Lillian Castillo-Speed Oral History Interview

Amanda Belantara: Today we're interviewing Lillian Castillo-Speed, Head Librarian of the Ethnic Studies Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The interview was conducted for the Ways of Knowing Oral History Project. It was recorded virtually on June 10th, 2022. The interviewers are Amanda Belantara and Emily Drabinski.

Belantara: Hi Lillian, we're so glad to have this opportunity to talk with you today. We'd like to start by hearing a little from you about your background and education, and what led you to become a librarian.

Lillian Castillo-Speed: That could be a long story! I was born in East Los Angeles. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, and was the first in our family to go to college. I went to UC Riverside. I was an English major, and later decided to go to library school. That's the long part of the story. I ended up at UC Berkeley, and I got my master's in library science degree there in 1983.

Belantara: How did you decide to go into librarianship?

Castillo-Speed: My husband and I moved to U.C.- Santa Barbara because he was getting his PhD there, and our son Nathan had just been born. I had wonderful years with my son as he was growing up. When he went to preschool, I needed to do something else. I had not finished my graduate work in English at that point. I found an ad in the paper to be a volunteer at a high school library and I went every Thursday. I looked forward to it, and got dressed up for that one Thursday. An actual job opening came up in another high school and I got recommendations to apply there. I got that job as a library tech. There was a librarian there and she had her own office. Susan and I, the other library tech, didn't have our own offices, but we were always out at the front desk where all the action was with the students. I wanted to go and get some more skills as a library tech because I had no skills. I hadn't been trained in library stuff. This was way back before the internet. I found out that there was a library tech training program at Santa Barbara City College.I took the bus, walked in the building, and they said, "No, we don't have that program anymore." And I said, "Well, do you know of any other place that has a library tech program?” Because there was no way to just look it up on Google. But they said, "Oh, well, go talk to the librarian on the campus." So I went into the library, there was a woman at the front desk, and I told her, "I want to get library tech training." And she said, "Well, do you have a bachelor's degree?" And I said, "Yes." She says, "Well, you should go to library school." And that was the first time that that possibility ever came into my head that I could just go to library school. So I applied to different places. When I got an offer from Berkeley and a little scholarship for that program, we decided after my husband's PhD program was over. We got a moving van and we moved up to Berkeley so I could get my library degree there.

Belantara: What year was it when you started your library degree?

Castillo-Speed: 1981. Yeah, it was hot August time when we moved into married student housing on the campus, and very, very old buildings. It was wonderful to be in Berkeley.

Belantara: When you started the program, was there anything that you found most interesting about the field?

Castillo-Speed: Well, I was looking forward to anything having to do with digital. What did we call it? Computer, we used to call it computer stuff back then, because that was just coming up, and that's when I thought I would just get a basic degree for librarianship. But then I ended up taking, what do they call them, independent units in learning how to do some software program. I can't remember what it was, but I got a unit for learning how to use that program. I thought that's where things were going and that's where I should be. I should be learning how to do computer stuff.

Emily Drabinski: Can you tell us how you came to work at the Chicano Studies Library?

Castillo-Speed: At library school, I had a friend named Peter Latino, and he recommended a course that was in the library school curriculum called Ethnic Bibliography. It was taught by a librarian on campus named Francisco García Ayvens. And I thought, "Well, I'll do it." I didn't really know anything about it, but I signed up for the class, and that's how I found out about the Chicano Studies Library, because I was going to go to that class. Part of the class was giving tours of different ethnic libraries in the area, public and academic, just anything that was some ethnic focused libraries. His library, the Chicano Studies Library, was one of them. When I walked in, that was the first time I'd been on campus that changed my life, walking through that door, which I can see in my mind very clearly, 104 Wheeler Hall. And I became a volunteer. I was in the class and just wanted to do everything that Francisco was doing. He showed me collection development, and everything that he was working on, he is a lifelong friend. That was very important for me in my life, in my career.

Drabinski: Can you tell us anything about what sort of feeling on campus was around Chicano issues at that time? Is this still 1981?

Castillo-Speed: Yes. I was not that connected with, as a graduate student, to that much activity, like marches or anything like that. So, I was not really drawn into anything. But when I decided to focus on Chicano librarianship, I took a class in Chicano history, and just became more aware of the history and the issues, the concerns, and where I was In that arc of history. And also through Francisco, because he recommended books for me to read to just make me more aware of my history. I had been taking Spanish ever since high school because I'm not a native speaker. We didn't get Spanish when we were young, but my grandmother always wanted us to speak Spanish. And so that was a personal goal of mine, to please her and to try to become a Spanish speaker. When I was in college too, I took Spanish. So then also when I was in library school, I took summer class in Spanish. So I just kind of just kept that going. And also there were tutors and teachers that had classes offsite and you'd pay for them, and then we'd speak in Spanish, that kind of thing. Once I knew that I wanted to be in the Chicano studies, librarianship world, then I tried to learn more about Chicano studies and Chicano history.

Drabinski: Can you tell us about your initial thoughts about the need for a specialized vocabulary for these collections?

