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Stories
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Women”
Topics: Information-Information ManagementEducation-Higher EducationKnowledge-Knowledge ManagementNews-School NewsThousands of alumni over recent decades have spoken and corresponded with three HBS women even though they’ve never met them. I’m talking about the backbone of the Alumni Records Office — Val Curtis, Doris Bogues, and Marianna Lozzi — who cumulatively have more than 80 years of experience getting accurate alumni names and contact details, explaining LEFAs, doling out passwords, and recording and verifying deaths.
Val, the Records Office’s necrologist since 1979, started at the office in 1973 and recalls how alumni records were kept in those precomputer times: on 8x5-inch alphabetized cards, one per alum, filling buckets set in five-foot-long deep trays placed on four revolving shelves, like cars on a very wide, miniature (about 4 ½ feet tall), electrically operated Ferris wheel. This contraption was cumbersome and inefficient (only one person at a time could use it), and one time it managed to spill all its cards on the floor. Val remembers that it took most of a week to put them back in order.
How were changes in alumni data recorded back in those days? The staff filled in the alum’s new data on a form with fields for each category of information (street, telephone number, etc.), and batches of filled-in forms were sent to the keypunching center in the basement of Baker Library. Piles of keypunched cards (each somewhat smaller than a size 10 envelope) containing the new data were regularly taken across the river to the Harvard University computing center to be run through a computer there so that new HBS 8x5 cards could be printed containing the new data. Then the new cards were proofed against the old ones. So it turns out the late 1970s were not, in fact, precomputer times for the Records Office; it’s just that the computer storing the data was not on campus.
Doris came to Alumni Records in 1979 after two years with the HBS Fund. That was the year HBS records were computerized using the VAX System 1022 program (running on a DEC PDP-10 on the first floor of Baker Library) and accessed with the DECmate housed in a VT100 terminal cabinet. At first I was envisioning Doris and Val at their Decmates inputting all the data for some 38,000 alumni, but no, the keypunched cards allowed alumni data to be digitized. The data went from chads and their holes to bits and bytes via Harvard’s computers.
Marianna began in 1988, so she experienced the old green-on-black-screen Decmate before all alumni data were switched in 1990-91 to a new database, called Ace, which was custom-built at HBS with a slick Uniface GUI on a Sybase platform and viewed on Mac computers. (Yes, Virginia, HBS was once Mac territory!) Ace stored more kinds of alumni information (e.g., kin relationships between alums, one level of prior employment, and, eventually, e-mail addresses) than the previous system did and was easier to use to produce class directories, Excel datafiles, and labels.
Over the next 15 years, as the use of e-mail and the Web expanded, the work of the Records Office became more complex and demanding — paradoxically even as alums could do more and more online themselves. Do you remember, back in late 1994, that HBS arranged for AOL to host what was called the HBS Electronic Network? Alumni subscribers to it received an AOL e-mail address and could access the alumni directory, career services, Bulletin articles, and class notes, etc. — a rudimentary version of the HBS Web site. But by April 1996 HBS had its own, independent Web site. In late May 1997 the LEFA (Lifelong E-mail Forwarding Address) system was set up and, shortly thereafter, the “E-Mail Your Class or Section” function on the HBS Alumni Web page.
The very large volume of e-mails (more than 1,000 a month) and telephone calls (300–325 a month) coming in to the Records Office is rotated among Val, Doris, and Marianna: one person handles e-mail for a week, another the telephone, and the third the other tasks. Recently the Records Office has begun a very valuable service: inputting from the Reunion Profile books compiled for MBA reunion classes such information as alumni children and their date of birth, nonprofit and corporate board memberships and years served, and multiple layers of prior employment (company, job title, and years).
Even had Val, Doris, and Marianna’s duties not expanded over the years, just the fact that there are nearly twice as many alums as in 1973 means their workload has increased. But as alumni have come to realize the value of accessing the password-protected parts of the HBS Web site (for mass e-mailing, consulting the directory, or using career services, for example), they have increasingly turned to these three women for patient coaching over the phone on how to log in, what their password is, how to enable cookies, how to deal with corporate firewalls, and much, much more. And this is where my admiration for them knows no bounds. Patience, one of the seven Roman virtues, is underrated, I believe, for I think it underlies most of the other six virtues. But in Val, Doris, and Marianna, alumni experience it in full measure. So let us now praise these paragons of patience.
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