Arts & Culture

From farm to typing pool: UVA librarian celebrates 55 years on the job

When Gayle Cooper was a little girl picking cotton on her family’s subsistence farm in Alabama, she had no idea she would go on to consult for a Pulitzer Prize winner, handle some of the University of Virginia Library’s rarest holdings and become one of the library’s longest-serving employees. She has worked for the University for 55 years.

Cooper grew up in a farming community around 25 miles from the nearest town.

“We had cotton-picking vacations at my school that would last about two weeks,” recalled Cooper, now the head of rare materials cataloging at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.

From there, she attended the University of Montevallo– then called Alabama College – a liberal arts institution designated as a “state college for women” until 1956. Cooper worked in the library to help cover the cost of attendance while studying to be a teacher.

Cooper sits at a desk in a library office using a laptop computer with a large open book to her left.

Though the technology has changed, Cooper says the fundamentals of her job have remained the same. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

One year of practice teaching taught her that it wasn’t for her.

“Those kids knew every trick in the book, and they used them,” Cooper said.

She ditched her teaching plans and started working on her master’s degree in American history at the College of William & Mary. There, she participated in an apprenticeship program with the libraries of College of William & Mary and Colonial Williamsburg. The program was affiliated with the college’s Institute for Early American History.

Edwin Wolf, who led the Library Company of Philadelphia, sat on the institute’s board. He sought to hire someone to help him catalog rare books for the Library Company. He looked specifically for people like Cooper, who did not have a library degree, since Wolf himself did not study library science.

“His only requirement was that you be interested in what you were doing and willing and able to learn,” Cooper said.

She fit the bill. One other apprentice interviewed for the position but withdrew her name, so the job went to Cooper. She packed her William & Mary experience and moved to Philadelphia. That required an adjustment for someone more accustomed to an Alabama cotton field.

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Cooper spent six years working for Wolf at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The library, founded as a subscription library by Benjamin Franklin and his friends in 1731, began to focus on identifying and cataloging the many rare books in its holdings rather than supplying contemporary fiction and biography. It has become a world-renowned research center.

She then went to Rutgers University in New Jersey before being hired at UVA in October 1970.

“It certainly was a meandering road,” Cooper said.

Cooper joined a team of six original catalogers and was the only staff member in charge of cataloging rare books. Special Collections did not exist at the time; instead, there were separate departments for rare books and manuscripts.

It was Cooper’s job to enter information on each item that crossed her desk onto a 3- by 5-inch card, which would then be retyped, proofread, duplicated and filed into a card catalog, an old-fashioned tool that allows students and researchers to look up a subject of interest – say, the Harlem Renaissance, or King Philip II of Spain – and find the relevant materials. Card catalogs took up over half the space in Memorial Hall in Shannon Library (then called Alderman Library), where Cooper worked.

Cooper, right, standing behind tall stacks of books with two other UVA library colleagues.

Cooper, right, poses with UVA Library colleagues behind a pile of dissertations waiting to be cataloged. (Contributed photo)

Most card catalogs have since been digitized, making it easy for people to access what they need at any time of day or night. For years, though, Cooper and her colleagues made typewritten entries for nearly every acquisition the library made. Her team did not start using computers for their work until the late 1970s.

Cooper, like many rare book catalogers at the time, resisted the new technology for a couple of years. She later took over the project of converting records of the library’s holdings into a digital form, helping UVA become one of the first university libraries to do so.

Over more than five decades at UVA, Cooper has played a hand in a number of projects. But one stands out: She cataloged books from the library of Landon Carter, a Virginia politician whose annotated books served as the basis for a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Transformation of Virginia.”

Still, Cooper finds it hard to name her favorite item in the collection.

“It’s hard to choose a favorite when there are so many interesting things there,” Cooper said.