ISAAC MCDERMOTT: Good morning.
Can you please introduce yourself, tell me what you do and who you are.
BILL RICH: OK.
My name is Bill Rich.
I'm a Professor Emeritus at Ohio State, in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace
Engineering.
I am also in the Chemical Physics program here, but I'm interested in
high energy lasers, reentry plasmas, rockets, that kind of thing, and do some research in
this area now.
ISAAC MCDERMOTT: Alright.
So, let's start early in your life.
What were some of your early experiences with reading, and how did you first start using
the library?
BILL RICH: OK.
I couldn't read until I was six years old.
I learned to read in first grade.
I can remember the first words I learned to read, they were the first page of the, you're
too young, but, the first page of the Scott Foresman readers which were pervasive throughout
the schools in the United States when I was six years old, Dick and Jane, and on the first
page of that reader, the teacher had a big reader in front of the class, and we all had
little readers, first Dick had his head upside down in a basket of fall leaves, and the words
underneath were "Look, look," and those days, you were taught initially by word recognition,
no phonics, so "look, look" were the first words I learned to read in September of 1943,
OK, there you are, but there were a lot of books in our household when I was growing
up, and reading was encouraged, and outside of school, I liked to read comic books, a
lot of them, and got interested in classic literature.
There was a medium then called "Classic Comics," later "Comics Illustrated," which would be
big pictures of big comics of the classic books, and somewhat abbreviated, very abbreviated
for, for kids, and I was interested in sea stories and all those things.
I read things like "Treasure Island" and even "Moby-Dick" in the "Classic Comics" version,
and sort of hooked me.
Then I read more serious books, and, I don't know how much further you want me to go into
that, the usual kid stuff.
"Hardy Boys" was a series, and, as I grew older.
ISAAC MCDERMOTT: So, so, you mentioned your interest in classic literature, and also your
interests in archaeology and collecting books.
How has your use of the library fostered these interests throughout your life?
BILL RICH: OK.
Well, I began by using school libraries a lot, and my father was mildly interested in
archaeology and he had popular archaeology books in the house, and this fascinated me,
and I would check books out of the, out of the school library on archaeology, and the
sort of thing, and that interested me.
And, frankly, looking at classic literature, was fostered by a parent, both parents really,
but my father was a good guide to this sort of thing, and I began reading a lot of books
on history as well as archaeology, and you can, I can remember certain, formative books
when I was growing up, like out of the high school library in the 8th grade, or I was
in a combined junior and senior high school in Alexandria, Virginia.
And, oh, my parents, my father, my brothers-in-law were all in the military, and I became interested
in war histories and that sort of stuff, and I had a huge collection of model soldiers
and that sort of stuff, but I can remember in eighth grade, finding Churchill's history
of the Second World War, and this just seemed fascinating to me.
So I read all six volumes of the thing, at a rather early age, and, that kind of contemporary
history and military histories I found real interested for a really long time.
Still do, sort of.
And then, read, oh science fiction became hugely popular when I was in high school in
the early 50s, and this is sort of the glory days of science fiction.
Isaac Asimov had just begun to publish and Heinlein and people like that, I would always
read Astounding Science Fiction magazine, and became interested in space travel and
rocketry from reading science fiction.
Sorta helped me decide that I wanted to learn more about rocketry, actually.
But a lot of this, again, a lot of the books, I didn't buy many books at that time, they
were almost all library books from both public libraries and the school libraries.
ISAAC MCDERMOTT: So, continuing to your current research in rocketry and aerospace engineering,
how, how does the library currently help you, help you supplement your education and your
research in these areas?
BILL RICH: Oh, OK.
The, I like to, I've always, one major thing are, are books that the science and engineering
libraries at OSU generally will have, and I'll want to check the books out.
I would prefer to have the books.
As a matter of fact, this is grossly overdue from OSU libraries right now, but [puts down
book] we submitted an article a couple of years ago on a new type of gas laser, and
the reviewer, who I know, kept referencing his book where he has a review article.
[taps book] I felt the least I could do was check the book out of the library and read
what he said, alright.
But it's been very useful.
I've kept it here, that's why it's overdue.
But, also journal searches.
