 I'm very excited that we have Dr. Virginia Tucker, who's gonna tell us all about her PhD and research and scholarly journey. So Virginia, please take it away. I'm so enthralled by all of these presentations and yours is gonna be so interesting. So please go right ahead. And do you need to share the screen? I do, I do have slides. Okay, I will make you a co-host, let's see. They've really been fun. It's been fun to learn about each other. Yes, yes. Learn things about people I've worked with for years. So, great, I understand. I assume people are going to, well, hopefully not everybody will leave, but Wasana, it was nice to see you here for Kevin. And I'll understand if others need to leave. So let me just go ahead and get my screen up here. Okay, so hopefully you're seeing it on full screen now. Things away. Okay, Sylvia, thanks. Okay, so I do have a few slides. And so my journey as a scholar in the Information Sciences, it's been a long journey, though not as long as Bill's last month. So I had to put that in there. And the first thing I wanted to say is thank you for asking me to do this. Excuse me, I need to move a couple of screens out of here. There we go. But thank you for asking me to do this. The process of preparing for this talk was truly an exercise in some kind of enlightenment and reflecting on what at times has seemed like a meandering path was especially valuable. I could see in looking at some CV worthy chunks of my professional life, six years in academic libraries, 11 years in special public library as a county law librarian, and over 25 years in the online database industry. Being a SciTech database specialist and instructor, working in client services and as an instructional programs manager and designer, and then many years as a product architect and as a consultant in the information industry where I did this, that and the other thing. One master's degree and two unfinished master's degrees and one PhD. And 40 plus years as a single mom, of three children, 13 plus years as a grandma and caregiver to too many family members. Those are the non CV worthy facts. So I'm going to just get started here with those three images that I pulled in because I can't seem to help myself but do a little thematic analysis when I'm looking at a big bunch of data. And I discerned three thematic patterns and some of these were ones I really hadn't fully graphed. So once again, gratitude for this invitation. I looked at the seeds planted in terms of how I ended up getting into research when did these seeds get planted, which ones grew, which ones flourished, which ones instead led to some life lessons. And then which interests surfaced again and again in some form of information structures, whether it was in mathematics, which was my first love for music theory, which is a close second and closely related or working in database design and search interface development for over 25 years. I should be able to say it by now. The building blocks of my different careers and the structures of multidimensional information blocks themselves. And then making connections and bridges, bridging between these different career environments and roles that I've had. The Golden Gate was a good fit here because I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and then moved from California North to Washington State for personal reasons, I'm still here. And this ended up presenting different opportunities that I could not have imagined. I found that I really wanted to prepare a small set of slides because as I was reflecting on these experiences and trying to say, what was my scholar's journey? I had images come to mind of people and places and events and I wanted to use them as ways to represent what I'd learned, what I put into practice as a scholar and as a scholar educated because that's the identity I see for myself in my career. So I hope you enjoy this. And again, thanks for listening. So the importance of education was deeply instilled in me and in my sisters, I really cannot disconnect my journey as a scholar from certain life experiences. I won't spend a whole lot of time on this but it's super important for context. They helped with the decisions I made and what I learned from those decisions where they took me. They made me a better researcher, a better writer for sure and a better scholar. So who are these people? This newspaper article shows my grandmother, Pansy, my mother's mother. She went to Teachers College at age 16 and by age 18, she was teaching in a one-room school house shown here. She's the tall one in the center at the top. She had 51 students in her classroom from ages six to 19. She had some young men who were older than she was. She kept teaching other than some time off when she had two kids and she retired from teaching at age 71 in the town of Blaine right along the border of Washington and Canada. This is my mother in the color picture. She worked in the steel mills outside Chicago during World War II. So she was a bit of a Rosie the Riveter. She was a gifted sculptor, soprano. She was great in musical theater and one of the most creative people I knew. She taught fifth grade and directed musicals after school just because. My mother went back for a master's degree in education and an administrator's credential at San Jose State. This was when I was in kindergarten. She became one of the very few female school principals in the area. This is her inner office as principal. She remarried late in life and my stepfather was a professor at University of Santa Clara. So more reinforcement of the importance of education. So seeds planted. I'm going to jump ahead to the question when did the seed of interest in library and information sciences begin? And I was planning to tell you about working in a couple of different environments during my undergraduate years in libraries but in fairly unusual environments. But then I recalled that when I was in middle school I was selected to serve as a representative on the city's advisory council to the mayor on building a new library. Fairly progressive idea to have not just teens but tweens on this council. And my favorite part was looking at the architectural drawings. So that should have been a clue that I was interested in going deep into structures of some kind. But who can understand that when you're 12? But at the same time, in that