A Spa? In Boston?

What’s that got to do with libraries?

In the summer of 1974, my husband Hank and I took a trip to Europe. When I told my co-workers that we planned to visit England, the UC Berkeley Library Director suggested we include in our itinerary a place called Boston Spa, to investigate, take pictures, and write a thorough report of my experiences. The Library would even finance a portion of our trip!

Now, why on earth would a library pay one of its employees to visit a spa? Boston Spa, although at one time there were hot springs and spa facilities in the area, is not a fancy resort. It’s a small English village in West Yorkshire that also houses a division of the British Library which maintains a huge collection of newspapers and other document and printed materials. By the 1970s, it had developed a complicated and technologically revolutionary method of document delivery between libraries in which books and other materials were retrieved and distributed by means of conveyer belts and a pneumatic tube system of cannisters that transported orders for library materials. The librarians and staff at Berkeley were curious to know more about this system; we were in the early planning stages of developing a storage facility in Richmond from which materials would be moved back and forth to Berkeley as needed.

So off we went. Boston Spa was indeed an impressive operation. The staff there welcomed us and gave us a thorough tour, explaining the many functions in detail. Hank took a lot of pictures; I made copious notes. On my return, I was asked to give a presentation to the entire library staff. Compiling my notes and preparing and arranging a slide show took a few months—and by then I was very pregnant.

In that era, a presentation like mine, which I carefully organized to demonstrate the step-by-step procedures of this complex book delivery system, had to be done with slides painstakingly arranged in a tray called a “carousel” then projected onto a screen.

The day came. The entire library staff, except for those needed to serve the public, came into the room to view my slide show and hear my carefully prepared outline of the facility and its operations. Everyone was seated. The library director introduced me and gave attendees a bit of background about the significance of Boston Spa. The lights dimmed. I turned on the projector.

And then—nine months pregnant—my bulging tummy bumped into the carousel, sending over a hundred slides spilling out onto the floor. Catastrophe! People scrambled to help me, picking up the errant slides (I was so pregnant I couldn’t bend over to retrieve them) and inserting them back into the carousel. Of course, now they were hopelessly out of order. My meticulously prepared presentation, designed to show the process from arrival of an order via vacuum tube to mechanical retrieval of an item from its shelved location to delivery to a packaging area via conveyer belt, all now in utter disarray. I proceeded as well as I could, but it was a mess.

Oh, if only we’d had PowerPoint back then!

(My daughter arrived a week later, healthy, happy, and entirely unaware of the trouble she’d inadvertently caused.)