Castillo-Speed: That came as I was in library school, and again, I was being mentored by Francisco and also by Richard Chabrán, who at that time was the Chicano Studies Librarian at UCLA. They were both part of the Chicano periodical indexing project. And so I started to learn about that just from being in Francisco's office. I just remember him telling me everything, telling me what he was working on, what it was. I didn't realize till later that that was the very beginning. I mean, that he was in the middle of a lot of transitions there, from there being a network of Chicano librarians who wanted to create an indexing project so that Chicano movement journals would be accessible, to reference tools. Because at that point they were not included in the Reader's Guide. So one of the transitions, there was a librarian group that worked on this, but then I realized that the project became more and more centered at Berkeley, and that Francisco was the head of that. He was the one that was keeping it going for the most part with Richard's help, getting help from the other people, but it wasn't like a cooperative kind of thing. They were there making sure that it kept going. So that was a transition. The index was being published by G.K. Hall, but then they stopped publishing it. And so the Chicano Studies Library itself, which had its own publications unit, decided to publish it on their own. So that was another transition. It’s only looking back that I see that when Francisco was telling me about these things, the project was in transition on different fronts. And back to your question, the vocabulary, at the beginning, it just seemed like if you're going to have an indexing project and you're going to index, then you're going to have to decide how you are going to apply subject headings to the things that you're indexing. So the Chicano Thesaurus was a tool, a necessary tool. It wasn't like, oh, people got together thinking “Wouldn't it be nice to have a nice vocabulary?” It was something that they actually needed. It was something necessary. In order to have an indexing project, you had to figure out what a project was going to use in order to give subject access to materials. So I didn't see the Thesaurus itself as being something that you just create on your own, just because it would be nice to have a Chicano controlled vocabulary. It's because they actually just needed it. But it did interest me, and I think now maybe because I had been an English major, I was interested in just language in itself. So I think that's why I wrote an article when I was in library school. I wrote a paper, it was actually a paper for a class to get credit. It was based on my interviews with Francisco and Richard and other librarians, and it was called "The Usefulness of the Chicano Thesaurus." And so I just wrote about it and what I was learning at that point. So that experience of having to write a paper, I had to write a paper, so I had to go interview other people, I had to take notes, I had to get a bibliography, all that focused my attention on the Thesaurus at that time. That's how I remember my first experience with the Thesaurus and why it was important.

Drabinski: Did it feel when you were learning about it, like a political project or just as a utilitarian one?

Castillo-Speed: During that time when I took that class, met Francisco, walked in the door, from that point on, for me it was all political. I mean the work, the space, the library itself, when I heard about the history of it and how it came to be out of a political movement. So it's hard to separate that work from what was not political because it was political. It was all political.

Drabinski: Can you tell us a little more about the Chicano Periodical Index?

Castillo-Speed: Yes, that was the beginning of the Chicano Database. There have been some articles written about that time period. I'm just trying to think of 40, 50 years ago, of what the state of computer technology was and what it is now. So back then, there were key punch operators, punch cards, I'm trying to think of the terminology. In order to write a program, and we did learn this in library school, we did have a class where we had to learn how to write a program. We didn't go to a keyboard and type in anything. You had to go to a machine and it was a keyboard, a key punch. Once these cards were punched out with the little holes that indicated the program you were trying to write or the program lines for a program, you had to submit it. On the Berkeley campus there was a place to take them and put it in a box. And a technician there, or student, whatever, would then go and put it into the mainframe of the campus and it would get entered. And then two or three days later, you'd go and you'd try to pick up and see if the coding was accepted or if there were mistakes in it or something. So that was how it was when I was in library school. The Chicano Periodical indexing project began around the time when things had to be done that way. So that, from what I understand, indexers have something in hand, a journal, looking at an article, and then they'd fill out worksheets, and the worksheets were sent to a central place. And then from there, they were coded into a mainframe. I wasn't there at that time so I'm just imagining how that would work. But again, this was at this transition time when I found out all about this. Things were changing. Okay, about the periodical indexing project. There was a group of librarians in California, mostly, some from Texas, I think also in Arizona and New Mexico, that agreed to become indexers. They filled out worksheets and were assigned different titles of Chicano journals. They were librarians who had access to subscriptions to these journals. They signed up, and they sent in the worksheets. It ended up being that Berkeley was the processing place and Francisco would be the one to make sure people were doing their assignments, and then putting them into a computer program. Then there was a company called Vort Corporation, owned by Tom Holt, and he was the person who was contracted to make this data come out into, what is it called, “printer ready” pages that were then sent out to GK Hall, the publisher. And the pages that were printed out of the index were the actual ones that came right out of the computer printer, formatted. They became the pages of the book of the index. The first two volumes of the index were the result of that process.

Belantara: It sounds like Francisco was heavily involved in terms of coordinating and organizing the group. Did all of this work occur in different places? Did people ever come together to do some of the indexing work? And when people were working on this, do you have any idea what the atmosphere was like and how people managed to actually get the work done?

Castillo-Speed: First of all, I have to say that I was not there at the beginnings of that. So I don't know, Richard Chabrán would know more about the meetings. It wasn't that easy to get together, I assume, during that time period. But the people that are listed as indexers in the early volumes, I've known most of them through the years, and I know that they are committed. I can see why they would be part of this project. I'm assuming that they thought it was very important and they did have to make it part of their work time or their professional development time. I know people would list themselves, like when they were coming up for reviews or something, they would say, "Oh, I'm an indexer for the Chicano Periodical Index." So that was something that could motivate them a little bit. But I think it was mostly because they thought it was an important thing to do. If it were me, I'm just projecting on to what I'm thinking they might be thinking, is that if I knew that a sizable and important portion of intellectual printed, published history was not accessible and it was because they were not mainstream and that they had to do something not mainstream in order for that material to be visible, then I would also feel motivated by that thinking. Like, if we don't do it, nobody's going to do it. So we've got to do it. Seeing how things turned out afterwards, my take on it would be that that impulse or that motivation was strong there at the beginning, but as time went on, I think it became more focused with Richard Chabrán and Francisco García and that people saw them as the leaders and they'd actually were the ones, if it wasn't for those two people taking that leadership role and even putting more of their time and making more connections and try to get funding and those kinds of things, I don't think the project would still be going on. I think it was the leadership that kept things going.