same year I was told by my science teacher, literally, it would be a shame if you did not become a physical scientist that was during a physics course. So that was kind of a burden. Some of you might relate to that. I ended up as a physics major at university where I was the only girl in classes of 50. This was in the 70s. But I had another love and that was music theory and music composition. This is a program where I have a composition on the concert and I'm also performing there as one of the percussionists. There are a couple of famous people on this program which is probably was fun to keep it like Lori Anderson. You've probably heard of her as well as David Lang to contemporary composers who've hit the big time which is hard to do. But I continued to sing and play guitar in the style of John Baez and Judy Collins. So not much research going on, but when you're in music theory, you really learn a lot and I was definitely taking a deep dive. My first job while at university was waitressing at the faculty club. But my life got a lot better when I got a second job at the music library and I was a student assistant to the cataloging group. They had me do original cataloging records, not copy cataloging for musical scores that were completely original. And I had to create all the Library of Congress details for instrumentation, form, composer, classification, even down to the cutter number. And then a real library would approve it. But for me, this was thrilling because I was looking at original compositions and I had enough background at that point in music to do a fairly decent job of the draft cataloging. And then I was able to add a third student job. Now I had a really good scholarship and my mother was helping to college was expensive even in the seventies. And this third job was at the computer science library. So we're starting to see a theme here. And I worked on entry into a database for the technical reports collection. The only search access points at that time were author name and title words. Title words are pretty good indicators of subject content and the way we created access was with a rotated index for the title words, print it out on the dot matrix printer. So it probably seemed inevitable by that time that I was going to work in libraries, but I actually did part of a master's degree in music composition. Before going off to do an MLS at UC Berkeley when they still had one. And there I was able to focus on programming courses and on management in academic libraries, but the really big experience for me as a scholar was that I did an independent study in bibliometrics. At that time my math skills were still really strong. Professor Michael Cooper agreed to be my advisor to do an independent study. And I was quite honored to submit the paper to ASIST for the Pratt-Severn Award. And I did win the award. So that was pretty exciting. These are just a couple of snips from the paper. As I said, my math skills were really good back then. And that might have been part of what they liked about it. This is just to show you some of the formula I came up with as a way of analyzing the data and coming up with the findings and what my contributions were. So that was quite a deep dive into bibliometrics. And I had a lot of factors involved as well. Now, while I was doing the MLS, a job came open at Stanford and I interviewed for it. But at Berkeley, they encouraged me to stay and do a PhD. So I could have done a PhD back in 1978, which is just a few years ago. But the job was at Stanford as the physics librarian and they offered me the job, but on the condition that I could finish my MLS in nine months. So I decided to do that. I took like five courses a quarter. One of my sisters loaned me money for the tuition so that I could finish quickly. And I ended up going back to Stanford as the physics librarian. So you see there that sort of classic photo of the quad at Stanford, if you've ever seen a picture of Stanford, it usually looks like that. And the lower photo is of the variant physics building and the library was on the third floor. It's now integrated into a combined science and engineering building with just gorgeous library. But that's where I was. The one mistake I made was we got funding to replace the furniture and I ordered the poster chairs that were blue and gold. And I just didn't think of it at all, but those were Berkeley colors and they are rivals with Stanford. So they forgave me that problem. And I did get tenure at Stanford as a research librarian. But one of my favorite things there was doing online database searching. We had one computer terminal at the main library and you had to make appointments with it. So that's what I did. But I continued doing that, learning as much as I could about it. And while I was at one of the dialogue seminars, a lot of you folks have been around a while will know about dialogue. The trainer talked to me and asked me some questions. We got to talking and said, how would you like to come and talk to us at dialogue about a position? So I went for an interview and was offered a job there. But I learned that the position was one that required quite a bit of travel. And by that time I had a one-year-old daughter, so I turned it down. Then a year or two later, I was on an airplane with my daughter and ran into one of the dialogue trainers I'd met while I was at the dialogue facility, Konizuka, and we talked for a while. And she said, would you reconsider? We're still looking for someone. So I came back for a follow-up interview at dialogue. I was just so excited what was happening there. Adding databases, adding features, multi-database searching, this was all very, very new. 1982 was that time period. They made me the proverbial offer I couldn't refuse. And I took the position and left Stanford and went to dialogue. It was a very good decision. I was involved in a lot of the development and prototyping of some of the newer commands. And I was there as the SciTech database specialist. So any databases being added, I was involved in how to make them searchable. I did a lot of training. And I think I have another picture. No, anyway, this is me giving a seminar. And then I moved into being the manager of the client instruction programs. So that was largely seminars, but then we moved into self-instruction, which involved printed materials as