 "Photo: Brennan Wagner/The Siskiyou")
She sat behind her desk in her office on the first floor of Hannon Library. Scattered across her desk are piles of paper work, documents of all kinds and pictures of her family.
By most accounts she is nothing more than another faculty member: an older lady in a lovely blouse and dark trousers with her hair parted to her left.
But, this lady is unlike any other. As the current Government Information Resources Coordinator and Department Chair for Library and Information Science, Deborah Hollens stands as the oldest member of the Southern Oregon University faculty and staff.
For almost 40 years, Deborah has made a career out of working at SOU.
While many people work at multiple jobs after their college years, Deborah started here after graduate school and has continued ever since.
“I started on September 1, 1971,” she says.
Deborah eases into her chair as she thinks about her years prior to working at SOU.
Deborah grew up in southern California, in the town of Glendale.
As she says, “At the time, it was little; now it’s a metropolis.”
After high school, Deborah went to San Fernando Valley State College (now known as California State University-Northridge), and then transferred to University of Southern California to obtain her masters in library sciences.
“I was in graduate school [at USC] where I met the man who worked here before me.”
Though she is currently in charge of all Government documents, Deborah began working as a part-time archivist and part-time reference desk.
“I was offered a 10-month contract,” she says of her first time at SOU.
“When I started, I had no idea what it meant to be an archivist,” she says.
The University sent her to the University of Oregon to learn about the position.
Being the archivist at Southern Oregon College, as SOU was called back then, meant Deborah was in charge of collecting and preserving access to information within various departments and offices on campus.
“Years ago, the librarians had 12-month contracts,” she says.
At the time, Deborah was one of roughly 10 other librarians, but hte only one under a 10-month contract. However, when her contract was due to end, they wanted her to stay on board.
According to Deborah, her and the other librarians presented the idea of the librarians switching to nine-month contracts, effectively cutting their salaries, but keeping Deborah on staff.
“After the [pay] cut, the Department of Health Education and Services wanted to know why,” Deborah says.
It was an effort to meet standards set the decade before with the 1963 Equal Pay Act that required equal pay for minorities, including women to eliminate wage imbalance.
“It was all part of this effort to make sure minorities were paid equal for their work,” she says.
After the investigation, the librarians received a substantial increase in their salaries.
“I was just thankful to get this job,” she says of her first post-graduate venture.
“Coming out of my graduate work, there were so few who found jobs.”
It was late summer and during the end of the Vietnam War when Deborah and her husband, James, drove up to Ashland, Ore.
“I was 23, just married...my first job,” she says of her experience.
For decades, Ashland has been known as a town of alternative lifestyles, with hippies, healthy living gurus and a slew of people that come and go.
“I came from a place where there were a lot of violent demonstrations,” she says of her life in Los Angeles, Calif.
“Being in Ashland was much different,” Deborah says. “This was a quiet place.”
Deborah gained her second master’s in English and now works with many University Seminar professors teaching their students how to find government documents within the library.
“I tell them [the students] they make for sexy bibliographies,” she says about the government documents used by her students.
As she stands up from behind her desk, she begins her walk outside her office to the Government Documents section of the library on the first floor.
“We have a really pristine collection of documents,” she says.
The Oregon Documents Depository Program allows citizens access to government documents.
Nine libraries across the state, including the state library in Salem and Hannon Library at SOU house catalog documents and various collections.
Deborah says what makes the collection at SOU different is its placement.
“The University of Oregon may have more documents, but I think we’re one of the few places that has as many as we do in a single place,” she says, aside from the state library.
In 2004, SOU received the Federal Depository Library of the Year award, the second in the history of the Federal Depository Library Program history.
Between 2001 through 2005, Deborah and many other librarian staff worked tirelessly to create the Southern Oregon Digital Archives, originally funded through the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“We came up with this idea to digitalize,” Deborah says.
At a time when libraries and other institutions were starting the move to digital archiving, scanning photographs, Deborah and the rest of the staff wanted to take volumes of text and archive it digitally.
Deborah was in charge of overseeing the documents that would be placed in the SODA Bioregions Collection.
In total, eight individuals were tasked with receiving the information and placing it within the system.
Including Deborah, Teresa Montgomery, James Rible, Mary Jane Cedar Face, Lisa Haley, Sue Burkholder, Anne Richards and Karen Menzie, worked together on this project.
