Robert S. Martin
1971 BA in History
Professor Emeritus at the School of Library Information Studies at Texas Woman's University, former Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal
I did not start out knowing I wanted to study history. I changed my major a few times my first two years at Rice, and by the end of my sophomore year, I decided to major in what I seemed to be good at and enjoyed. My first job was working the library at the University of Texas, in what was then called the Barker Texas History Center, which contained the university archives and the Texas southwestern archives. I was an archive assistant for four or five years, and historical cartography, specifically the maps of Texas, interested me. Through a project I was working on with a researcher, I had the opportunity to go to the University of Texas at Arlington, which had just acquired a major historical cartography collection.
When I went to Arlington, I decided should get a master's in library science, which is an entry-level ticket for professional positions. While working full time, I earned a master's degree at the University of North Texas. After that, it seemed that in terms of a career in research libraries, a PhD would be a good credential. The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill offered me a fellowship, and I went there for three years to do the coursework and research for a PhD in library and information science. I then went to University of Wisconsin, Madison, to teach part-time in the library school while working on my dissertation.
Then the perfect job came along: head of special collections at Louisiana State University. I moved to Baton Rouge, where I spent ten years running the rare books, archives, and special collections operations at LSU. It was an "ARL library"; the Association of Research Libraries are the largest and most prestigious academic libraries in the country. I was an associate director, and then they changed the title to associate dean. The next stop in my career was to become a director or a dean of an ARL library. I applied for such an opportunity at the Texas State Library, and, surprising everybody who thought they would not hire an academic but rather a public library person, they hired me.
I arrived at the Texas State Library about five or six months after the Bush family moved into the Governor's mansion. Mrs. Bush is a librarian and became the honorary librarian for the state. As a state librarian myself, it was my role to introduce Mrs. Bush at events. I also did some things with the governor's education programming and met people like Margaret Spelling, who was then his chief advisor on education and later became the Secretary of Education.
Since coming to the State Library, I had been a member of the advisory board for the library school at Texas Woman's University. I liked the people, the program, and the focus of the university. I made the move to go back to academia to be one of those who prepare the next generation of librarians. In my third year of teaching at TWU, President Bush was elected. He appointed me to serve as the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, administering the oldest and most important federal funding program for libraries in the country. Washington had a lot of exciting and interesting opportunities, but I knew that eventually I would be coming back home to Texas. After a four-year non-renewable term, I came back to teach at TWU until I retired last year.
The skills, perspectives, and attitudes that I took away from my undergraduate experience have been important in my career path. First and foremost was developing the ability to read scholarly works with comprehension, and to assess, evaluate, and synthesize academic scholarly work. Beyond that, to be able to develop hypotheses, test them out, and write a coherent essay are essential skills. I honed those skills in my history classes. Every history course that I took required a term paper, and some required multiple written assignments.
I'm a historian by inclination and by preparation. That informs the way I approach almost everything. At UT Austin, I wrote my first scholarly article that was published on the maps of Stephen F. Austin. I did a good bit of research in materials that were well-known, but I approached the maps in a different way, as a primary resource for historical scholarship. When teaching, I started every course with a historical overview. If I was teaching a management course, I discussed how management theory developed. Very few of my colleagues in the library and information profession approach things with a historical frame of reference. I find that odd, unsettling on occasion, and unfortunate. So not only the skills but the perspectives I developed at Rice inform the way I look at the world and understand people and realities.
At Rice, I was a disc jockey. In my various professional situations, I do a lot of public speaking, from delivering papers at scholarly and professional meetings to giving speeches as a public official. Like anything else, it's a matter of practice and, at the outset, getting some feedback on your performance so you can improve it. The radio disc jockey experience helped me become a better speaker.
When hiring people in a library or archives setting, I was always interested in academic qualifications, of course. Most of those kinds of jobs require a combination of an academic humanities background and a professional education. A good archivist will be somebody who has a background in history, preferably, but also a formal education in archival theories, concepts, principles, and application. I was also interested, though, in finding, hiring, and fostering the development of professionals who had more than just a technical ability and understanding of the work; I looked for people who had intellectual curiosity about their work and about the resources that they were responsible for organizing. The head of the rare book collection at Louisiana State University, whom I hired, is not only an experienced and capable librarian, she also has a substantial humanities background, a mastery of basic history and literature, and a real interest in book arts. I have always had a prejudice in favor of hiring people who have the approach of a teacher and a willingness to work collaboratively with faculty, students, and researchers.
My advice to students is to do what stimulates you, challenges you, interests you, and excites you, and don't worry yet about how you will make a living at it. I remember a conversation I had with Michael Hammond, the former dean of The Shepherd School of Music who was tapped by President Bush to be the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was a passionate musician but also a neuroscientist and had a medical degree as well as a PhD in music. When people asked him how he balanced those two things, he would say, "Well, I had to make a choice early in my career between medicine and music, and I decided that I could live without medicine and science. I enjoy it tremendously, I'm stimulated by it, I'm excited about it, but I can live without it. I can't live without music. And that's how I made the choice of where I would devote my energies and time." I think that's a model that everyone can embrace.