well as computer-based training. And that was really exciting. I was able to hire different people to help with that and work on those areas. The article on the right, this happened after I left the training area and went into product development and they hired me as a product architect. So I was doing prototyping. I learned HTML, learned those things just on my own. And I'd had so much work with clients that I was typically on product teams as the voice of the client. I conducted user research, focus groups, usability testing, all the things that would be involved in making sure the product would be what clients would buy, would use, would be happy with. But I would typically do the prototyping, a working prototype of some kind of sketch and then a working prototype. So this one was very well received. So I'm happy to keep this article. This is from the year 2000 Dialog Internet Toolkit where clients could actually pick and choose the databases they want, pick and choose the search options they want and construct their own search forms. This was a brand new idea at that time. And of course, a lot of design decisions were involved. This is something that's just from two years ago, Dialog received an IEEE milestone award for the first iterative search product. It was actually in the late 60s. And I did a research blog post about this event and I thought I would include this when I got up and spoke. I mostly spoke about mental models and how it affects people's ability to do a good search or not. And over in the left corner, you'll see Roger Summit who was the founder of Dialog. And off in the right is Margie Halava. Some of you might know her as well. So I jumped forward in time and now we're gonna jump right back because I ended up moving to Washington State a lot of personal reasons for that move. And this was in the early 90s. And I continued to do consulting work for Dialog and for another client at that time. I wanted to continue to study and I worked on a master's in education that I didn't quite finish. I did student teaching in fifth and sixth grade. Mostly I was teaching the math lessons and I was working toward endorsement in math and physics. So I seemed to persist at being a student while I was working full time. And by that time I had three children. I continued in that study in education at Western Washington University which is right down the street from me and just was unable to with too many other things going on in life. And then came the gateway program in 2008. I applied for it and was accepted into the first cohort. At that time I was working as a law librarian half-time as a paralegal full-time and a part-time lecturer for the iSchool teaching courses in advanced search. And by then my two youngest children were in college and the oldest was out of college. All of that might have been reasons not to do it but the time was right because gateway made it possible for me to continue those jobs and stay at home. And I was thrilled to be able to begin in the PhD program so I am like the biggest fan although I probably have competition for that. My skills in research were stale but I twisted Judy Weidman's arm to become my advisor and we hit it off, it worked out extremely well but as you know the PhD experience is hard. This is what it felt like many times like trying to get through a snowstorm and with very little to keep you going but this might seem familiar to you but on the other hand this is another photo that I thought of if any of you have heard of the Dutch experience called Ratlopen, it's called mud walking. I spent what would have been my senior year in high school as an exchange student in the Netherlands and I did this. You walk 10 miles through the mud when it's low tide and you walk to an island called Stiermonico and then you wait for the tide to come in and you take the boat back to the mainland. It's considered a fun thing to do. You definitely need a guide because it can become quite deep water like that and it can be dangerous if you don't have a guide who knows exactly what's going on but I thought of this because at one point I was talking to Christine Bruce during my PhD experience and I was a few months into analyzing data and I was using grounded theory. Some of you can relate to this and I was moving slowly. I told her it felt like I was walking through mud and Christine's response was really not terribly hardening but it was helpful. She told me, well, it might feel that way for a while. So there you have it. This is the school I attended in Amsterdam called Spinoza-Liseum. It's a math and science school just to give you a nice picture of the sculpture of Spinoza. So onward through the PhD experience I used the threshold concepts theoretical framework in my study. It wasn't what I intended from the start but in a way my own transformation of understanding research and the other important thing was how research completely informs how I teach as well and how my teaching informs my research. It's all very integrated. So you pass through a portal and it transforms your understanding and I'm not going to give a mini talk on threshold concepts but we show this fellow here getting his driver's license and life will never be the same but for me the PhD experience was definitely like that. I also can relate to this dancer although I can't dance like that I do love to dance. And then I was able to get a tenure track position and that was a transformation from being a lecturer and also needing to have other part-time jobs that happened in 2016. One thing I learned in this PhD experience is that there are two Sammys. This is the San Jose State, Sammy the Spartan which is kind of scary looking but there's another Sammy called Sammy the Salamanda at QUT that's the faculty mascot. I don't know if you knew this but I thought it was pretty interesting and here he is with the hard rain and the floods. So a few photos of people, many of whom you will know I think conferences, colleagues and collaboration are super important to the studies I do. I've collaborated with quite a few people. In the last few years I've published with five MLIS students and two PhD students including Ladi of course and collaborated with professors at three different universities, Africa, HANS, you all know at ECU, Sylvia QUT and Michelle Simmons at Momneth College in Illinois. Michelle used