Belantara: In your article, and in some of Richard's writings as well, there's mention of the Chicano Classification System. Did that come before the thesaurus? And if so, was that used in the creation of the thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: I'm not sure which one came first. I do know that Richard Chabrán used to be the librarian Chicano Studies Library at UC Berkeley before Francisco. I'm assuming it was during that time, because the classification system preceded Francisco. It could have been like almost at the same time. It was in that same time period. Maybe it's kind of an analogy: the periodical indexing project needed a tool, needed the thesaurus. The Chicano Studies Library, when the students were starting to organize it and found a space and a reading room and had bookshelves and they started to collect books, they needed to start figuring out what order we were going to put these things in. How do we organize this? And they were not library school students. Richard himself, he was an anthropology major and got pulled into this. The way I hear it, they sent him to library school. The group needed somebody to go to and they figured out who's the most likely one that can go and get library training and come back to help make this library work. So Richard went to library school. But during that time period, the students, and I'm not sure if Richard was part of that at that point, but anyway, they consulted with librarians in the main library for help. How do you do this? How do you find those numbers that you put on the back of books? I've heard that they were helpful, and they told them about the Library of Congress Classification system, okay? But the students saw right away that if they used the Library of Congress Classification System, everything in the Chicano Studies Library would be under E184.5 something. And they wouldn't have that. That would just be so unusable that they just couldn't do that. So anyway, they decided to take over the classification system on their own. So for instance, music has the ML classification. So they made music, Chicano music. So the Chicano music books would be under M, the Chicano art books would be under N, the literature would be under variations of the P class rather than putting everything in under E184. They had to create that. They made a modification of it. I do have a copy of, I think it's the original copy that was printed out on computer paper with lines on it and holes on the side. It's been marked up and edited. When the Ethics Studies Library was formed, the Chicano Studies Library became part of the Ethnic Studies Library. And I actually gave the Chicano Classification System to our cataloger. The cataloger had to use it to understand how the Chicano studies collection was organized because that's how it had been organized from the beginning. I'm not sure which one came first, but it was all during that time period. I wasn't there at the time, but that's the legend, the lore, the history that pulls me in. I repeat this story to people who come, when I give classes, library classes for students coming in, and I tell them the history of the library and the history of the collections and everything. I've repeated the story many times. While we're talking about it, the students came upon the class of E and PS, which is literature, language, and literature. And they were trying to find a place to put Chicano literature. And at the time, and I guess it still is, that if they put it in the PS class, they would have to make a distinction between things written in English and things written in Spanish or any other language. And they wouldn't have that at all. For them Chicano literature, this is very political too, could be any language that was just an artificial division. So they created PX as Chicano literature. And that we still have PX. I mean, that is where we have our Chicano literature on the shelves in the Chicano Studies Collection, at the Ethnic Studies Library. If I have time, I always try to tell that story because they took it on their own. I mean, they saw what the structure was supposed to be, but they made it their own. They altered it, they changed it so it could reflect what they wanted to show, how they wanted things to look, and how the world should look from their point of view. Because the shelves of a library are like a world in themselves with all these different areas.

Belantara: In your article, "The Usefulness for the Chicano Thesaurus for Indexing Chicano Materials" you wrote, "It was to be what Chicano librarians had long dreamed of, a subject heading list of their own, which would provide vocabulary control." Could you talk more about this dream?

Castillo-Speed: I was making an assumption about what I think would've been their dream. But when I say dream, I think I was thinking more in terms of when the Chicano Periodical Indexing Project was conceived, the way it stated there, it sounds like for decades, but more just when people started to focus on it and think that an indexing project would be a great thing to do. I think that's as long as they dreamed about it. And also, I think it goes back to what I said about the PX classification, that it would be something of their own, that wouldn't be mandated by what was established already or what was supposed to be. And that often would leave out things that were important to Chicano culture or Chicano experience, Chicano history. Just because they didn't fit. That's what I was thinking. They did dream of it, and they did see it as important because then it would be their way of expressing themselves.

Belantara: Related to that, what does vocabulary mean for access?

