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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This essay captures the reflections of several students who studied with Professor F. W. Lancaster during his tenure at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) from 1970 to 1992 and beyond. It is organized around the emerging themes as expressed by a diverse group of students in the United States and from around the globe. These students have given us permission to use all or some of their comments in this Festschrift.
INTRODUCTION
Those who have come to know Professor F. W. Lancaster primarily through his writings may not know of his personal qualities that have endeared him to many of his students. This essay is a tribute to Lancaster by several former students for his personal qualities that reflect his caring, sharing, inspiring, and encouraging nature, and his down-to-earth wisdom and ready wit. F. W. Lancaster joined the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois in 1970 and served as a faculty member until his retirement in 1992. Notwithstanding his retirement, Lancaster continued to direct students' research as an emeritus faculty member. During his tenure, hundreds of students took his courses, which included Information Storage and Retrieval, Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval, Measurement and Evaluation, and Foundations of Librarianship for students entering the masters program. Based on the student dataset in the MPACT database, Lancaster mentored more students and served on more research committees during his tenure than other faculty at GSLIS in the field of Library and Information Science. (1) Appendix A shows Lancaster's advisees and the dissertation committees on which he served.
In this essay, we draw on the reflections of several of Lancaster's former students who studied at the GSLIS in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. The students who responded to our call for contributions gave us permission to use their personal stories for this project (see Appendix B). We, the authors, are former students ourselves and we have interspersed our own reflections of Lancaster and of his family throughout this essay. Our goal is to let each student's voice be heard as they reminisce about Lancaster's impact on their lives, their professional careers and in their research interests.
A quick review of Lancaster's advisees reflects a significant number of international students. They arrived in the United States from Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa, The Dominican Republic, and Taiwan.
Reflections offered by his international students demonstrate Lancaster's global reach through his writings and travels. He always seemed especially sensitive to the diverse needs of students who came from different cultural backgrounds and educational systems. The students who responded to the call for contributions to this personal tribute included both masters degree and doctoral students and roughly spanned the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Master's degree respondents include: Julie Sigler ('71), Linda Smith ('72), Becky Lyon ('72), Elana Hanson ('74), Tad Graham ('74), Clifford Haka ('77), Terry Mills ('81, '82), Rashmi Mehrotra ('82), and Sidney Berger ('87). Doctoral student respondents include: Evelyn Curry ('81), Jaime Pontigo ('84), Chandra Prabha ('84), William Aguillar ('84), Sharon Baker ('85), Sharon (Chengren) Hu ('87), Szarina Abdullah ('89), Lorraine Haricombe ('88 '92), and Hong Xu ('96).
Without exception former students agree that Lancaster made a lasting impact on their careers and left them with a deep respect for his personal qualities since his very early days of teaching at GSLIS. Overall, his students recognize him as a dedicated teacher and mentor with a down-to-earth quality, a father figure with warmth and hospitality, and one who never failed to recognize his students for their contributions to his research and to his writings. This essay honors Lancaster for the human values he espouses. It is organized around the themes that emerged in the stories several former students shared with us.
THE DEDICATED TEACHER AND MENTOR
From his earliest days at GSLIS Lancaster had a distinguished aura and a distinct humane side as described by Hanson ('74). She writes:
The most commanding presence in the Library Science halls in 1973 was E Wilfrid Lancaster. When I was assigned as his research assistant I nearly fainted. His look, stance, walk, features, and reputation all struck awe and even a bit of fear into the heart of this nervous elementary education graduate and former resident of the sorority just across the street. Wilf took me into his office and home, welcoming me as his assistant on campus and family member off campus. He and his wife introduced me to the cuisines of the world; as I helped prepare his manuscripts, he helped prepare me for the coming of the computer to the world of medical libraries I was about to enter as a hospital librarian. What I didn't realize was that inside this legend was a great human being who took equal delight in taking budding librarians under his wing and getting them ready to take on new challenges in the whirlwind that was becoming information science.
Smith ('72) wrote, "As an undergraduate in physics and mathematics at a small college, I had completed the few computer science courses offered at the time. But it was not until I enrolled in Professor Lancaster's courses that I began to understand the potential of computer applications for the field in which I had chosen to pursue a career: library science." Smith writes that she was a student of Professor Lancaster in two courses: Information Storage and Retrieval and Vocabulary Control. He literally wrote the textbook for each course (Information Retrieval Systems: Characteristics, Testing and Evaluation, 1st ed., 1968; Vocabulary Control for Information Retrieval, 1st ed., 1972).
I remember sitting in the auditorium in Room 66 in the basement of the Library at some point that year, watching a demonstration of an early online retrieval system from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), AIM-TWX (Abridged Index Medicus-Teletype Writer Exchange Network). We had been learning about NLM's pioneering efforts to carry out batch processed searches of bibliographic records of the medical literature (MEDLARS--Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System), but this was something new: online searching in real time. By the time I returned to Illinois in 1977 to join the faculty, Professor Lancaster had published yet another book (Information Retrieval Online, 1973) and developed a course on online information systems. He generously offered to let me teach the course, which until that point had...
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