Annual Review: Library legends

Mary Roach doesn’t precisely remember her first day working for KU Libraries, but she knows she was on time. That was the day, in 1975, when she learned that her supervisor stood at the door with a pocket watch taking note of any late arrivals. The inclination toward efficiency and order made a strong first impression, though it was soon balanced with a keen sense of community, full of engaged and interesting colleagues.

One of those colleagues was Kent Miller, who had already been working at the libraries for 10 years when Roach arrived for her first day. The two have been coworkers ever since, and in 2025, Roach and Miller reached the extraordinary milestones of 50 and 60 years of service to the libraries, respectively.

Both began their careers in the cataloging department, which was on the east end of the fourth floor of Watson Library at the time. “It was a sea of gray Steelcase desks with no partitions, everyone sitting back-to-back,” Roach said.

Miller remembers the noise, the distinctive click-clack percussion of many typewriters as each library item’s information was manually typed on individual cards. The machines were fitted with a special platen that enabled the small cards to stay in place as they were typed. If a mistake was made, an “electric eraser,” which required a change of typewriter cartridge, allowed the card to be altered without being completely retyped.

“That was technology then,” Roach said, beginning adaptations in a long line of innovations that she and Miller would play integral roles in, over the decades to come.

Miller said some of his most rewarding moments at the libraries took place in “a golden age of creativity” through the late 1960s to the 1980s, when technology was developed and adapted by librarians and staff to meet the ever-changing, ever-growing needs of the university community.

“The focus at that time was on building collections, but the future could be glimpsed in the technology that was the basis of experimentation,” he said.

In 1967, Miller helped implement a punched card system for the circulation of general collections, the first large-scale automation project in KU Libraries. Working with the university to modify user IDs, the libraries began to produce cards with uniquely punched patterns for each of the 1.7 million volumes in the collection at that time. Special card readers allowed for automatically generated notices and replaced the three-part forms that had previously been filled out by hand to maintain circulation information.

Soon after Roach arrived in the mid-1970s, work began with “beehive” data terminals from the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) as part of the libraries first foray into a new computerized Union Catalog system, a centralized database that allowed the sharing of bibliographic records and holding information with other member libraries.

“The beehives were big, clunky old things and they were all daisy-chained together with these long, thick cables that would have to stretch across the room, so you had to have cable up and over and down and across, then connected to a modem,” Roach said.

“If you look at the right places in the ceiling in Watson, you will see a lot of cable,” Miller said. “Dead cable from these various connections that had to be physically made.”

From these beginning projects and throughout the decades, the need for the libraries to change and evolve to meet rapidly developing and expanding campus needs has never ceased. As key players in the evolution of the libraries’ technology as well as longtime stewards of the Watson Library building, Miller and Roach bring special context and irreplaceable institutional knowledge to their current-day responsibilities. Over the past year, as executive associate deans, they took part in the selection of a new integrated library system (ILS) to manage the 5.8 million items currently in KU Libraries’ collection.

“The evolutionary path from 2,500 drawers of 3 by 5 inch catalog cards, thousands of Kardex records and three-part circulation forms with access to only KU holdings, to the type of personalized, at-your-fingertips access to KU collections and services, as well as many other sources, represents an awesome leap in one lifetime,” Miller said. “Libraries of the 1950s and 1960s were very similar to their predecessors of the previous century, but the last 50 to 60 years have brought dramatic change.”

Looking back to those first days on the job, Roach said she thinks her younger self would be surprised at the way things have turned out.

“I never would've expected to be here for 50 years, or to have the opportunities that I've had, to engage in so many different things and have different roles in the library. I never would've anticipated when I started that I would have such a fully rewarding career here.”  

And if someone had told Miller during his first semester at KU, that he would still be working at KU Libraries in 60 years?

“I guess I wouldn’t have been that surprised,” he said. “It's always seemed like Kansas is not a bad place to be, and the things that were happening at the university and the libraries — a lot of pretty progressive, cutting-edge stuff has happened here.”

This content first appeared in KU Libraries 2024-25 Annual Review, a publication that reviews accomplishments of the past year and provides a glimpse of priorities moving forward. See this story and the full issue in the downloadable pdf.