Castillo-Speed: That's a big question. I mean, a lot of things come to mind. One is very political, right? And very current. The way people are named, or language that's used to describe people is very powerful. It could be very hurtful, or it could be empowering. Language I think is potent. When you're dealing with it, you have to be careful. Let's say a group of people decide to create a language, create a list of subject headings, then every word becomes important. Because that means that you're choosing that one as acceptable to a group of people. And you're just one, maybe you're like a handful of people, but how do you know it's going to be acceptable to a lot of people, to everybody who might read that? It's very emotional that people can be classified, cataloged by the words that are used to describe them, and they lose their humanity. At the same time, if you have the courage, and I'm not saying me, I'm saying the people who've created the idea of even having a thesaurus, and say like, we're going to include all these words that maybe, oh, my grandmother used or these words that I grew up with and these words that we know among us that we use all the time. Even if they sound whatever foreign or clunky, or odd to other people, we're going to just say yes, even the word Chicano. Even just thinking of that, to call yourself Chicano or call anything Chicano, you're already taking a stand against a lot of other stuff. With each word, I mean I'm sure some of them were very easy to figure out, like, okay, they didn't have to think about that much, but I think some of the words they had to think about, oh okay, we're going to include that word. Okay, yes. Okay, what's the related term to that? Oh yeah, there's another term. So yeah, that's language and it is very important. I mean that's a no brainer, but I'm having in mind, the more recent battles about the term Illegal aliens and how that certain language that was and is used by the establishment and how there's other language that could be used instead. And how that first term is so hurtful, even if you're not in that category of people that the term is trying to describe, it is hurtful, and it just shows how powerful a language is. So I guess the people that were putting together the thesaurus were pretty aware that they were creating something that some people would not accept, but because of the material that they were trying to index, it made sense. The material brought up these words. If there was a concept that they were trying to convey, it'd be better to use a term that was not hurtful than to use one that was hurtful. Why pick that other one if you could pick something else?

Belantara: Can you mention a few of the terms that might be most meaningful to you personally or to researchers that you work with?

Castillo-Speed: The one off the top of my head, I can think of the one that's used or the other terms that are used instead of Illegal aliens. From the beginning there was the term Undocumented workers. Later as the material evolved or there were other types of materials, it wasn't just the worker aspect that was important or needed to be described, but it was also the people that were living in the United States who were undocumented. So then we've added the term Undocumented residents. And then I think we've had, for a long time, Undocumented children. So just to give you the other side of Illegal aliens, over the years, another term that's come up was Racial profiling. And just to mention that the way that we do the periodical index, now it's the database. There are index terms which are in the thesaurus, but there are also supplementary terms. And those are terms that are people, places of things. That's where we would put a term that was coming up and we weren't sure was going to become an index term yet. So at the time when a lot of news articles and conversations were about racial profiling, we made it a supplemental term. Sometimes what happens is that another term takes over. You decide, okay, this is going to be Racial profiling, and then it turns out it's going to be another term. It becomes like, oh no, everybody's calling it this, so then you have to change over. So that's why there's this waiting period. Finally, it took hold, it became a term. And so we added that. I'm trying to think of ones that I wasn't involved in adding, there was a project to actually add two areas to the thesaurus that needed to be fleshed out or we needed to have more terms for.

Belantara: How did you actually start getting involved or being the person in charge of the Thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: Well, that came with the periodical index. It was 1984. Francisco decided to resign in order to go back to LA to be with his family. And I was working as a cataloger on a temporary project in San Francisco. But I was always coming back to the Chicano Studies Library to continue doing volunteer work there and hanging out. When he resigned, he gave me a little bit of a heads up on that. But anyway, I applied to be the temporary librarian to take over from his position, and I was named the temporary librarian. And then when the permanent position opened up I applied for that and I got the job. With the job came everything that Francisco was doing, which was coordinating the periodical index, which at that point was becoming the database. There was a transition that was beginning around that time. And with that was the thesaurus. I mean that they're intricately connected. You can't separate one from the other. So I had to keep up with working on that, too. Just to be clear, I was never alone. I was not left on my own to do this. Francisco was always available by phone. Richard, who was still the Chicano Studies librarian at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, was also always available by phone. I still remember the phone number! I think I talked to him daily because he was in the same UC library system. He knew how things worked, and he was also mentoring me on being a librarian at UC, not just the Index. During those years, and still to some extent today, I don't see myself as the one person totally in charge of the project. Sadly, Francisco passed away in 2018, but I see Richard and I as equally being in charge of what's going on. I took over from Francisco, but never left on my own to figure out what to do.

Belantara: When you first started taking over some of the work that Francisco was doing with the thesaurus and the database, did you have some learning curves? How did you go about acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge?

Castillo-Speed: Oh my gosh. I know there's probably a lot of things, but what first comes to mind is the equipment, the computer, the system. I think by the time I met Francisco, he had already purchased a system called the Alpha Micro 1000. I don't know if Alpha Micro is still out there or if anybody's heard of it, but it was revolutionary at the time. It ran on Alpha Basic, its own version of the basic language. What was different about it was that you could have several terminals connected to the one mother computer. And so that meant that he could have one terminal in our, I couldn't even call it a computer room, but it was just the other side of his office. And then he had a monitor in his office, a monitor in the reading room, and different people could be adding data to it. And that whole thing about different terminals was like, whoa, that was really neat! The other thing I want to mention is that he told me that he had used one year's allotment for collection development to buy the Alpha Micro. I think it was like $10,000 at the time. That means there were no books bought, no serials. The whole book budget went to that to just buy that one system. So he took a chance. I mean, he bought it, and with that came the programmer person that I mentioned, Tom Holt. So the learning curve that I have in mind right now was working with Tom Holt. He was the kind of person that... Looking back on it, he was not the most pleasant person, but he taught me a whole lot. At times he seemed impatient. But I think I needed to have somebody to be impatient and not mess things up. Because I think he was trying to let me know that I was in charge. Francisco wasn't there, Richard wasn't, I was the one that could be messing things up if I didn't do it right. I remember this one night, it was the end of the day, but for some reason I started some program, and I think he had said something like, "Okay, just let it run until something else happens." Okay, so then I waited and waited and waited and waited, and I was so afraid that if I touched anything, I was going to mess something up. I was there for a couple of hours after work. I don't know how long I was there, but I always remember that feeling that I was going to mess it up either by not doing something or by doing something. I don't know how I got home that day or how I slept that night. It turned out to be okay. But I think he wanted me to be in that kind of state so that I wasn't going to do something rash or mess things up. But anyway, that was a big learning curve for me. And then just trying to learn everything I could. Again, this was when we didn't have desktop computers, we couldn't go look up how to do things. You had to rely on somebody like the programmer to tell you whether you're doing it okay or not. Another thing I learned was to be very precise with programmers and try to speak their language even though I'm not a programmer. I think instead of just saying, okay, I wanted to do this and this and this, I could be very precise and that would help things. And then the programmer would respond to that positively, and I could work better with them. That was a learning experience for me.

