By MARTY LEVINE
A lot has changed at the Falk Library of the Health Sciences in the School of Medicine over the past 40 years, but main desk manager Mary Gail Merlina has been working there the entire time — through the card catalog era, through all three of the library’s electronic systems, and now through the big move to the building’s new addition.
In fact, she has been working in libraries since she was in eighth grade at Resurrection, a Catholic school in Brookline, and then at the Carnegie Library branch in the same neighborhood while she attended the city’s Brashear High School. “I never really looked into anything else,” Merlina says. “I did like books, and it just seemed like the path I chose.”
She recalls her job interview shortly before her first day at Falk Library, Nov. 28, 1983. She remembers being warned that the job would be demanding — that some of the faculty would come seeking materials with just a tiny bit of urgency. “They said sometimes people want their things then and there ... and the students are kind of wanting things too, compared to students down the hill,” in the lower campus, Merlina recollects. That hasn’t changed, she says: Some patrons are chatty, others all business, but by now she can pretty much tell them where a book would be, just from memory— just from its title.
Not that there are books in the new library space yet — those will return from storage as soon as the renovation is finished.
She also remembers working at the library’s front desk — sometimes with three workers behind it at once — which stood as a fortress in front of shelving for the journals that too often went missing. The desk and the entire library were smaller back then, of course; the library eventually expanded into spaces vacated by the school’s old grill and by the medical bookstore.
Her start coincided with the beginning of the computer era, but the library still had a card catalog, its slim drawers packed with file cards strung on long horizontal spindles, three per offering — one for its title, one for its author and one for the subject matter.
She remembers putting reserved materials for courses onto a computer at Falk, then having to walk down to the Engineering Library to get them printed on a continuous role of paper with holes down its perforated sides. There were still typewriters in use too — IBM Selectrics, the last word, then and forever, in electronic typing, with ball-shaped interchangeable typefaces rather than thin keys, and its own erasing capabilities (which was an advance over liquid White Out).
Some things haven’t changed. While Pitt IDs are now library cards and books are scanned for check out by bar code, each book still has a due date slip inside. But today’s emailed late notices are too easy to ignore, she says: “Years ago, when you sent them out handwritten, people used to return (books) faster. Now I don't think they even look at the information in their email.” She has resorted to sending less-ignorable personal emails to remind people to return materials.
Merlina began as a library specialist here and has been main desk manager for 32 years, but checking materials in and out and reshelving them is still part of the job. As manager, she also hires staff.
One big change at Falk occurred a decade ago, when it began offering fiction and general nonfiction too — about 200 titles at a time. While some may involve medical subjects, those aren’t necessarily the most popular, Merlina says.
Readers of those books may be looking for a little escape, she thinks; the most popular among them include “American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics” by Kevin Hazzard, along with Barbara Kingsolver and John Grisham novels, as well as a coming-of-age story/murder mystery by zoologist Delia Owen, “When the Crawdads Sing.”
This “leisure collection” joined the general collection, medical humanities collection (bioethics/medical ethics; history of medicine; medical philosophy; medical sociology; the arts in medicine; and psychology) and rare book room, housing the library’s oldest tomes, available for viewing only by appointment.
She and her crew do have a shiny new desk and continue to help the document delivery department send out invoices and the cataloging department receive and check in the books, not to mention reserve requests, now often for online materials. Her duties also include learning new tech and setting up the library’s new classrooms for faculty to give exams. She still likes her job as much as she did all those years ago, she offers.
While the new facility feels open and bright, Merlina must admit that she is nostalgic already for the literal old-school digs: “I do kind of miss the old part,” she says. “We had old cherry wood and it just seemed more homey.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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