
Director, Library Systems

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  Golden Anniversary for Oral History Research

More and more humanities and social science scholars are finding relevant oral history interviews in The Bancroft Library that can provide depth and illustrative commentary for their research. The Library's 5,000-plus collection dates back to 1952, just four years after Allan Nevins established the first program of tape-recorded history at Columbia University. A few years earlier, Berkeley's George R. Stewart, a historian as well as a novelist of the west, had independently formulated the idea of continuing the interviews begun by Hubert Howe Bancroft.

Nationally recognized oral historian Charles T. Morrissey will address the Library's Townsend Center Oral History Working Group on Thursday, February 26, on "A Half-Century of Oral History in the United States, 1948-1998." Dr. Morrissey, who received his master's degree from Cal, will examine how oral history has been applied as a research methodology and with what consequences. He will then look forward to reflect on what prospects the future holds for oral history as a technique for documenting American history. The Townsend Group will meet in the Stone Seminar Room on the third floor of The Bancroft Library, noon to 1:30 p.m.

Morrissey is a past president of the Oral History Association and currently a consultant to the Pew Charitable Trusts, Baylor College of Medicine, and the Oregon Health Science University. A frequent teacher of oral history workshops, he is currently assembling a book of essays, "Asking about America: Oral History and the Nation's Past."

- Ann Lage or Gabrielle Morris (510/642-7395)
The Bancroft Library

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  The Bancroft Library Acquires Native American Oral Histories

The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) has received for The Bancroft Library's Donated Oral Histories Collection the full transcripts and tapes of interviews with 26 contemporary Native Americans. The narrators represent a wide range of tribal backgrounds, from Penobscot and Onondaga in the northeast, to Tlingit and Inupiaq in Alaska, to the Pueblo and California tribes of the west, and occupationally they range from traditional elders and healers to doctors, lawyers, artists, and college presidents.

They were interviewed on their cultural backgrounds and spiritual beliefs by Lois Crozier-Hogle and Darryl Babe Wilson, the donors, for what eventually became, in abridged form, a book entitled "Surviving in Two Worlds", University of Texas Press, 1997. This collection of contemporary Native American voices adds to the four volume set of transcripts on "The Salmon War and Other Chapters in the Lives of a Yurok Family" given to The Bancroft Library by Helene Oppenheimer. Among the topics discussed in those interviews are the battle for fishing rights on the Klamath River, conflict with the neighboring Hupa tribe, environmental issues, and Yurok traditions.

The oral histories donated by Lois Crozier-Hogle join a number of valuable and heavily-used manuscript and archival collections available at The Bancroft Library to researchers interested in Native American Studies. These include the field notes, correspondence, and writings of anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber, Samuel A. Barrett, Robert H. Lowie, and Robert F. Heizer; and the records of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, which contain a wealth of primary source materials collected and created by the department's faculty and graduate students in the first half of the 20th Century.

- Willa Baum
Regional Oral History Office

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PAPER COPY ATTACHMENTS to this week's CU NEWS:  None
Copies of paper attachments are filed in CU NEWS binders available for staff consultation at the following locations:

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