Belantara: Can you paint a picture of what it was like when you actually sat down at this state-of-the-art system and how you would get started with work?

Castillo-Speed: Some of the work was inputting data from worksheets that were sent in, and then that started to dwindle a bit. But there were worksheets from outside indexers when I first started. And then a lot of it was us, myself putting in indexing, putting material, putting data in. And then we also hired students after the worksheets were already edited. I would figure out that okay, these are good to put in, and then the students would just put the data in. So yeah, the way it looked was completely different. Small screen, all black. You're working in basic language, it was kind of like DOS, but it was even more basic than DOS. It was the Alpha Micro version of Basic. You had to learn that. For what we were doing, it was repeating the same process over and over again. I didn't have to learn a whole lot of other stuff. But there was a template. I can't even remember if there was something that was there and we filled it in or if you input something, and then something would come out next line or hit return. I can't even remember. But I do know that at that point, it was all numbers. I mean, for the most part it was numbers. Let me back up. What I meant was, if you're inputting a title, you would type in the title because that was probably a unique piece of information for the database. If there are a lot of poems, there would probably be a lot of them called mother or love or something like that, right? So that title could be repeated, but often the title was not repeated. So that would be unique. You need to type it in. And then we used a number for an author, and so you would type in the number for that author. I can't remember if it would show up on the screen, you type it in and then it'll tell you what the number was and you type it. That I can't remember. But I do know that the terms themselves all had numbers. So Chicanas was 638, like Richard's phone number that was always going to stay in my brain. 638 is Chicanas. I probably could remember some other ones if I thought about it. And then you'd hit return, and then you could review it. And then when you were ready to make a printout camera ready, that was camera ready pages, and you'd print it out. You'd hear the printer typing it out. Thank you for inviting me to remember that because it's so different now.

Belantara: Over the years, you worked with a group of people to revise the Thesaurus. How were revisions decided upon with each new edition of the Thesaurus? As you were making these revisions, were the changes and decisions documented as well?

Castillo-Speed: That's a good question. I think I documented everything I did on the database in a series of written notebooks. It's probably buried in there. But at some point the software was such that we could keep old terms. I do know that when we changed a term, we would put a use for. If we had an old term, we would say use for and then show the old term. But it wouldn't document when we did that in the program itself. So that's something that probably should have been done more diligently. But I know, it's in my notes. If I or anybody ever goes through those notes, they might find it. So there was another part to your question.

Belantara: How did you decide it's time to revise and publish a new edition of the thesaurus? How would you go about making that decision? And then how would you decide on which revisions actually needed to happen?

Castillo-Speed: Okay, so I actually see it a whole different way. It's not like, isn't it time for a new one? It was so organic as part of the indexing process, as we were indexing, we needed to have a new term. So we added a term. And it ended up being put in the thesaurus, in the in-house versions. And then at some point, we printed it on paper and sent it to indexers. That might have been so early that I don't even remember. But more recently, the thesaurus is embedded in the Chicano Database. Major revisions that came out were due to somebody from the outside saying that we should make those changes. This is where I'll tell the story about my working with Yolanda Retter-Vargas, who was the new head librarian after Richard had left the UCLA Chicano Studies Library. She wasn't the one that came right after him, but in the mid-2000s, she was the librarian there. I started hearing from other people saying, "Yolanda doesn't like the Thesaurus, she's going to get in touch with you." And I'm thinking, "I wonder what that's about." So finally she did get in touch with me, and she was concerned about the terms relating to LGBTQ and also the terms that should be in there describing Latinos in the United States and what countries they came from. So she and I wrote a grant and got some money. We got money from the Librarians Association of the University of California. And it was a grant to revise the thesaurus to add those terms in there. That was a successful grant. We got two extensions to it. We needed more time, but we did finish and those were major additions. It wasn't just changing a word here and there. That was like a whole concept that was brought in. That was Yolanda's doing, making that happen. So I guess to go back to the original question, I love my work, but there is a lot of it, and I can't spend as much as I want to on the thesaurus and the database. That's the dessert at the end of the day, if I can make time. Oh boy, now I get to work on the database! But if I did have more time, I think I would be more conscious about the regular revising of the database or making sure it's okay. Then the other thing I would like to explain or mention is the fact that the latest version isn't available right now. There is a version available on the Ethnic Studies Libraries website. I had worked with EBSCO, EBSCO is the company that distributes the Chicano Database. Several years ago, we had discussed making the Thesaurus available for people who use the database. I pushed back a bit and said we really need to do some more work on it before it gets more public that way. So in the intervening years, I contracted with a consultant. We did work in two different periods, and we made a lot of great changes, but I haven't had a chance to go back and start over that conversation with EBSCO. For people who have passwords and can get into our maintenance database, there is a list. You can actually see the living list, the living thesaurus. Because of the interest in the Thesaurus lately, I've actually figured out that I probably could, with our current programmer, print out that list even as a PDF and just have it on the database. What I'm trying to say is that it does keep changing. If I added a term today then does that mean I send it out as a revised list? I guess I could, now that we can update things more quickly. But in the past, I think it had always been a big chore to think, oh, we're going to have to do a whole project to revise the thesaurus.

