William M. Roberts
University Archivist
Recipient of the LAUC-B 1996/97 Distinguished Librarian Award
The Librarians Association of the University of California-Berkeley Division is proud to honor William M. Roberts with the Distinguished Librarian Award. Bill is a distinguished librarian whose career embodies all the things that make librarianship special: the desire to serve a multitude of interests and needs in the University community and the community at large and the fusion of a deep knowledge of a subject with the overarching requirement that knowledge must be shared so that it can be a seed for every kind of creative endeavor. We wanted to bring together just a few of Bill's many accomplishments and to share some of the comments that Bill's nominators made about his career.
Bill's Career Path
Bill Roberts came to Bancroft in 1966 as a library assistant in the Manuscripts Division. He received his MLS at Berkeley in 1968 and in 1969 he became a reference librarian and assumed responsibility for the hiring and training of student pages and for the organization of the portrait file. By the mid-1970s he had become Assistant Head of Public Services and Assistant to the Curator of Pictorial Collections. Bill continued to fulfill that dual assignment until 1984, when he became the fourth University Archivist at Berkeley. As demanding as the full-time position of the University and UC Systemwide Archivist is, Bill, because of early retirements and budget cuts, also served as Acting Curator for the Pictorial Collections from 1992 until July of 1997 and as Acting Curator for History of Science and Technology from 1993 to 1995.As Professor Charles Faulhaber, James D. Hart Director of The Bancroft Library, states:
"Bill is one of the longest serving members of The Bancroft Library staff and as such has been a tower of strength and an invaluable source of wise and discreet counsel to me as I learned to deal with the more Byzantine arcana of the campus and library bureaucracies. More importantly, he is also one of The Library's most valued, versatile, dedicated and productive employees...Bill has carried the load of two full-time positions for the last five years and of two and one half full time positions for two of those years--with, moreover, the grace and wry self-deprecation that characterize him."
Service to the University Community
Bill has helped shape the future of the catalogs at Berkeley through his service on the Subcommittee on the Future of Catalogs, the Public Service Catalog Design Group, the Working Group on Short Records, the Online Catalog Design Group, the Cataloging Council, and the GLADIS Special Access Committee. He also served on the General Library Reference Services Committee, Special Collections Access Management Committee, and the NRLF Subcommittees on Archives and Special Collections and on Conservation. From 1983 to 1987 he edited the General Library Christmas Exhibition Catalog. He participated in the University History Seminar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education and served on the 125th Anniversary of the University of California Committee. From 1987 through 1991 Bill was a member of the LAUC-B Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Advancement (CAPA) and served as its chair in 1988-89.A wonderful example of the ways in which Bill's service and expertise ensure the accuracy of the history of the University of California comes from President Emeritus Clark Kerr.
"Bill Roberts has provided exceptional, irreplaceable aid to me and my staff during the several years that I have been at work on the memoirs of my years as first chancellor of the Berkeley campus and president of the University of California. He always responds with a great spirit of friendly cooperation and real interest."
Service at the Bancroft
Bill has participated in the Space Planning and Security Committees, the Bancroft Online Catalog Discussion Group, and the Bancroft Collection Assessment Project. He continues to work on various strategic planning initiatives, and is currently chairing the outreach subcommittee and serving on the steering committee for the 1997-98 Strategic Plan. He belongs to the Bancroft Collections Development Committee and the Bancroft Management Advisory Group and has written many pieces for Bancroftiana, the newsletter of the Friends of the Bancroft Library. He has designed, planned and installed many Bancroft and Library exhibitions, most recently acting as exhibit curator for "Defining Leadership: The Berkeley Chancellors, 1952-1997."As Acting Curator for the Pictorial Collections, Bill was a key member of the Pictorial Review Committee and has been the principal guide for the successful grant strategy that has been carrying out that Committee's recommendations. He co-authored two successful National Historical Publications and Records Commission proposals, one to survey and catalog the pictorial collections and one to process the 400,000 photographs of the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin photo morgue. He took the curatorial lead on these projects as well as on the NEH-funded California Heritage Digital Image Access Project. The latter created the first Internet-accessible Encoded Archival Description (EAD) digital archive, comprised of 160 finding aids and 28,863 digitized photographs from pictorial collections. The result of these efforts has been a dramatic improvement in access to and control of these nationally renowned collections. They have now been completely surveyed, cataloged at the collection level, mounted on the World Wide Web, and in many instances, have been described in finding aids at the item level. According to Charles Faulhaber, "It is in large part Bill's efforts that have made possible the resolution of a long recognized curatorial problem of extraordinary proportions."
Tony Bliss, Rare Books Librarian at the Bancroft, who has worked with Bill for more than seventeen years, summarizes Bill's career:
"The hallmarks of [his] performance are commitment and competence. Over the years, as additional responsibilities have been piled on him, his commitment has continually expanded to handle them. He is not content with "holding the fort"--he demands excellence of himself and his colleagues. His work as University Archivist has brought that unit into the age of automation making it more responsive to the Office of the President's needs and greatly increasing the use and utility of the archives as a scholarly resource."
Service to the Community
Bill served on and has chaired (for multiple terms) the University of California Archivists Council. He is a member of the Society of American Archivists and the Society of California Archivists. He has also been secretary, vice president, and president of the Berkeley Historical Society.Deborah Day, Archivist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, captures the wonderful combination of skills that make Bill a librarian in the finest tradition of our profession:
"The combination of Bill Roberts' knowledge and his helpfulness in imparting it embody the highest standards of librarianship. His scholarship enhances the University's Intellectual Community."
Bill as Human Being
And last but not least, Charles Faulhaber points out that"[I]n addition to his professional qualities, his friends appreciate his prodigious talents and wide ranging interests, as a creative cook and gardener, indefatigable and multi-lingual (French, Spanish, Italian and Hungarian) traveler, devotee of opera and theater, gifted singer, voracious reader and devoted father and grandfather."
Kenneth Sanderson, Associate Editor of the Mark Twain Papers, gives a wonderful description of the kind of people that make Berkeley a special place, and Bill fits this description perfectly: people with "a flair for imaginative understanding, a clear sense of human and intellectual priorities, an enlightened outlook, and professional competence, leavened with good humor." In these days of identity crises in the profession, priority crises in our libraries, and a general crisis caused by our inability to create and live in a community, Bill's example is impressive and meaningful. We congratulate him on his award and hope that his vision of librarianship will live on into the distant, digital future!