to be at San Jose State's EYE school. I do a lot of work on curriculum development and again to me it is very connected with work I've done in the past in instructional design and with the research I do. So here's one of my favorite pictures with Laura, Sylvia, Christine and myself. And then I wanted to bring up the point about how important mentors are. This lower photo, I'm standing there with John Chowning and Roger Summer, two of my most important mentors. John Chowning is music professor at Stanford. He is also the inventor of making frequency modulation possible. He was the first one to come up with a synthesizer that was actually constructed now by Yamaha and we're standing there up at the computer music building. Roger was the founder of Dialog. Roger is also quite a good amateur musician and I had the pleasure of getting the two of them together, I've been wanting for years to introduce them to each other, not just because they were my mentors but because I knew they would hit it off, they're both musicians and then after they talked for about five minutes it turned out they were in the Navy at the same time in the same sphere. So that was very fun. You never know what can come of that keeping in touch with people. Couple more pictures. There's some graduates of the program and then celebrations important. We're doing that now for Letty and Walter and the lower right here that Judy Wheatman was my sanity supervisor on the PhD and then she retired soon after. I don't know if that was a cause and effect or not but and then the young woman with blonde hair is my middle child, Jessica and we went on a cruise together. That was my biggest celebration of all for completing the PhD and that was the day when I turned 60. So that was an extra special celebration and we miss Judy very much. The other thing I learned in some of these different venues is different ways of writing. So I just wanted to mention that because I think it's super important. One thing that came out of being at a conference was I got talking to a publisher who was interested to learn that I was a law librarian and that I worked with the public. I worked with attorneys and I did reference work for jail inmates. This ultimately led, this one conversation at a conference led to writing a book on legal research published by ALA Editions. It's now in its second edition. So you never know. It's one thing I really miss with the virtual conferences we've had to have over the last two years is those kinds of conversations are much less likely to take place. So getting ready to wrap it up here. The PhD experience plus life, don't try this alone. These are the people who were with me on that journey. My children and I include in that my son in law because I've known him since he was a teen. He's like my oldest son. And then two granddaughters were born while I was doing the PhD. And it's hard to imagine life without them. We know the power of reflecting on our learning experiences and often speak about takeaways from our learning. So I'm going to leave you with this thought. My last takeaway is this one. Thank you. That was awesome. That was fabulous. Thank you so much, Virginia. That was wonderful. Everyone is so interesting. Every time someone does one of these presentations it's true what you said, like we learn all these sorts of things. That was amazing. So thank you so much. It was great to do it. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Does anybody have any questions or comments or things for Virginia? There's a comment. Ginny, thank you for doing that. I'm surprised that you didn't do your PhD on something bibliometric. Yeah, yeah. Your math skills get a little rusty after a while, don't they? Yeah, yeah. I was really surprised to hear that part that you didn't do bibliometrics for PhD. I thought about it. I thought about it. The thing I thought about doing that my advisor said, no, it's gonna be too hard to measure that, which was the learning that takes place during searching. And now there's all kinds of lit on it. So maybe we'll do that, but thank you. Thanks, Michelle, thank you. Personal board of directors. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, Virginia, I'm gonna have to tell that story about you ordering blue and gold furniture for the Stanford Libraries. I'm just gonna have to tell that story. I had no idea. I was just, you know, in the library I had, I rearranged the whole thing because the journals, you know, which are like shelves and shelves were all still in there by LC number in with the books. And I said, no, no, no, we're gonna do this. The journals are gonna be alphabetical, you know, but that means basically everything gets moved multiple times in order to, you know, to flip things around. And yeah, you know, Arthur Shalow, who was one of the co-inventors of the laser, who I had for my optics class when I was a physics major, both of his daughters were teenagers and they came to work for me and help move books. So I thought, wow, there's, you know, it's like, it was sort of like physics royalty coming to work for you. But yeah, it was, yeah. So much of our work focuses on students and teaching and rightfully so. But this moment, you know, Mary, to your credit, I think this moment that we're creating about sharing our own journeys is not only good for students, it's good for us all. We focus so much on the work that we're doing rather than on who we are, who we become, how that journey has happened. Right. It's a rare moment. Right, it really is. And I'm grateful to you, Virginia, for doing it. Yeah, yeah. Well, Anthony, I think this was your idea. So, you know, I really think it's one of the best things, I don't know, it's one of the best things I've ever gotten to, you know, be part of or witness. And it is very interesting the thing where I thought I was gonna do this and then, you know, whatever, then I didn't, then I had another opportunity or the things like the road not taken. Yeah. I didn't do this, I didn't do this, you know. Yeah. And then life intervenes, our parents, our children are, you know, our spouses, whatever. And you move from one place to another and so on. So, yeah. The device of the interview, though, is incomparable, you know, the way that we can do this and I'm looking forward to others too. Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. Yeah.