Belantara: So, the Chicano Periodical Index, CPI for short, drove the need for the Thesaurus, and then the Chicano Database came about. Can you talk about how the Database actually came to be and when did you switch from talking about the CPI to just referring to it as the Chicano Database?

Castillo-Speed: When I came on the scene, G.K. Hall had published the first two printed CPI reference books. They are huge books. And then as I mentioned, the Chicano Studies Library itself published it from the third volume on. I think we went up to a few more volumes after that. That was the printed life of the index. But we started exploring other ways to make the database available to people electronically so that there could be an interface with the data. We published some CD-ROM versions of the database. Once you put it in electronic form, it becomes a database in my mind. We actually had customers and we were sending them CD-ROM updates for a while, but it was also at a time when I think the university became more aware of through different initiatives. Richard Chabrán was part of that as well, trying to get the university to be more cognizant of the need to support Chicano and Latino resources at the University of California. He and I were on a committee where the state of California was encouraged to provide some funding to the University of California to enhance Latino collections. One of the things that was recommended was that the CD-ROM of the Chicano database be distributed to all of the campuses for free. For all campuses to all have it somehow. This recommendation ended up being supported by the University of California administration at a very high level. Some high level administrators came to see me one day after that. They introduced me to the idea of having not just the CD-ROM, but to have it online. They said they could connect me with people at RLG, Research Libraries Group. That was nearby, in the Mountain View, Palo Alto area. With that introduction, I met with RLG and they made it into a file that could be accessible. I can't even remember now what the interface looked like, but it was an interface. Then we had a contract with them and we got royalties from that. So that's when the indexing, I should say the Chicano Periodical Index, became the database. It was during that period. We weren't publishing it in print, and we weren't publishing it as a CD-ROM. It became available through this RLG service, and then RLG switched over. It became an OCLC database. I think it was like RLG was going in a different direction. I think that's what it was. So its databases became OCLC databases. The same thing happened years later. Select OCLC databases were taken over by EBSCO. So now our contract is with EBSCO, and EBSCO has its own EBSCO host interface. So that's what people or libraries see when they subscribe to the Chicano Database. That's where the Chicano Periodical Index became a database.

Belantara: With all of those transitions between all of these different companies, were you asked about whether or not you still wanted to be working with that company?

Castillo-Speed: Not really. We didn't have much choice. We could go back and say, okay, let's create our own product. This has been done by other projects where they made their own interface, they sold their own product, and they weren't part of a bigger company. And we've always kind of had that in mind that that could be like a... I don't how to say it, emergency exit or something because we couldn't rely on businesses. We had a good relationship with RLG, but they had a business decision to make, and we could go along or not go along. We couldn't say, “oh, why don't we do this instead?” We weren't part of that at that level. Same thing with OCLC, that was more like, this is a big change. We weren’t the only ones that were affected. This was happening to a lot of databases. You can't fight that. I couldn't see how we had a way to fight that. Then when EBSCO came along, we had a really good relationship with EBSCO at the beginning. We still do, but we did have a lot more person to person contact in the past. They came to visit, they came to talk. There were different things that they asked. They even asked if we could change the name of the database. We didn't do that. I think they wanted something that had Hispanic in it, something like that. They didn't put up a big fight, but they were trying to make it seem more marketable. The name doesn't exactly represent what's in the database, because it is Latino and not just Mexican American experience anymore. In our advertising we try to tell people, but for history's sake, we've always kept the name Chicano and for identity's sake because that's what it was, the Chicano Database, that was years and years ago. They haven't come back and asked, “you want to change it?” Over the years working with the different staff persons at EBSCO, I've learned that people change. You have a good relationship with one person, and it's a new person. There's nothing bad about that. It's just you have to start over again and work with another person. But it's been cordial and friendly and good with the staff persons that I work with. I have not had as much contact with the top people as I did at the beginning. I’ve seen more of the programmers and their publicity staff. We work a lot with the publicity people. They help us when we go to conferences and they provide free materials to give out. They're very helpful with that.

Drabinski: I'd like to ask about that particular technological shift to the CD-ROM. The database was the first Ethnic Studies database to be released on CD-ROM in 1990. Can you say a bit about the decision to move to that technology and what were some of the challenges and benefits?

Castillo-Speed: Again, it's not me by myself, it was Richard and Francisco talking about these things. On my end, I think part of it was like, oh, there's this great new thing, CD-ROM, we don't want to be left behind. We want to be up to date, we want to take advantage of new technology. I think we wanted to be aware of it in case that was something that would be the answer to everything. We also had to figure out the interface because we weren't programmers. We couldn't just say, okay, here's the program to put on CD-ROM and then there it goes. We had to find out how that all worked and how to get experts involved in creating a CD-ROM for the interface part of it. If we wanted to just have all the data there, okay, maybe that wouldn't be so hard, but the whole point was to be able to send it to somebody and they would have a CD-ROM reader, and then they'd be wowed. Like, oh look, you can look up all these great things! We wanted to be part of this new thing, but also not didn’t want to be left behind. Little did I know that the CD-ROM would not last that long. It all changes really fast.

