ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Baltimore ’86

Four other theme speakers highlight ACRL’s National Conference.

Maya Angelou

Robert F Asleson

David McCullough

Barbara S. Uehling

Besides Alan C. Kay, whose profile appeared in the October C&RL News, there are four other major speakers on “Energies for Transition,” the theme of ACRL’s Fourth National Conference in Baltimore, April 9-12, 1986. Maya Angelou is an author, poet, playwright, professional stage and screen performer and singer. Robert F. Asleson, president of International Thomson Information, Inc., will speak on trends in publishing. David McCullough, prizewinning historian and biographer and host of the popular “Smithsonian World” series on PBS, will talk from the perspective of a scholarly consumer of library collections and services and will help identify transitions in American society. Barbara S. Uehling, chancellor and professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, Columbia, will speak from the perspective of an administrator in higher education.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou is a woman of many talents. She has been a singer, educator, dancer, author, historian, lecturer, actress, producer, editor, song writer, and playwright, and speaks six languages fluently.

Born in St. Louis, she spent most of her child hood with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. In 1940 she moved to San Francisco with her family and worked a variety of jobs, writing poetry and studying dance and drama at night. In 1952 she received a scholarship to study dance with Pearl Primus in New York. Returning to San Francisco early in 1954, Angelou made her first professional appearance at the Purple Onion as a singer, then joined the European touring company of Porgy and Bess as the lead dancer.

Angelou lived in Africa in the early 1960s. In 1961 she became the associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, at that time the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East. She also wrote freelance articles for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation in Accra, and became assistant administrator of the School of Music and Drama at the University of Ghana.

Random House has published eight books by Angelou: five autobiographies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), Gather Together in My Name (1974), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), Singin and Swingin and Gettin Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981); and three books of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1972), And Still I Rise (1978), Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1984).

Her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was aired as a two-hour TV special for CBS in 1979. Angelou was writer and producer of the film Sisters, Sisters for 20th Century Fox TV, as well as a five-part miniseries, Three Way Choice, for CBS. For PBS she has hosted a study course, Humanities through the Arts, filmed in thirty half-hour segments and produced at Golden State University. In 1977 she received the Golden Eagle Award for her PBS documentary, Afro-American in the Arts.

Robert F. Asleson

President of International Thomson Information, Inc., of Arlington, Virginia, since 1982, Robert F. Asleson attained that position through a career in sales, marketing and administration in other firms in the information business. With degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1958 and the George Washington University Law School in 1961, Asleson was first an assistant to the president of Xerox Corporation from 1961 to 1963 and then a Xerox sales representative from 1963 to 1964.

He then moved to a marketing position at University Mirofilms, became vice president in 1966, and was promoted to president in 1969, serving until 1975. From 1971 to 1974 he was a director of the National Microfilm Association. From 1976 to 1980 Asleson was president of the R.R. Bowker Company and from 1980 to 1982 he was president of Information Handling Services.

International Thomson Information, Inc., emphasizes the use of electronic delivery systems. It has several subsidiaries. INACOM International specializes in technical information services for the engineering community. Research Publications, Inc., is active in the micro publication of records of U.S. and international patents and trademarks, world newspapers and periodicals, and important scholarly research collections. Carrollton Press, a subsidiary of Research Publications, provides the REMARC database. Thomson and Thomson is the leading service organization for the trademark community. COADE (Computer Aids for Design Engineers and Scientists) is a software house for de sign engineers.

The parent company for Asleson’s firm is the Canadian-based International Thomson Organization, Ltd., a multinational company with significant interests in publishing in a wide variety of professional, educational, and library services. Their subsidiaries include Thomas Nelson International, Van Nostrand Reinhold, Wadsworth, and (since early in 1985) Gale Research and UTLAS.

Since 1976 Asleson has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Information Industry Association. Through that affiliation and based upon more than twenty years of increasingly more re sponsible positions in information businesses, Asle son is an ideal person to discuss trends in publishing.

David McCullough

Writer and historian David McCullough is a popular lecturer, teacher, television host, and author—most recently of Mornings on Horseback, a biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt that was both a national bestseller and winner of the American Book Award. He is also widely known for The Johnstown Flood and for his epic chronicles of two great enterprises and the strong-willed people who pushed them to completion: The Path Between the Seas, on the creation of the Panama Canal, and The Great Bridge, the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Path Between the Seas,a Book-of-the- Month Club selection and overnight bestseller in 1977, was winner of the Francis Parkman, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Cornelius Ryan Award, the National Book Award, and became one of those rare books of history that actually change the course of history. It played an important part in determining national policy on the future of the Panama Canal.

McCullough was born and grew up in Pitts burgh and was educated at Yale University. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in Audubon, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, Psychology Today, Smithsonian, and American Heritage, for which he is the senior contributing editor. He is a member of the Society of American Historians, an organization of 250 authors who have demonstrated literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. He serves on the advisory boards for the Wesleyan University Writers Conference and the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress, and on the Yale University Council on Writing.

In the past two years McCullough has become known to millions of television viewers as the far-ranging host of the popular “Smithsonian World” series on PBS. In October 1985 he was seen in a one hour PBS special, produced by Ken Burns, on the Statue of Liberty. McCullough’s earlier PBS film with Ken Burns, “Brooklyn Bridge,” was an Academy Award nominee. In the “Smithsonian World” series McCullough won an Emmy in 1985 for his interview with Anne Morrow Lindbergh. He is currently at work on a biography of Harry S. Truman.

Barbara S. Uehling

Barbara S. Uehling became chancellor and pro fessor of psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the largest campus of a four-campus system, in July 1978. Her talk at the ACRL Balti more Conference will be on the changes facing higher education in the United States.

Uehling was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1932. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Wichita State University in 1954, and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in experimental psychology from Northwestern University in 1956 and 1958. She was on the faculty of Emory University in 1958-1959 and Oglethorpe University in 1959-1964. In 1964 she returned to Emory as a post-doctoral research fellow in physiological psychology, supported by a U.S. Department of Public Health research fellowship through 1966, at which time she rejoined the Psychology Department at Emory until 1969. From 1970 to 1972 Uehling was on the faculty at the University of Rhode Island, and from 1972 to 1974 served as academic dean of Roger Williams College where she played a significant role in shaping and implementing a contract with the faculty collective bar gaining association.

Uehling served from 1974 to 1976 as dean of arts and sciences at Illinois State University, then was named provost of the University of Oklahoma from 1976 to 1978. Since that time she has received two distinguished alumni awards and two honorary doctorates. In 1978 the magazine Change, a publication of the Council on Learning, acknowledged Uehling’s leadership in education by naming her one of “100 Young Leaders of the Academy.” In 1981 she was presented the Missouri Institute of Public Administration Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Administration. Besides several publications in psychology, Uehling has written extensively on topics related to higher education in such journals as Change, The College Student Affairs Journal, Educational Rec ord, Journal of College Placement, Planning and Changing, and Vital Speeches. Two articles of special interest are: “Managing Institutional Change: Evolution or Revolution?” Business Officer, October 1982; and “Innovating and Adapting: New Financing Strategies for Colleges and Universities,” which she co-authored and which appeared in Selected Proceedings, Ninth Annual Conference on Higher Education, May 1984.