A lot of my work, we will go back into past journal articles.
It is a nice thing to have hard covered journals available in the library.
More and more, these days, some of the principal journals are available online.
Not without the help of the OSU libraries, many of these journals will go back now, way
back, and they have gotten online copies, but only if OSU or somebody pays the subscription,
and through OSU, it's possible to find journal articles going way back on my computer here.
Not otherwise, but this is an enormous strength.
First of all, you don't have to high yourself over to the library all the time.
Although it's an enormously useful thing, particularly when you're looking at books,
to just browse at books in the same subject category, it's sort of unbeatable, and most
of the people in my group here, the Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics group, do that from time to
time.
But, we still use the libraries a lot.
There's an aside here, which is just my book collecting and book preservation interests.
I became, I've become aware in various places I've been, but it's also true at OSU, that
we have an excellent collection of bound journals going back more than a hundred years for some
of these journals.
There are classic papers in science in some of these journals, like the famous, you know
this, the famous Watson and Crick paper on DNA, its two page letter to the journal Nature
in 1953.
Now, that's a very valuable book collector's item.
I have seen in many libraries where these bound journals are still available on the
open stacks, that the pages like that have been very carefully razored out, and I'm all
for access, but not for that reason, and I have been responsible for some journals like
that.
A photocopy or Xerox copy of that particular journal has been made on the shelves, the
other is in Rare Books and Manuscripts, that includes Watson and Crick, I have, oh, the
19-3, I think it's 19-3 Einstein paper on special relativity in Zeitschrift Physik,
when I was at the State University of New York.
That, those pages were razor bladed out of the copy there.
OSU will have those, have a duplicate, a facsimile available on the open stacks now.
And that's a good thing, for all sorts of reasons, OK.
But again, from time to time, I will use things like that in classes, engineering and science
students should know how some of this knowledge was acquired, and things like that are extremely
useful, I think, and it's part of education.
ISAAC MCDERMOTT: Alright.
So, looking forward, what does the future hold for your literacy, and how will the library
continue to engage you in your literacy development?
BILL RICH: Well, in the same ways, now I'm a fairly serious book collector, and rare
books and manu-, and this is not directly connected to my profession in aerospace engineering,
but I use rare books and manuscripts in their collections like every second week at least,
OK, and books there, I'm interested, oh what's the recent thing, sea stories, I wrote an
article on sea stories.
I was interested in Robert Lewis Stevenson and "Treasure Island", and I consulted the
bibliographies of Stevenson in Thompson Library recently for this, for this article, things
like that.
As far as my research goes, as I showed you, we still do this more and more, any current
reference, I will look it up on the OSU catalog system and look at the computer version.
Having said that, this may be a function of age, I've had a heck of a time reading serious
technical stuff, scientific papers on a computer screen, particularly mathematics, where it's
subscripted.
I don't think it's really failing eyesight.
I will print out even from a PDF file a hard copy and make notes on the hard copy and study
from that, which again would be frowned upon if I took the journal out of the library and
wrote notes in the margin of that, so, that's useful, and I intend to continue to do that,
I don't know what else to say.
Although, it's really true computer searches are hugely useful to, you know, do a computer
search on a particular author for his scientific papers, and go through all that.
In our own group, in violation of some of the copyright laws, but the, the group I started
here, we call it the Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics Laboratories, but anyhow, we have a big website,
and one part of that website is every journal paper and every review paper published by
our group is accessible on the website, which, heck we wrote 'em, but nevertheless that's
not quite within the copyright limits, but it's sure useful for people, because people
want references to things or call, and you'll just give them the link to the website which
is helpful to a lot of people, so we intend to continue to do that.
That's not quite the use of the library, isn't it, but anyway (laughter), it's what we do.
I can't imagine, I have to say, a bookless library, no matter, it's fashionable on some
librarians and some speakers to talk of a bookless future.
I have my doubts about that, and I don't think it'll happen.
ISAAC MCDERMOTT: Well, thank you, Professor Rich, for delivering your narrative.
Your story's been very intriguing in opening the perspectives of professors, like you,
in the development of literacy education and the use of libraries.
BILL RICH: Well, thank you, Isaac.