Alice and Joe Specht: a Gentle Rivalry

It's easy to imagine what dinnertime at the Specht house must have been like. There was Alice, who recently retired as Dean of University Libraries at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, TX. Across the table sat husband Joe, who until retiring in 2007 served as Director of the Jay-Rollins Library at McMurry University, also in Abilene. In the middle was daughter Mary Helen, who these days teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University in Austin, TX, and is an accomplished author whose debut novel, Migratory Animals, was published in January and is now in its second printing.

Was shop talk forbidden at the dinner table or was it inescapable? It depends on who you ask.

According to Joe, work discussion over dinner happened only occasionally. "Occasionally?" laughed Alice. Mary also chuckled. "At least from my perspective, there was constant library talk at the dinner table."

Did a rivalry develop between the heads of two of the city's academic libraries? If so, it was likely a good-natured, gentle one. For example, Joe noted – obviously for Alice's benefit – that the Jay-Rollins Library "of course" has the reputation in Abilene of being the area's flagship library, which drew a chuckle from Alice. While he seems to enjoy the occasional light-hearted jab, Joe is quick to compliment his wife. "I’ve always been very proud of Alice’s professionalism. She has always taken whatever she has done very seriously."

Asked how she plans to spend her retirement, Alice says she has set up an office at home and will soon begin research on a couple of projects, one of them a history project dealing with an unsolved murder in Collin County, TX, in the 1850s."Hardin-Simmons has a document related to the murder, an extradition paper trying to pull the murderer out of Indian Territory (Oklahoma). We've had that document since the 30s and I've used it for displays, and I got to thinking that I didn't know the story behind that extradition and I'd like to get it written." A board member of the Grace Museum in Abilene, Alice said she plans to help the museum organize its archives.

Most of all, Alice says she looks forward to setting her own schedule. "I don't have to get up at 6:00 anymore. I can sit around the house, drink my coffee, and start the day when I want to." Joe sees travel in their future. "We're excited about Alice being out on her own again. I think she wants to do some traveling, and she might let me tag along."

As for memorable moments in her library career, Alice recalled her time spent in public libraries. "I've had two different jobs with public libraries and I really enjoyed them. The thing I like about the public library was that people would come in with a question and really want to know something. That to me was cool." An interesting difference Alice noted between public and academic library users was what motivated them. "College students were there because of an assignment," she said, "and may or may not be curious about the topic." Students and the public that came in and really wanted to know something about a topic was one of the best parts of the job for her.

Since his retirement, Joe has pursued a number of longtime interests, including music-related projects that are primarily Texas-oriented. He's currently working on an oil field song project called "Smell That Sweet Perfume: Oil Patch Songs on Record." The project will eventually become a book that focuses on petroleum-related songs sung or written in what he calls the Gulf Southwest: Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and New Mexico. Parts of this project have already been published in various installments, the most recent of which was a six-part series in PB Oil & Gas magazine that deals with oil field songs from the Permian Basin dating back from the 1940s through 2009.

Alice and Joe both view their involvement over the years with Amigos as "a special relationship." Both the Hardin-Simmons and McMurry libraries are longtime members of Amigos, dating back to its founding. Mary and Joe were part of those early days and recall them with fondness.

Alice said one of the things that first comes to mind is that their libraries were always pretty thin, in that they did not have layers of staff and librarians working for them. "Sometimes we needed some help with training, and it was always nice to know that we could get someone from Amigos to come in and help if, for example, the only cataloger we had left town." Working with Amigos to develop disaster plans brought the library tremendous peace of mind. "When we'd have issues with water and mold, it was nice to have a preservation officer at Amigos help out. If we had flooding in Abilene, we’d get a call from someone at Amigos asking if everything was OK, and if our heads were above water (laughs). It was nice to know that somebody had our back."

Joe recalled that Amigos originally served as what he called a conduit to OCLC. He also noted how pleased the libraries in Abilene were that membership in Amigos put them on an equal footing with the state's largest universities and allowed them to take advantage of everyone's combined purchasing power. "We of course were much smaller but had an equal vote with UT Austin and Texas A&M. Amigos made it possible for smaller libraries like ours to be able to piggyback and be able to afford some of the services that we probably wouldn’t be able to otherwise." As libraries moved into shared database purchasing, Joe noted that through Amigos smaller libraries were able to pay a proportional share of the purchase price, making it possible for them to provide their students and faculty with electronic resources the libraries could not have afforded on their own.

Joe also credits the Amigos connection for making possible the existence of the Abilene Library Consortium, a group of Abilene-area libraries. "We've always been proud of our unique situation, in that our group of three academics (with Abilene Christian University) and one public library were used as an example to the rest of the country of academic-public library cooperation. It's often hard to find public libraries and academic libraries that can agree on working together. Amigos made that possible for us with a shared online catalog, and as Alice said, backup with training. It's been a long-term, evolving partnership. Certainly the ALC wouldn't be where it is today if not for Amigos."

For Mary, certain memories of growing up as the daughter of two librarian parents stand out. In addition to those library conversations over dinner, Mary recalled how she spent considerable time in her parents' libraries after school, often with friends. "I would try to convince my friends to play this game where we would pick a card out of the card catalog, and the first person who finds the book would get a point. And of course I'd always win because my parents were librarians and I knew the cataloging system."

Being raised by librarians shaped Mary's career path and later prepared her to deal with an unforeseen aspect of writing. "One of the things I didn’t expect in becoming a writer was the importance of research. I knew that I loved to read and that my parents loved to read, and we spent a lot of time reading as a family, but I didn't realize until I became a writer how important research is." She said having librarians as parents equipped her with research skills that have proven invaluable to her writing. "Migratory Animals deals with climate science and snowflakes and Huntington’s disease, architecture, farming – lots of things I was not an expert on that required me to spend considerable time researching, of course in libraries," she said. Mary is currently at work on her next project, a novel set in New Mexico in the 70s.

Mary said that growing up she was always aware that both her parents possessed a natural curiosity about things and had many interests outside their careers. "While they were librarians and that was their job, they did a lot of their own research on writing projects outside of work. I think they were just such great models, in terms of living a life of curiosity and not just settling into the mundane. I think I came to expect that's what my life would entail. Just watching them, that's what I thought a good fulfilled life was."

With a wink, Joe teased, "Don't you think your father was probably more of an example than your mother?"

Alice said she hopes future generations realize the importance of libraries. It's an issue, she says, that will continue to occupy her time and energy. "In Abilene next week there's going to be discussion about whether the new elementary school will actually need to have a library or librarian," she noted. "It's pretty discouraging to some of us that we have to have that conversation, but we are going to have that conversation. It's an important issue for all of us, that we need to continue reading and supporting libraries." She hopes to stay in touch with former colleagues, asking that we include her email address, alicespecht@gmail.com.