Belantara: So you already commented on this, but we wanted to learn a little bit more about your decision in 1992 to expand the scope of Chicano Database to include materials related to Puerto Ricans and Central Americans. How was this decision made after it was initially focused on the Mexican American experience?

Castillo-Speed: It's kind of a no brainer, but I'm trying to figure out now why it was a no brainer. Here's one thought that I hadn't really pondered before, but the project started, I'm trying to index Chicano movement journals, right? But even at the time that the project started, that outflow of production was already starting to ebb. Chicano journals that published Chicano writers and scholars, artists, in some cases, lasted forever. The journal Aztlán from UCLA has lasted all these years. Whereas the one that was published very early on in Berkeley, El Grito is no longer published. So when scholars were looking for places to publish and because now there were Chicano Studies programs and Ethnic Studies Departments, they were trying to get published in other places, not in Chicano Movement journals. So a lot of the academic scholarship was being published in places besides Chicano journals. Part of all this was realizing that the original source was not going to last forever. Looking at what other sources there were, academic journals or other journals or magazines. We didn't really make that distinction. So we had to open up that anyway. But also realizing that if we wanted to add more types of materials like books or articles in books or newspaper articles, then there had to be changes to the database. So that was working with programmers. We had another series of programmers, and that's what I worked with them on. Now we're going to try to add fields, that was the basic thing, adding another field. How do you make this a book citation instead of a journal citation? Over the years, we worked with programmers to make those changes. Adding books was another way of getting to another source of material. Also, as I mentioned before, more books were being published. I mean, at the beginning, and this goes back to when Francisco was showing me that original collection back in 1983. When I first saw it, he would show me a book and say, "Okay, if people are looking for anything on migration, this is the book. And just think about what that means. This is the book." For Chicanas, I remember that there were probably a handful. Okay, it wasn't just one, but I remember that these are the important ones. And so he would show me, these are the books on, this is the book or the best book or one of the books on immigration. So now because of Ethnic Studies departments, because of Chicano Studies Programs, people are going getting degrees, writing books, getting tenure, they have to get tenure, they have to write books, they have to write articles. So now there's more and more books, whereas before you'd have to draw from anthropology or sociology and say, well, there's a chapter in here on farm workers. That's why it was in the library in the first place. But that was all there was. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is that now there is a lot more. So then we started adding books, and I guess at that point we just thought, look, we don't want to limit ourselves in the future. At one point we even added fields for web links or something trying to anticipate what we would want in the future. So yeah, so I think it was more like trying to accommodate what we thought where things might go, but also accommodating where the literature was coming out.

Belantara: In the article that we talked about earlier, you mentioned how the Chicano Thesaurus was really feeling an ethno-specific need, not a language need. Once the database started indexing materials related to other groups, did you also incorporate cultural terms used by people from those communities into the thesaurus?

Castillo-Speed: The first thing we would do probably would be to put the terms that came up. If they came up over and over again, make them supplementary terms, and then see later on, we're using this all the time. We better make it an index term. So they went into this holding, this waiting room stage. Other terms did come up. I have to say there was a conservative, how should I say it, feeling on my part. I'm like, what can I do? How much time and effort can I put into this? Do we want to expand it and am I the authority on these terms? So I think a lot of times it was mostly, okay, let's hold those terms until they become unavoidable. We have so much literature on this that we have to use it, but it's always there as a supplementary term. And then we try to keep those consistent so we aren't using a whole lot of different versions of that supplementary term. I don't think we ever did something that I could say was a standard method for doing that. It's more like as things come up, we react to them. When I contracted with the lexicographer consultant, wonderful person, wonderful work and brilliant. The time I spent with her working on this was really well spent. We did make some good changes because I have felt over the years that one of these days I need to go back and look at it over again. I need to make sure that it's presentable. That I could say, yes, this is the latest version, but it’s only when working with Kristen, her name's Kristen Jeffries, that I could feel a little bit like I was keeping up. She went back and found some terms that were outdated and no longer used and just negative kinds of things that I should have taken out a long time ago. But it's not that easy to take things out once it's embedded in the database. One of our earlier versions of the database was on Microsoft Access and that one, and the previous version, the Alpha Micro 1000, were relational databases. So if you made a change to a term, it automatically changed it in all of the citations. Whereas what we have now does not do that. That was a drawback when we changed over, but we've had to deal with it a different way. It is more complicated. It isn't that easy to change a term, not just because it's a substitute. If you just had X term and you wanted to substitute Y, if they mean exactly the same thing, then, that can be done through the computer. You could write a simple program. Actually, we have a program now that we can use to do that. But if you're making a change where the term could imply a lot of other concepts in it, and then you use that term instead, then you don't know if a citation might have other terms that would be duplicative of the term that you're trying to add in. So you actually do have to look at each one if you're going to do it the right way, you do have to look at them. So that keeps you from wanting to change that term. We have changed some terms, but we really needed to change them. That kind of brings up something I wanted to put on the record here. This is something I learned from Francisco back in the publishing times when we were publishing things, there were books that were being published, not just that reference work, but there were other reference works that came out of the Chicano Studies Library. I was an editorial assistant while I was in library school around that time. Francisco told me, not just me, but our staff, he would say, "If you know something is wrong then you can change it. If you can't change it, okay. But, if you know that it's wrong and you can change it, then fix it." That stayed with me over the years. So this whole thing with the Thesaurus, I'm not going to put something in there and say, yeah, it's good enough, I want to do it right. But it might take a long time to be done right.

Drabinski: I have another question about the sort of shift to Research Libraries Group and then to EBSCO. Now that the Thesaurus is in use in these commercial products and it's been implemented by the Library of Congress, it feels like it's a mainstream controlled vocabulary. How do you feel about the sort of mainstream adoption of this work?

Castillo-Speed: First of all, I don't even know if anybody's using it. It was accepted, this was on May 24th, 1990. I got a letter from the Library of Congress, from Sally McCallum, that said they had assigned the code CHT to the thesaurus. The code is to be used in the 6XX subject heading fields. The code was going to be published in part four of Subject Index Terms: Sources of the US M-A-R-C, US MARC Code List for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions, when that publication was reissued. It was a short letter. So that was 1990. We were really, really proud that had happened. We wanted to be recognized. That was great. But over the years, I'm not aware that anybody has been using it. We weren't even using it because that wasn't something that we were able to do. I was asked to come to a meeting at the main library because of that letter, they had wanted to consider whether they could use thesaurus terms. I showed up with a list of terms from the thesaurus that weren't in Melvyl, the UC library catalog at the time. I made copies, passed it out and everything. It was a pleasant meeting, but I don't think they ever actually adopted it. They just said, "Oh, okay, we'll get back to you." But they considered it, I guess for me it didn't really matter that much either way. Your question implies that maybe it would be like absorbed by the mainstream and taken away or something like that. But I was glad about the recognition it got. Really it exists. Somebody created it, and I'm a career long member of the American Library Association. So those are important things to me. The Library of Congress is important, ALA is important. Being a librarian, a professional librarian is important, so to me that was a good recognition. I guess I thought that maybe other people would use it, but if they are using it, I don't know. We haven't heard. Because of the recent webinar I was on, I got contacted by some librarians at UT Austin, I think from the University of Texas. And we had a nice conversation yesterday. And they were asking me if they might use some terms for some newspapers that they're indexing or cataloging. That's my take on it.

Belantara: So now after all these years, what do you think about the Chicano Thesaurus project itself and what would you tell your younger self, Lillian back in 1983 or 84, the year that you took over managing it along with the help of others, you said you always had a team, but what are your thoughts looking back?

Castillo-Speed: Wow, over the years, I have felt very grateful that my colleague at library school told me to think about taking this class called Ethnic Bibliography. I might have missed that. I’d have missed the whole thing because I wasn't looking for that at the time when I was in library school. Being part of this whole project in the broader term of the project, the library, the database, the indexing project, the thesaurus, the network of people, the UCLA and UC Berkeley and all the friendships, all the working together, just the fact that I had a job almost right out of library school that has lasted until now. It's not many people can say that. So I feel very, very lucky about that. It's something that sustains me and that keeps me going. There's always something new, and this I guess might pertain more to being a librarian. It's like every day is another challenge. And I'm just very, very grateful for finding my place, finding something where I felt that I could contribute. I thought that I was just going to get a library degree, but because of the whole trend towards computer technology, that's what I thought should concentrate on. So I did concentrate on computers and that combination with then finding out what I could apply that to and how important that was. And of course learning about myself, my identity, being Chicana myself, learning to even call myself Chicana, at that time, I just felt very lucky about being part of all that.

Belantara: What is your hope for the thesaurus and the database moving forward?

Castillo-Speed: Of course, I hope it continues forever, but I've had to take a longer, more practical view of it. Not just me, but Richard. We're not just working on this. We're working on other things and we see them as important and wanting to keep working on them. Of course, I'm going to retire sometime or somehow leave. Before COVID hit, I was actually making some long term plans. Not immediate plans, but like longer term plans to phase out. I mean, to phase somebody in, to take over what I was doing. And so I met with my supervisor at the time and I was asking like, "How's the budget? If I leave, would I be replaced?" And at the time they said, "Oh yes, yes, yes." So that made me feel good at that time, but things have changed now because of COVID. I couldn't leave while all that was going on. I guess what I'm trying to say is, ideally I would leave when I knew that I was going to be replaced and ideally I would be part of finding the person. Ideally there would be a person who was willing to be committed to continuing what we have been working on. But I understand on a practical basis, people will find their own things that they are passionate about, and this might not be that. So I would like to be involved as an indexer for as long as I can. I see myself as doing that. I'm going to index, then I'll actually have the time to do the stuff I wanted to do every day. I want to do some more indexing, but I don't have the time. If I had the time, that's what I would be doing. I can't keep things from changing. I can't predict the future. But that's what I'd like to think that at least that one person beyond me would continue working on it.

Belantara: Is there anything else that you would like to add or something that we should have asked you about and didn't get to this time round?

Castillo-Speed: I just do want to emphasize there are other librarians that have been supportive, and people I've mentored even that are part of a group that we have. There are other projects that we're working on. I’m just very, very grateful for that. Whoever is learning about the Chicano Thesaurus and the Chicano Database, I hope that they know that it's not one person, it couldn't have been done with just one person. It had to be a group effort.